Relational Art: A Guided Tour

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Taking place in the skies over London, the plazas of Rotterdam, and the hallways of museums worldwide, a new kind of art has emerged since the 1990s. Known as Relational Art, this conceptual practice features audience participation in ways never before realised, often using new media and social networking. In this book, academic and artist Craig Smith outlines a rigorous theory of Relational Art, explaining why audience interaction and collective art production has become so relevant.

Tracing the development of the movement, from its beginnings with the 1996 Traffic exhibition in Bordeaux and Nicolas Bourriaud's treatise Relational Aesthetics, to the diverse and international scope of Relational Art today, this provocative book explores the foundational impact this movement has had on contemporary art and exhibition making.

Taking the reader through a range of case studies, such as Olafur Eliasson's iconic Weather Project at Tate Modern, and uniting ideas from artists, art critics, curators, philosophers and audience members, it reveals the practices integral to the movement and how these have affected aesthetic, theoretical and economic forces in the art world. Through a guided tour of thought-provoking and influential works, he demonstrates that Relational Art has permanently altered the nature of art and its global audiences.

Reviews

A critically informed engagement with art that involves participation and interactivity, this book is a superb introduction to an increasingly important form of art practice, likely to become a key text for anyone interested in this kind of work. * Charlie Gere, Professor of Media Theory and History, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, UK *
Smith provides not only a thorough and engaging history of relational aesthetics, but also a convincing claim for the critical importance of the concept for art practice today. This is necessary reading for artists and educators grappling with interactivity and participation in our increasingly mediated, post-Covid world. * Joel McKim, Director of the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology, Birkbeck, University of London *
Craig Smiths Relational Art: A Guided Tour is an exceptional book. Smiths revealing tour is two-fold, taking readers through theories of Relational Art and several in-depth case studies of recent artworks with discussion of how each was planned and executed. Among commentators on Relational Art, Smith stands out by providing an artists understanding of this relationship between theory and process. * John Bowles, Associate Professor of African American Art, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA *

Author Bio

Craig Smith is Associate Professor of Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of Florida, USA. His previous books include Training Manual for Relational Art (2009) and On the Subject of the Photographic (2007). He is also a media artist, using image, sound and text to explore the production of contemporary culture.