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Nicolas Bourriaud

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Books by Nicolas Bourriaud

Relational Aesthetics

First published in 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics laid out a thesis for art’s turn toward participation, experience, and the whole of human relations. Now, over twenty years after its original release, this landmark work has been updated with a new translation by Denyse Beaulieu and a new foreword by the author.
 
Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach to contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists’ works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the interhuman, of the encounter, of proximity, of resisting social formatting.
 
The aim of Relational Aesthetics is to produce the tools that enable us to understand the evolution of today’s art. We meet Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Louis Althusser, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Félix Guattari, along with most of today’s practicing creative personalities.

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Inclusions

“Today, the ecological catastrophe challenges us to rethink the space our societies have assigned to art. Creativity, critical thinking, exchange, transcendence, the relationship to the Other and to History are values intrinsic to artistic practice that will soon be of vital importance for the future of mankind. We need art to give a meaning to our lives, and the banks will not supply that. By attempting to unfold a few of the aesthetic figures floating in the global imaginary, this book intends to describe what is at stake in artistic activity in the age of the Capitalocene and to argue for it as a vital need.”
 
The current ecological crisis has brought about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances is creating interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. With Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era. Artists acknowledge the fading of the division between nature and culture, which has been the matrix of segregation for millenia. Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, social segregation, the exploitation of land, subsoil, and animals—all are based on status distinctions between subject and object. Against the commodification of natural elements, Bourriaud sees a new generation of artists calling for a molecular anthropology that studies the human effects on the universe and the interaction between humans and nonhumans. Contemporary art reconnects to archaic magic, the witches, sorcerers, and shamans of precapitalist societies. Against the devitalization of the world, art has managed to preserve certain aspects of the social function and spiritualist practices of these societies. Inclusions explores art history as a network of underground galleries, and sutures sundered connections.

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