The social contract,
relational art and autómata: Reactions and Interactions
Although we may consider
ourselves tolerant people, when our neighbors seem to transgress certain social
norms, we may see a break that leads us to call for our rights. If the neighbors
are from another culture, or “tribe”, their rules are probably different from
ours.
When I was 12, my favorite
TV show was “Las reglas del juego”
(The Rules of the Game) (TVE, National Spanish Televisión, 1977) a series of anthropological
documentaries that analyzed the principles by which modern societies are
governed. Directed and presented by José Antonio Jáuregui, Professor of Social
Anthropology at the University of Oxford, he thought that the behavioral
mechanisms related to social life, such as shame, language, social norms and
even religion, are innate and universal in the human species.
Many years later, during a
visit to London in 2000, I attended the exhibition "Intelligence: New
British Art 2000" at the Tate
Gallery. I discovered with surprise a project called "The Folk Archive", a visual account of contemporary popular
British culture that artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane had begun the previous
year. This project culminated in 2007 with its acquisition by the British
Council and the creation of a virtual museum (http://www.britishcouncil.org/folkarchive/folk.html).
Deller and Kane had
transformed their own artistic work into something which could be labelled an
anthropological study of British customs.
Deller is considered one of
the main figures of “relational art”. This art practice places greater emphasis
on the relationships established between, and with, the audience of the
artistic dynamic rather than on any artistic object. Works that are identified
with this artistic movement tend to be situated in everyday activities and
contexts.
The first uses of the term
"relational art" are attributed to Nicolas Bourriaud, former
co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, who used it in the title of his
book, Relationnelle Esthetique
(Relational Aesthetics) ( Les presses du réelle, 1998) and in 1996, in the
exhibition catalog "Traffic" curated by himself.
Bourriaud posited that the
close relationships that the city generates have transformed the conception of
artistic activity. For him, the presence of the relational
factor in artistic practice responds to a pressing need to encourage the
recovery and reconstruction of social nets in a society of split subjects,
isolated and reduced to the status of mere passive consumers.
Luckily, for the viewers of
our exhibition we do not ask him or her for any action, so the critics of this
art form, led by Stephen Wright, can relax. Nothing is needed beyond a
reflection upon our behaviors. Or not even that: mere contemplation is also
worthwhile.
One of the things we may
choose to contemplate are the terms of the “social contract” that structures
some of our relations. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Of The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right
(Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a work on
political philosophy that primarily speeks about the freedom and equality of “men”
living under a State established by a social contract. To live in this society,
so the theory goes, human beings agree to an implicit social contract that
gives them certain rights in exchange for giving up the freedom that would otherwise
be available in the state of nature. As such, the rights and duties of
individuals constitute the terms of the social contract, while the State is the
entity created to enforce the contract. But the rights and duties are not
immutable or natural. And a greater number of rights implies greater duties,
whilst fewer rights means fewer duties. This is a very contentious area of
discourse in Europe at present.
Mauro Entrialgo’s profound knowledge of human relationships, as seen
through his comics – we have a little sample in the exhibition – presents the
vision, "From my windows",
of what happens around him. For him, these “reactions/interactions” are just “little
moments of my life”. Situations and attitudes that clash and that he reveals, seeking
our complicity in a shared laugh.
Pilar Baizán has similar concerns, but to analyze the quarter (or
“community”) where she lives, she prefers to rely on sociological studies to
support her thesis. Both Baizan and Entrialgo live in neighborhoods that being
gentrified. They analyze this process with compassion and without bitterness.
In the exhibition we also present
a fanzine, “Sanfranzine” made in
this neighbourhood during a workshop designed to empower a local community
under pressure. We present a book “El barrio de San Francisco
en Bilbao. Un polo artístico” (The district of San Francisco in Bilbao. An
artistic kernel)
Jai Du also presents an autobiographical view of a European
town, but if Baizán and Entrialgo are part of the regeneration of degraded neighbourhoods
undergoing gentrification, she speaks from the other side. She is part of the immigrant
community – in her case, living in Germany – who are denigrated by the mere
fact of being. Through her poetry she tells of her bitter experience as such. A
painful experience that reminds us of the people who may never have a voice.
I wonder if “the Turk”, the
automaton chess player of Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), that interacted
with chess masters around the world would have worried about all this if he had
not been himself a fake. Jacques de Vaucanson’s “Le canard digérateur”, hailed in 1739 as the first automaton capable of
digestion was also a fake. The city buses in the work of Daniel Romero that we see interacting in the exhibition are real.
Do they dream of electric sheep like Philip K. Dick’s androids?
Finally, turning to the music-making
plants of the artist collective uh513, we could ask ourseleves the classic question of whether plants suffer
when eat them. We cannot say for sure that they are suffer, but we can be sure
that they react. The sun, irrigation, wind, and so on generate different flows
of electricity depending on the circumstances. Through electronic interfaces
these artists give the plants the possibility to interact with us.
We communicate through our
behaviors.
Txema Agiriano, March 2014
Publicado originalmente en el catálogo de la exposición Reactions and Interactions,
Verge Gallery, Sydney (Australia) Abril 2014
