To see oneself in that Mirror

Is it necessary to underscore that there can be no artwork without ­taking into account its foremost characteristic of transitivity, “a tangible ­property of the artwork,” “without [which] the work is nothing other than a dead object”?¹ 1 - Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998), trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 26. From this standpoint, the “relational” quality of art is, first and foremost, the result of a structural logic, determined by the interaction that occurs between the scope of the work’s creation and its social space (i.e., the public presentation of the work). Although the property of “openness” can be conceived as inherent in the artwork, many artists have nonetheless reconsidered this perspective: they have focused on this characteristic in an effort to magnify it, extrapolate from it or, conversely, to undercut the “participative force” and the will to “action” the spectator can experience when confronted by a work’s “openness.” The history of twentieth-century art in particular has urged a rethinking of images as increasingly predicated on experience. In ­addition, currently the notion of representation is likewise theorized in terms of a transaction incited by the spectator’s participation.