Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Performance Interventions)

Bourriaud makes several very important contributions to understandings of the form in Relational Aesthetics. He enumerates and details the trend in visual, sculptural and installation art, discussing many vivid examples in detail. He sets it within art historical and theoretical contexts. And he argues for what he sees it achieving. While it does n

Rather, he claims that it attempts to ‘create various forms of modus vivendi permitting fairer social relations’ (p. 46) in what he terms ‘everyday micro-utopias’ (p. 31).

I explore what models of social relation and community these practices can produce, while I remain wary of models that either fetishize a myth of a unified singularity and thereby obliterate difference, or propose an unresolved multitude. I seek models of community that recognize people’s social interdependence without assimilating their distinctiv

The question of the significance of participation, though vital to much contemporary work, is one that should be treated with some suspicion. The mere involvement of the actions of audience members is not enough to assume a vital or direct relationship to the work of art …. How the exchange of participation takes place must be carefully framed, so

Harvey argues that ‘[t]he present economic difficulties in both the US and Britain, as well as throughout Europe, are essentially being deepened for a political reason rather than out of economic necessity. That political reason is the desire to have done with capital’s responsibility to cover costs of social reproduction’ (ibid., p. 269),

‘art tak[es] as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14).3 Its role is ‘to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real’ (p. 13).

two of the main ‘costs of inequality’ are ‘community life and social relations’ and ‘social mobility’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010).

agree with Morgan that participation is not intrinsically politically progressive. Thus, though I seek these practices’ democratic potential and look for ways they extend equal opportunities for social engagement, I also pay attention to ways they constrain or suppress those opportunities.

For some critics, including Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan and critic Claire Bishop, Bourriaud’s approach and his claims risk, themselves, being utopian, naïve and unrealistic.