Nicolas Bourriaud:
Relational Aesthetics is a “a set of
artistic practices which take as their
theoretical and practical point of
departure the whole of human relations
and their social context, rather than an
independent and private space.”
Robert Smithson:
Museums are tombs, and it looks like
everything is turning into a museum.
David Hammons:
That’s why I like doing stuff better on
the street, because the art becomes
just one of the objects that’s in the the
path of your everyday existence. It’s
what you move through, and it
doesn’t have any seniority over
anything else.
Rirkrit Tiravanija:
It is not what you see that is important but
what takes place between people.
Carsten Höller:
It's about making an experience work
beyond just going to see a sculpture that
is in a museum. It's so much more
interesting to produce an environment
where you can subject yourself to a very
personal experience, where you can use
that experience as the raw material, rather
than simply oil paints or marble..
Felix Gonzalez-Torres:
When people ask me, “Who is your
public?” I say honestly, without skipping a
beat, “Ross.” The public was Ross. The
rest of the people just come to the work.
Antony Gormley:
It's about people coming together to do
something extraordinary and
unpredictable. It could be tragic but it
could also be funny.
Tino Seghal:
Attention is the material I work with.
Tomas Saraceno:
Like Tarkovsky was always saying, “I
will only give you 50 percent, the
other 50 percent you have to build it
by yourself.” Without your imagination
we will not do anything.
Ann Hamilton:
No two voices are alike. No event is ever the same.
Each intersection in this project is both made and
found. All making is an act of attention and attention
is an act of recognition and recognition is the
something happening that is thought itself… We
attend the presence of the tactile and perhaps most
important—we attend to each other. If on a swing,
we are alone, we are together in a field…. Our
crossings, with its motions, sounds, and textures, is
a weaving, is a social act.
Holland Cotter:
Joint production among parties of equal
standing … scrambles existing aesthetic
formulas. It may undermine the cult of the
artist as media star, dislodge the
supremacy of the precious object and
unsettle the economic structures that
make the art world a mirror image of the
inequities of American culture at large.
Swoon: Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, 2008
Theaster Gates:
Joint production among parties of equal
standing … scrambles existing aesthetic
formulas. It may undermine the cult of the
artist as media star, dislodge the
supremacy of the precious object and
unsettle the economic structures that
make the art world a mirror image of the
inequities of American culture at large.
Justin Lowe / Jonah Freeman:
The viewer might not be sure if these are
a Duchampian trick [referring to the artist’s
1946-66 Etant donnes] or if there really is
a larger world behind them.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
Each particular artwork is a proposal to
live in a shared world, and the work of
every artist is a bundle of relations with
the world, giving rise to other relations,
and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.