Interaction as an Artistic and Political Strategy: A Philosophical Source of the Relational Aesthetics

Abstract

The article analyzes the concept of «social turn» in the art of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the most famous conceptualization of which is Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud. Collapse of the communist project, general disappointment of the art community in the neoliberal version of capitalism – those are aesthetic and political reasons for the Relational Art. The article discusses the difference between the Relational Art and modernist artistic practices. The interpretation of the principle of "operational realism" according to Bourriaud - the art of «social turn» does not revolutionize the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation, but learns to exist in the established cultural context, carrying aesthetic projections on social relations already existing in reality in order to gently recode the world. The main «medium» of the Relational Art is human relations, the main theme - «being-together», the goal – microsocialities, new ways of human collaboration. The article proposes a comparative analysis of the aesthetic and political aspects of Guy Debord's concept of the "society of the spectacle" and Relational Aesthetics - the former served as the philosophical source of the latter.