Nicolas Bourriaud - STAGE 1, UNIT 3 CRITICAL STUDIES READING FOR FRIDAY 14 OCT LECTURE

The aura was recreated there, by way of fiee
associations" But the audience concept must not be mythicized-
the idea of a unified "ntass" has rnore to do with a Fascist
aesthetic than with these rnomentary experiences, where
everyone has to hang on to his/her identitys.

Meeting and coming together (all the "pairs"); knowledge of the
other (the "portraits"); life shared, presented trike a string of
happy moments (the light bulbs and the travel figures);
separation, including all the imagery of absence which is
ubiquitous in the work; illness (the record of UntitLecl
(Bloodworks), 1989; the red and white beads of Untitled (Blood),
1992); and last of all the lament of death (Stein and Toklas' grave
in Paris; the black edging on the white posters).

It's your life" , he said to his friend Ross, faced with the
results of a blood test. with untitled (Alice B. Toklas and
Gertrude Stein's Grave, Paris)' a 1992 photograph depicting
flowers planted on the shared grave of the two friends, Gonzalez-
Torres ratified a facL; he posited female homosexuality as an
unquestionable choice, capable of demanding respect from the
most reactionary of Republican senators' Here' with the help of a
sirnple photographic still life, he rediscover...

However I might
try to avoid disagreeable comparisons, it has to be said that this
type of aesthetic represents an example of Reagan-Thatcherite
ethics applied to art.

Gonzalez_Torr",
"ur-urked the
most monumental part of his
work for the portraits that he
produced on the basis of
interviews and conversations with
the
people commissioning them.

At the other end of the scale, the exhibition situations
presented to us by artists such as Gonzalez-Tor:res, and today
Angela Bulloch, Carsten Holler, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre
Huyghe, are governed by a concern to "give everyone their
chance", through forms which do not establish any precedence, a
priori, of the producer over the beholder (let us put it another
way: no divine right authority), but rather negotiate open
relationships with it, which are not resolved beforehand.

Felix Gonzalez-
Torres was probably the very first person to convincingly posit
the bases of a homo-sensual aesthetics, in the sense that inspired
Michel Foucault to advance a creative ethics of love
relationships.

Let us recall that, at the end of the
l9th century, all El Greco was good for was second-hand dealers,
and "true" sculpture did not exist between Greek Antiquity and
Donatello, But the "institutional criterion" dear to Danto seems
to me to be a bit limiting, too.

It's your life" , he said to his friend Ross, faced with the
results of a blood test. with untitled (Alice B. Toklas and
Gertrude Stein's Grave, Paris)' a 1992 photograph depicting
flowers planted on the shared grave of the two friends, Gonzalez-
Torres ratified a facL; he posited female homosexuality as an
unquestionable choice, capable of demanding respect from the
most reactionary of Republican senators' Here' with the help of a
sirnple photographic still life, he rediscover...

This is no longer the addition of two
inevitably heterogeneous realities, complementing one another
in a subtle interplay of contrasts and dissimilarities, and driven
by the ambivalence of the motions of attraction and repulsion
(suffice it to think of Van Eyck's The Marriage of Giovanni
50
Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami, or the Duchampian "king and
queen" symbolism).

The aura of
contemporary art is a free association.

Meeting and coming together (all the "pairs"); knowledge of the
other (the "portraits"); life shared, presented trike a string of
happy moments (the light bulbs and the travel figures);
separation, including all the imagery of absence which is
ubiquitous in the work; illness (the record of UntitLecl
(Bloodworks), 1989; the red and white beads of Untitled (Blood),
1992); and last of all the lament of death (Stein and Toklas' grave
in Paris; the black edging on the white posters).

Let us recall that, at the end of the
l9th century, all El Greco was good for was second-hand dealers,
and "true" sculpture did not exist between Greek Antiquity and
Donatello, But the "institutional criterion" dear to Danto seems
to me to be a bit limiting, too.

To
mention just a few, whose work is now coming to maturity,
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas
Gordon, Jorge Pardo, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, who
each develop their personal problem-set, but also find common
ground around the priority they give to the space of human
relations in the conception and distribution of their works (they
express ways of production based on inter-human relations)'
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Jorge Pardo are perhaps the
two...

58
In a show at Le Magasin in Grenoble, Gonzalez-Torres altered
the museum cafeteria by painting it blue, putting bunches of
violets on the tables, and providing visitors with information
about whales.

Guggenheim Museum catalogue,i995, p.

Let us recall that, at the end of the
l9th century, all El Greco was good for was second-hand dealers,
and "true" sculpture did not exist between Greek Antiquity and
Donatello, But the "institutional criterion" dear to Danto seems
to me to be a bit limiting, too.

You would have to
be
unbelievably ethnocentric not to see that technological progress is
far from being universal, and that the south of the planet, the so-
called "developing world", does not enjoy the same reality as
Silicon Valley as far as technical goods are concerned, even though
both are part of an ever-nar:rowing world.

Felix Gonzalez-
Torres was probably the very first person to convincingly posit
the bases of a homo-sensual aesthetics, in the sense that inspired
Michel Foucault to advance a creative ethics of love
relationships.