Artistic practices and Relational Art

When I started reading about Affect last week, I thought about the works by the brazilian artist Lygia Clark as a clear example... but as I continued reading, and specially after class, I realized that Massumi's affect was quite different from what I considered affect: (from Merriam-Webster) "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes".

Well, maybe it is just a matter of terminology, but Clark's work could be summarized in the following way: "Throughout her career trajectory, Clark discovered ways for museum goers (who would later be referred to as "participants") to interact with her art works. She sought to redefine the relationship between art and society. Clark's works dealt with inner life and feelings" (from wikipedia).

But then I read the Relational Aesthetics text from Bourriaud, which I found really inspiring, and which actually explained quite more clearly why I found Lygia Clark's work very engaging in relation with the definition of Relational Art "art which takes as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space" (p. 14)

For example, I totally think her work Hand Dialogue (1966) fits really well in the Relational Art description, although it was actually created years before the works Bourriaud takes as base for his theory (I think).



It is an elastic band in the form of a Möbius strip that two people use to connect their hands in a tactile dialogue. I think it could be considered a literal description of what Bourriaud means when he says that art "tightens the space of relations" (p.16). The same could be thought about Clark's work "Dialogue" goggles from 1968, which restrict the visual field of the two participants to an eye-to-eye exchange, merging interactivity and dialog, two of the central concerns in Clark's work.



Julio