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.
