Tori Bell Beyond Objecthood Response 1

In at least two paragraphs (using your own words) define the positions of Fried, Smithson, and Bourriaud as outlined by Voorhies.

Bourriard theorized that relational art was a benchmark for new models of living and acting within a tangible reality and that therefore it called for new models of aesthetic assessment. Social practice does not fall into Bourriard’s theory because it shirks the aesthetic and formal qualities of the work.

Fried disliked the solicitation of the spectator in minimalist aesthetics because he believed the spectator’s spatial and temporal experience of it introduces an aspect of theatricality that negated its position as art. He asserted that bringing the viewer bodily into the work contaminates the purity of modernist painting and sculpture and ultimately its artistic autonomy, because Fried thought minimalist  had an inability to be wholly present through a visual immediacy at any given moment.

Smithson critically challenged modernist dictum through the non-site that takes the form  of the exhibition to put spectators through a durational exercise of space and time to experience. He deployed the exhibition in an expanded critical form to leverage an attack against modernist exhibition principles and their methods of aesthetics assessment, creating an art free from the authority and confinement of critics and exhibitions.

In an additional paragraph or two state your own opinions/philosophy responding to the four positions (Voorhies included) as you understand them thus far. Feel free to invoke other artists or precedents in exhibitions to outline or defend your position.

I agree with the assertion that aesthetics are an important consideration for relational aesthetics. I think as creators artists should consider the formal qualities of the objects they leave behind from their participatory work.

I believe sometimes theatricality can overtake the artwork like when Jay-Z and Marina Abromavich did a performance together. But I don’t have an actual problem with participatory art. Some of the strongest reactions I’ve ever seen to contemporary art work were those that were participatory like James Turrell or Olafur Ellison.

I think Smithson was correct to question and critique the museum institution but I disagree with his statement for Documenta5 when he called the galleries a jail. I feel that it is extreme, and a gallery is what an artist makes of the space creatively.