Art that seeks to produce situations in which relations are formed among viewers is placed in historical and theoretical context in key writings by critics and artists.The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. This publication collects texts that place this artistic development in historical and theoretical context.
Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière's influential "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art." The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
Copublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
Claire Bishop is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History and a contributor to many art journals, including ArtForum, Flash Art, and October. She is a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Warwick.
Claire Bishop is the author of
Installation Art: A Critical History and a contributor to many art journals, including
ArtForum,
Flash Art, and
October. She is a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Warwick.
Umberto Eco was an Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is the author of
The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and
The Prague Cemetery, all bestsellers in many languages, as well as a number of influential scholarly works.
Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher and the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School.
Félix Guattari (1930–1992), post-'68 French psychoanalyst and philosopher, is the author of
Anti-Oedipus (with Gilles Deleuze), and a number of books published by Semiotext(e), including
The Anti-Oedipus Papers, Chaosophy, and
Soft Subversions.Writer, filmmaker, and cultural revolutionary, Guy Debord (1931–1994) was a founding member of the Lettrist International and Situationist International groups. His films and books, including
Society of the Spectacle (1967), were major catalysts for philosophical and political changes in the twentieth century, and helped trigger the May 1968 rebellion in France.
Eda Cufer, one of the founding members of NSK, is a dramaturge, curator, and writer and the cofounder of Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater.
Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957) is a Swiss artist known for large sculptures and ambitious projects, often constructed of everyday, makeshift materials.
Nicolas Bourriaud was the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and an art advisor for the Victor Pinchuk foundation in Kiev. His previous books include
L'ère tertiaire,
Esthétique relationnelle, and
Formes de vie.
Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian and curator. He is coeditor of several volumes published by Sternberg Press, including
Fundamentalisms of the New Order and
The Phantom of Liberty.
Molly Nesbit teaches at Vassar College. She is a contributing editor at Artforum and is the author of
Atget's Seven Albums and
Their Common Sense.Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and the author of
Prosthetic Gods (MIT Press) and other books.
