Hello!
I've been thinking for a while about the next movement in art. I feel like I know a lot about where painting needs to go. Most of my thoughts on the matter are all jumbled though. I know just enough to squeeze out a few ideas for possible paintings. I feel very protective of the medium though and I want to pull it all together and package it nicely so I can sell the meaning back to the art world.
I'll start somewhere in the middle of all my jumble with a term that has merited its own wikipedia page, Relational Art. I feel its good to start at a point thats linked outside of my mind. Relational art seeks to create a feeling of community among the audience.
It appeared in a book entitled Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud. I fully intend to read this when I have cleared my blocks at the UC Berkeley library by reading and returning the copy of Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing" I borrowed a month ago.
Until then, all I have are some preliminary reactions to my purely surface level exploration of this movement. This is based on a combination of the wikipedia article and some glimpses of the web pages of Relational artist. In my first act as a relational artist, rather than giving you art to look at, I'll let you explore the internet tails yourself.
I think the most pertinent question to explore is wether there is room for painters among relational artists. They seem to be against all art that operates as an object because it is a "product." Object, Product, and Mass Production are very sticky and problematic terms I find. It makes sense to me to rebel against "mass produced" art because it is operates as mechanism of advertisement and consumerism. But a painting as problematic because it is an object? I almost dropped my brushes to run to the nearest Best Buy and get a video camera so I could get in on this interactive art. But then I realized, this was not a reaction to the canvases, but to the images that have become flattened in modern paintings. Impressionists had a way of creating a world in painting. As though the dots or thick strokes you see only make up the surface of a series of parallel universes. Its rare to see what I think of as a fertile painting, that is one that gives birth in the imagination of the viewer. That too me is "relational." Note Its not handing the viewer the chance to make meaning. That type of postmodern art is sterile, waiting for the viewer to impregnate, not accosting them. So I propose a type of painting that forces a relationship with the viewer, but one that also depicts the greater community. It is a depiction of the systems the viewer inhabits, consciously or unconsciously. It is either active, with a current running within it, or it is veiled, with a current running into and out of it. This is all fluffy cloud nonsense. I promise I can ground it though. It just won't be today.
