Output details

Visual art and social structure: the social semiotics of relational art

This output addresses a contemporary research issue, that of theorising arts practice which Nicolas Bourriaud has termed relational aesthetics. Bourriaud has claimed that art practice in today’s period of cultural history he calls Altermodernist, no longer is amenable to a formalist analysis applicable to earlier periods. The article proposes that relational practice - what the author terms convocational art practice – is simply the latest in a sequence of artforms related to their social contexts, and demonstrates this contiguity by elaborating and extending Robert Witkin’s taxonomy of artforms related to social structure: Witkin’s three types of artform, invocational, evocational and provocational, is thus extended to embrace revocational artforms, typical of a post-Modernist social structure, and convocational art such as the events orchestrated by Rirkrit Tiravanija intended to bring participants together in an attempt to ‘heal the cracks in the social structure’. The article goes on to introduce an original systemic-functional semiotic model for the analysis of installations typical of relational art practice, and demonstrates its efficacy by analysing Tiravanija’s installation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The article is a refinement of a presentation first delivered at the 6th International Conference on the Arts in Society , Berlin, 2011. An article Relational Art as Social Semiotic, which includes a further demonstration of the systemic-functional semiotic model’s efficacy by analysing work by Anton Vidokle is published in The International Journal of the Arts in Society Vol. 6 Issue 3, 2011 pp 21-32. ISSN 1833-1866.