Who gets to do what, where, when and how in this cultural practice, and how does this affect people? What are this practice’s relationships to social engagement, communication, social justice, equality and democracy; how might it contribute to or weaken them? If it invites participation, who can participate and on what terms? What is the quality of

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

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.

These subsequent chapters often look at a greater range of art and performance beyond the participatory forms outlined above and in Chapter 1, because they ask how participation in culture is more broadly and fundamentally affected not just by artistic practices but also by policy-making, spatial organization and arts funding.

Nicolas Bourriaud has famously termed socially ‘relational’ (Bourriaud, 2002)

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

I believe in and want social engagement because people are, need to be and benefit from being socially interdependent.

‘relational aesthetics’

Socially turned theatre and performance, likewise, actively engage their audiences.