In his book, Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud highlights the difficulty in finding meaning, 'signification', in artworks:
Art keeps together moments of subjectivity associated with singular experiences [...] [O]ur visual experience has become more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography [...], enabling us to recognise as a “world” a collection of disparate element [sic] (installation for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links. [...] The setting is widening; after the isolated object, it now can embrace the whole scene: the form of Gordon Matta-Clark or Dan Graham's work can not be reduced to the “things” the two artist [sic] “produce”; it is [...] the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs, objects, forms, gestures... (p20)
The idea that overarches Dan Graham's art has to be taken in the cultural context of an evolution of signs, and beyond the form of the object so that it involves the personal and societal histories of the artist and viewer.
Niklas Luhmann has seen Art as an 'autopoietic' subsystem of society: the art world maintains itself, despite numerous internal changes of people, galleries and art works.
Harrington states: “Luhmann traces art's historical evolution towards an increasingly autonomous 'social system'. [... He] describes social systems as self-creating or 'autopoietic'.” (p199) 1
Luhmann states:
Operations (conscious perceptions as well as communications) are nothing more than events. They cannot persist, nor can they be altered. [...] The stability of a system based on time-sensitive events must be a dynamic stability, a stability that depends on the continual change of the system's resources. We shall call this state of affairs an "autopoietic system." This means that the elements of the system are produced within the network of the system's elements, that is, through recursions. (p49)
Luhmann sees the art world ('the art system') as a series of ongoing 'operations': perceptions and communications, suggesting that the art world is a series of operations that recursively maintain the art world system itself.
Art exists not as a series of discrete autonomous objects, but as part of Art as a Social System: “Our analysis has reached a point where it becomes apparent that [...] communication through art tends toward system formation and eventually differentiates a social system of art” (Luhmann, p49).
The ideas in the art world's network (what Sevänen calls “a Habermasian [...] special cultural system. This system includes works of art and artistic techniques” (p87)) may come about as a result of the current situation of all elements within the network.
These elements may include not only the artists' current reading, ideas, research, sketches (in whatever medium), but also their interactions2. These interactions may be as a part of the social system of art or even part of the work of art itself (see below).
Even if the artist is not part of the art world, he or she refers to it by their objection to it (stated or implied). The works created are also part of this system and feed back into the process of art creation, for both the artist and others. This may be through directly viewing/taking part in the work or reading about it, etc.
Either way, the work is taken on board either consciously, or subconsciously.
Moreover, it may take on the form of being an 'interactive' work, such as those mentioned in Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud), or may involve the social or networks (societal or otherwise) (see pp 30-403). As the idea of the lone artist-genius changes, the work of artists becomes, steadily more networked, interactive or relational.
The 'art world' continues to exist, despite internal change (artists and galleries coming and going), and from it organised works are created (art works, exhibitions, gallery shows) and the art world constantly renews itself. Harrington (p199) sees postmodern practise as in a recursive state of recreating and renewing itself, despite constant change: “Art's institution is constantly being 'ended'. But [...] this very 'ending' constantly renews art's institution at another level.”
Bourriaud's suggestion is that the nature of contemporary art derives from the change in modes of thinking: from modernist goals to consideration of society; urban, mobile and networked. This gives rise to the “freeing-up of isolated places, going with the opening-up of attitudes.” (p14). As a result work takes on “the possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space)” (p14).
These relational works reflect the nature of the art world and make reflexive play on the system that gives rise to their existence. An example, cited by Bourriaud (p33), is Maurizio Cattelan's work where he asked his gallery owner, Emmanuel Perrotin to wear a 'phallic rabbit costume'. The work created in internetworked society is less reverential of the autonomous art object and expresses the nature of society, with all its interactions.
What we have is a situation where an artwork is not denoted by a form, but by an idea comprising a set of concepts, each of which is inflected by the gallery-goer's personal context. An idea may comprise several parts, modified in the reader's mind by the 'baggage' (e.g. the 'century of photographic images') they bring to the museum or the gallery based on their experiences in the world (which in turn have been influenced by other people's experiences, similarly, and so on recursively).
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics. 2002, Les Presses du Réel.
Harrington, Austin, Art and Social Theory. 2004, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Luhmann, Niklas, Art as a Social System. 2000, Stanford UP, Stanford, CA.
Sevänen, Erkki, Art as an Autopoietic Sub-System of Modern Society: A Critical Analysis of the Concepts of Art and Autopoietic Systems in Luhmann's Late Production. Theory Culture & Society (18)1: 75-103.
1. Note that autopoiesis, here, is seen as being 'self-creating', and not self-maintaining.
2. Sevänen says: “by the concept of 'art as a system' we may mean the art world or the institutions and practices which accompany the production, mediation, distribution, reception and criticism of art. In this sense, we mean by 'art as a system' the whole social network that maintains art” (p87). The differentiation between the 'special cultural system' and 'art as a system' is, according to Sevänen, the difference between a cultural and a social system.
3. Bourriaud cites the examples of Sophie Calle's work, Daniel Spoerri's dinners, and Alix Lambert's Wedding Piece, in which she got married and divorced four times in six months.