Relational Aesthetics

Relational Aesthetics seem to be reactionary to modern art. The idea that times have changed and so has and should art practices. The fundamentals that appear to make up Relational Aesthetics are very broad yet narrow at the same time. The idea that the new goal is to not have a goal. Some combination of defining sets of non definition. Objects are allowed to just be what they are. I believe these ideas are an attempt at opening up art to be inclusive as opposed to the high-brow exclusiveness of Modern Art. The idea of connecting people to the practices of the everyday and also doing those things together is very apparent. Relational Aesthetics also calls for a more sensory approach to art, the way it is seen and even touched, the works draw heavily from interaction therefore demanding it during its consumption.

I believe photography is related to Relational Art however it takes a specific kind of photograph to confidently label as such. I believe a photograph would most easily be placed in this realm if the photograph is simply the means of showing what occurred. Something performance based that was done perhaps in public so to make a certain point. The photograph as proof seems to be its easiest connection.

"Systems Everywhere" NEW TOPOGRAHICS AND ART OF THE 1970S, Greg Foster-Rice / An Archival Impulse, Hal Foster

In Foster-Rice's essay the main discussion revolves around the New Topographics exhibition. Attention is placed on a few of the critics or commentators about the exhibition that used words about the work that would allude to its connection to minimalism. However, many practitioners and critics who dealt with non-photographic mediums argued that Minimalism, as a majorly sculptural movement would not place even the most minimal 2 dimensional paintings within. Regardless of this disagreement, Foster-Rice recognizes the two movements have similarities with their "structural and strategic characteristics that reflect a broad shift in contemporary artistic practices". This shift is from the idea of the art as object to this idea as the art being a system. The transformation was envisioned in the hopes that art would have a new relationship to the social. Bringing the real world experience back into what informed art.

"Systems Everywhere"- 1960-70's artist began to respond to the complexities of the time. Work began to take shape in the response to American affluence post WWII and the Cold War as the city grew less crowded and the sub-urban landscape exploded. "an experience of the human altered landscape as a system determined by issues of construction, habitation, and abandonment within the natural landscape".

"Toward a Systems Aesthetic"- Foster-Rice explains that the negative change in societies use of the land becomes a heavy influence in the work of the New Topographics photographers. The use of pictorialist landscape photographs in the late 1800's early 1900's were a way of placing the humans hand gently on the landscape. Train tracks gently followed curves of glorious mountains and pristine streams. The New Topographics, as if shifting 45 degrees in perspective, show the interaction of man and landscape as opposing forces that are colliding rather than strolling side by side. Foster-Rice continues with a concept that applies this shift from the pictorialist representation of landscape as a way of placing the viewer back into the environment of which is being viewed in the photograph. "Rather than separate art from experience, their work sought to see art as an analogue for experience, in which photography played a central role".

Photography as a System-Foster-Rice summarizes John Szarkowhi, "that fine-art photographs should be thought of as pictures that summarize moments in time but considered distinct from the actual experience and social significance of that time."

Procedural Method- The procedural aspect to the New Topographic photographers was a method that was in response to traditional and formal aspects that previously defined fine-art photography. The procedural is to make an image that is not based on an aesthetic response. It was to recognize variables and then keep them constant.

George Baker, Photography's Expanded Field

George Baker's introductory sentence - "I begin not with a negative, nor with a print, but with a screen." The wording of this, although, describing a photographically based project is a way that Baker is attempting to draw attention to the major point of this essay. The sentence plays on our understanding of photography, the way it is used, its once objectivity, and its now shift into new applications. He understands contemporary art as something "in crisis, or at least in severe transformation." Baker believes that the photographic practice still holds its earlier function although artists are now choosing to accompany or incorporate other forms with their work. It is still said though that something of the photographic effect still "survives" even through a transformation of traditional photography in a digital world. I think this is partially related to the loaded and learned referential agency of the photograph, for example the photograph of me and Russel Kirsch acting and presented as proof that I met him and the exchange happened in real life. The postmodern era is written as one that was attempting to expand the field of art and photography although Baker states that it was never really essayed on or "concretely expanded". Baker justifies his intention's of mapping this expansion on the basis that if the object of photography is "definitively slipping away" because of its expansion then we need to understand what that meant to the makers of art and photography in the past 25 years and how that has influenced the art makers of today. Baker proposes that the mapping of photography's expanded field be started by the "tearing" of "oppositional extremes". This is in connection to the idea of stasis and not-stasis, narrative and not-narrative, and the relationship between them all.





Bakers mapping shows the expansion as a way of broadening the application of forms and materials that are taken from culture and or influence it.

I was thinking about the work of Columbia instructor and photographer Brian Ulrich. Ulrich's photographs revolve around consumerism and the ways in which Americans interact with shopping, consumer goods, and the locations where these relationships are performed.


Image is from www.notifbutwhen.com

His project Copia is broken down into "chapters". In his most recent body titled Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls Ulrich has been photographing the locations that were once thriving shopping centers that are either barely keeping open or have completely imploded.




I am placing this body of work within Baker's expanded field because of Ulrich's use of found signage that once brilliantly hung as signage for bustling stores and had transitioned into non functioning words that were on their way of crumbling as the buildings they hung in would eventually be knocked down or re-purposed. The signs are installed along side the photographs to make an installation that Baker would most likely place on the plane of the "Talking Picture" narrative/stasis section of Bakers map. The photographs with the signage to me presents a sort of narrative that is carried even farther because of artifacts such as the signs that are physically presented in the installation. The stasis exists int he fact that the installation is not moving but this is a part that I am a little unclear about. I feel that somewhat the signage can actually transition the photographs into not-stasis because of the fact that something tangible from the world that the photographs show is now brought into the same space as the images? Does this sharing of the real world and the depicted one change the experience into one that does not reflect stasis?