Simon O'Sullivan is great.
(http://www.plastiquefantastique.org/index.html)
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A typical critique, increasingly made, of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics is that it substitutes a general model of “conviviality” for any criticality, or, more specifically, forms of dissent. My take on this (following Jean-Francois Lyotard) is that such dissent – which critiques of relational aesthetics take as the very modus operandi of a radical contemporary art practice - can be caught by the very thing they dissent from. They are forced to operate on the same terrain as their “enemy” and, as such, these forms of dissent can merely reproduce more of the same albeit dressed up as opposition.
A different take on Bourriaud might be to accelerate his concepts. For example, to articulate, following Spinoza, a kind of super-conviviality that is do with productive joyful encounters that occur when two or more things come together in a relationship of general agreement (this could be an art practice and participant, a collaboration, etc.). This is not to foreground a liberal ideology of consensus - Spinoza’s “joy” is not “happiness” in the sense of an individual ego-state or set of values - but it is to choose affirmation over negation and to understand the former as the basic building blocks for an ethical life and a political ontology - this being the argument of Spinoza’s Ethics and his other more political writings. In passing, it is worth noting that Félix Guattari’s ecosophic paradigm, especially as it is mapped out in his future-orientated book, Chaosmosis, has much in common with Spinoza’s Ethics in that it moves precisely towards this expanded chemistry of subjectivity. “Artistic anthropology” as a name for “novel models” for thinking art practice would do well to attend to this more molecular “relationality and connectivity”, or what we might call simply a register of becoming. This is an ethico- aesthetic model for life as well as art – and for “life as a work of art” (as both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze portrayed it). Another name for this, following Deleuze and Guattari, is schizoanalysis. Without doubt such practices are occurring all around us; equally without doubt the majority are invisible to an art world and market that trades on atomized and competitive individualism - however, this might be dressed up as “relational”, “participatory”, and so forth.
NJP Reader #1, 2010