Canon Ballz

2013

CANON BALLZ: a Relational Aesthetics critique of Relational Aesthetics

CANON BALLZ is a 2-chamber 25¢ gumball machine filled with colourful wooden balls. Dyed with Kool-Aid and finished with tung oil, each ball is debossed with one letter from one of two texts about Relational Aesthetics. The audience is invited to purchase the art (as they would gum) for a quarter apiece.

I called this project CANON BALLZ because Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics has become canon for those making relational or socially engaged art. (I used the Z in BALLZ because it is more “hipster” and therefore indicative of the all surface/no substance relational work that I am criticizing through this project.)

First, just like any other work of Relational Aesthetics, it is illegible to the casual and even interested/engaged viewer. It is only available to those in the know; those inside the work.

Second, it is impossible to reassemble; impossible to know by those not inside the creation of (conception of) the work. This is a critique that could be made of many artworks across many modes of artmaking, but is particularly damning of Relational Aesthetics because of the insistence that its very mode, aim, and end product is a connection with others. 

Third, as the ballz are dispersed into the world (it is not just a metaphor for Relational Aesthetics work, CANON BALLZ literally makes a relational artwork), the original text—the meaning—is destroyed, and the new owners of the ballz (the relational participants) can remake meaning with only the small pieces they own/their small experience of the work. 

People interact with and assist in the creation of the work for 25¢, simultaneously purchasing a piece of the art. Walking away from the interaction pleased with their encounter, (albeit somewhat mystified, in many cases) people are satisfied with the exchange– does this mark my critique as unsuccessful? In other words, is the critique only valid if people are unhappy with the interaction, as Relational Aesthetics predominantly aims to create pleasurable or at least satisfactory interactions with the public? No! Quite the opposite! People are pleased with the interaction, but they cannot understand what it is that they are a part of, as the text is illegible. Also, the vast majority of those who choose to engage in the work are those already in the know (as is the case with the worst offenders in the relational field) and not, in fact, the “general public” that the artists purport to work with. 

By handing out quarters to encourage participation in the work, I am critiquing the fact that works of Relational Aestheticians usually rely on the support of friends and people who are bribed to participate (making it a truly inauthentic experience and artwork). I am also critiquing the capitalist system as it is implicated in the contemporary art world and, specifically, in relational works; i.e. the commodification of relational exchange. How do we avoid turning art into product when the desire within the system is so strong, when the artist is tempted, and when the field of work has so few avenues for financial success?

One of the ways that Relational Aestheticians bribe other artists to participate in their projects is through the implication that, as a “collaborative” project, participants can include the work as a line on their CV. I advertised this as one of the benefits of participating in CANON BALLZ as a critique of Relational Aesthetics’ common reliance on a very small community of artists/Relational Aestheticians in the creation of the work. Artists participate in one another’s Relational Aesthetics pieces in exchange for reciprocation, creating a truly hermetic system. Purportedly, oftentimes, the artists are the community of people most interested in the work, but usually this happens because the work is in danger of failing without ensuring a built-in audience – so the work is actually artificial. Either way, a movement which claims to be about building social connections and creating opportunities for audiences to engage with art but is actually incredibly elitist and exclusive has both failed miserably and replicated the disasters of art movements it claims to be pushing against, only worse. 

There are two different texts, one on each side of the gumball machine – partly to give space to both sides of the argument, but mostly to point out that debate within the field of Relational Aesthetics is just as opaque and inaccessible as the content of the work itself. Criticism, and change, have to come from outside the movement; as interesting as some of the ideas have been, and as useful as some of the methods, the movement itself, as a movement, and an exclusive one at that, is of questionable value.

The two texts that make up CANON BALLZ:

Artistic activity is a game, whose forms and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence… In order to invent more effective tools and more valid viewpoints, it behooves us to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social arena, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing… 

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), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art. To sketch a sociology of this, this evolution stems essentially from the birth of a world-wide urban culture, and from the extension of this city model to more or less all cultural phenomena. (Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud 1998)

…to be politically relevant and effective, such experiments need to be grounded in social movements and struggles.  As a gallery-based game, relational practices are cut off by an institutional divide from those who could use them.  Who are the consumers of relational art?  The cultural élite of the dominant classes, primarily… (And this is a very different demographic from those marginalized communities whose members are sometimes enlisted for roles in relational works).   In general, this audience does not tend to overlap with the people actively attempting to generate pressure for deep social change.  But this is how the disruptive utopian energies that do exist in relational art are managed and kept within tolerable limits:  the social separations, stratifications and (self-)selections of the art system enact a liberalization – that is, a de-radicalization – of social desire. (“A Very Short Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Radical Culture Research Collective)

So, CANON BALLZ functions as a genuine work of Relational Aesthetics as defined by Bourriaud (loosely), or more specifically as it is practiced by those who connect to the movement today – or to social practice, dialogical aesthetics, and other related practices. It also functions more importantly as the kind of performance I theorize in my broader research, and about which Claire Bishop claims is the more responsible participatory art form: that of relational antagonism. (Antagonism 65-67) As a more honest form of interaction, antagonism allows for critique from within, and acknowledges that the concept of an “authentic” artist/audience connection is fraught with trouble.