Aesthetics and Globalization at Art Biennials

In Nicolas Bourriaud's (2002) view, there is a conceptual relation between the post-communist transition of the early 1990s and the contemporary art practices, such as those represented by Rikrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzales-Torres and Maurizio Cattelan, that must have made a radical break with its theoretical foundations rooted in the foregoing history, society and culture giving way to a postmodern condition (McIntyre 2007: 35). Bourriaud connects a transition to the project-based society of global capitalism to the relational structures of contemporary art (McIntyre 2007: 35-36) paralleling in doing this the developments associated with globalization that impose their logics on society, culture and economy (Bishop 2004). By basing his theory of relational aesthetics on the social contexts of contemporary artworks, Bourriaud (2002: 109, 112-113) takes social effects of contemporary art as a starting point for probing into its effects on individuals brought into contact with each other, social reality and theoretical concepts through the mediation of artworks (McIntyre 2007: 36), even though the nature of the relationships involved remains open-ended and under-theorized (Bishop 2004: 65).

Bourriaud (2002: 11) states that contemporary art is a social practice that has to be approached on its own constantly changing terms that rather than being oppositional to social reality, as were those of aesthetic avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, are models of action and living within existing social relations (Bourriaud 2002: 13) in concrete and ameliorative ways (McIntyre 2007: 36). For McIntyre (2007: 36-37), Bourriaud's (2002: 113) historical periodization that lies at the foundation of his theory of contemporary aesthetics while seeking to differentiate itself from Guy Debord's (1995: 24) theory of the society of the spectacle, as a latest, image-driven stage in the process of accumulation of capital, hardly distinguishes itself from it, as far as the reproduction of the aesthetic spectacle is concerned. Bourriaud (2002: 113) takes post-Soviet period as a social transition from passive spectatorship to participatory involvement paralleled in the possibilities that video as opposed to video games respectively offered with corresponding parallels in emergent relational aesthetics oriented at immanent rather than transcendent concerns better pursued in the interstices between economy and society where art exhibitions become positioned (McIntyre 2007: 37).

For Bourriaud 2002: 16), art exhibitions are interstitial spaces that not only escape the logics of exchange imposed on economic and social relations but also suggest radically different possibilities of their organization (McIntyre 2007: 37). Even though McIntyre (2007: 38) criticizes Bourriaud's video game model of contemporary aesthetics, as he takes recourse to Baker's (2004: 50) efforts to draw parallels between a historical periodization of economic development towards service economy and contemporary art and to Fraser's (1997: 114) opposition of commodity production and service delivery as immaterial production, he falls short of putting contemporary art into the context of either economic theory or art practice. McIntyre (2007: 38-39) finds close fit between neoliberalism, globalization and Bourriaud's aesthetics as he contrasts the widely shared chronology of Europe's post-communist transition (Maraniello 2002: 9-11) to its changed internal relations and international role in the world where global communication, mobility and culture render previous institutions and identities obsolete. However, McIntyre (2007: 39) underscores that efforts to understand globalization need to be put into a broad historical perspective, as cross border mobility and globe-encompassing economic activity have precedents that predate current wave of global interconnection, e.g. the 19th century labor migrations and the Dutch East India Company (Cooper 2005: 91-112).