Implicit Connections: The Magic Words of the 1990s

And if, above all else, relational aesthetics were an economy? Having tackled the aesthetic and ideological stakes of this 1990s1 1  - This article is a shortened version of a talk given on May 31, 2011 at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris, as part of the international colloquium Au nom de l’art. Enquête sur le statut ambigu des appellations artistiques de 1945 à nos jours, organized by Guitemie Maldonaldo, Katia Schneller, and Vanessa Théodoropoulou. revival of participatory practices in several articles,2 2  - The first was “L’artiste médiateur,” Artpress 22 (special edition on Écosystèmes du monde de l’art) (November 2001): 52-57. this question arose in light of PONZI’s (2006), a work by the artistic cooperative Société Réaliste. The piece was a critical satire of a relational economy based on the association of two models: the gift economy as it operates in contemporary economic and social networks and the pyramid scheme invented by Charles Ponzi.3 3  - For a description of the Ponzi’s scheme, see my article “In art we trust. Un art critique d’art” (2010), published on my blog at http://tristantremeau.blogspot.com. This article is the basis of my eponymous book to be published by éditions Al Dante, in Marseilles, in September of 2011.  As I elaborate in a forthcoming book, these two models, among others, are the basis of a global financial apparatus now presenting itself as a retirement fund for artists, the Artist Pension Trust. To understand the connections between the relational aesthetic and the relational economy, one must go back to the end of the ‘90s, when an economic vocabulary took up considerable space in discourses on and about art, and more especially, in exhibitions — privileged moments of visibility and exchange. This was particularly striking in France where ideas growing out of commerce and TIC (theories of information and communication) — networks, connections, relationships, flux, transit, traffic, and information — were found in the titles of exhibitions and marked their theses: Traffic (organized by Nicolas Bourriaud at the the Capc de Bordeaux in 1996), Transit and Connexions implicites (by Christine Macel and Jean de Loisy respectively at the École des beaux-arts de Paris in 1997), Connivence (Biennale de Lyon, 2001), and Traversée (by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Laurence Bossé at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in 2001).

Connexion implicite was, in its thesis and method, no doubt the most eloquent manifestation of the substitution of the collective paradigm — favoured from the 1960s through the 1980s by artistic practices that positioned themselves as alternatives to the dominant liberal economic model⁴ 4 - See Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York 1965 – 1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette, eds., Collectivism after Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).  — by that of the network, which had become a flagship concept and implicitly included the others, in a context dominated by an apologetics for the new possibilities offered by the democratization of the Internet. “With whom am I connected?” today seems a more explicit statement of ties or identity than “to which national or religious group do I belong?” read the press release. “Thus, movements once founded on a shared political or aesthetic ideology are no longer current, while the networks traversing old categories give rise to a dynamic transnational or transcultural identity.”⁵ 5 - From the press kit for the exhibition Connexions implicites, Paris, Énsb-a, from May13to July 13, 1997.  To manifest the “temporary, rapid and effective organic associations” characterizing the new, networked art economy, the list of exhibiting artists was based on an initial list of artists with whom Fabrice Hybert had worked, at a time when he had positioned and distinguished himself as an artist-entrepreneur. These artists were invited, in turn, to name their associates, who, once named, were also questioned about their networks. In the end, the exhibition reconstructed an “international cartography of an implicit network,” in this case that of well-known emerging artists in the process of institutionalization (Douglas Gordon, Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco, Philippe Parreno, and Jason Rhoades, among others). Also included (through interviews published in the catalogue) were emerging curators, who were equally well-known and becoming institutionalized (Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Nicolas Bourriaud, Éric Troncy), and who shared a common portfolio of artists in their writing and curatorial activities.