Relational Aesthetics
In 1992, at a gallery in New York, Rirkrit Tiravanija carried the contents of the office out into the exhibition room, turned the emptied office into a makeshift kitchen, and cooked Thai food for whoever came. Nothing hung on the walls. The work was the situation itself, people gathered and eating. The one who gave this idea a name was the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. He began using it in the catalogue for the Traffic exhibition in Bordeaux in 1996, and in 1998 he published a book called Relational Aesthetics. His definition: a set of artistic practices that take human relations and their social context as their starting point, in theory and in practice. He gave it the name himself. It was not an insult. The line this map keeps returning to, that the name is given from outside, stops holding here as well. There is criticism too. In 2004 Claire Bishop wrote Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics for October. Her point is that the relations relational aesthetics assumes are not as inherently democratic as Bourriaud makes them sound. Eating together and getting along is one thing; the conflicts in a society coming undone is another. That criticism is still being read today. (The dish Tiravanija served is said to have been pad thai in the 1990 work and a vegetable curry in the 1992 one; accounts differ.)