http://www.critical-art.net/home.html

Steve Kurtz told me that he did this project, and it was right before he went off to Buffalo and got arrested for bioterrorism the day his wife died, and I was 17 and wanted to smash the state and thought he was _so_ cool, and expected all of my subsequent critical theory professors to also be wild geniuses whose eyes were sunken in to deep dark sockets and who had stories about driving Greenberg around and had books written about them which mentioned their 80's cocaine habits. Anyway, it involves consumables, is in public, and attempts to make work with people/context. relational. Oh so the project's not described well on the site, I just realized. Basically they used some Euro money (important as it is given to artists sometimes) to buy a bunch of beer and smokes. Then for like a week or a month or something they hung out at some train station and there hung out with folks (sometimes unemployed, it's suggested?) who wanted said items.


When I Learned What Relational Aesthetics Was:

I was getting drunk and eating in a bar after friday openings, and sitting around a big table full of people who could talk about art and could accurately read the weather forecast (http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/166597.asp?from=blog_last3 )

One of those people was Abby Satinsky, who runs InCUBATE, a radical non-profit in chicago that my non-profit's like sisters with. http://incubate-chicago.org/

She's smart and has invested considerable amounts of time and treasure into investigating contemporary alternative modes of artistic practice. I wanted to know about relational aesthetics, and so I asked her.

She described it well, then kind of bashed it as an incomplete theoretical project, then got pretty upset when I suggested that maybe the InCUBATE project listed below might be called relational aesthetics.

Sunday Soup
http://www.incubate-chicago.org/sundaysoupfaq.html

OK so: relational aesthetics?
are we allowed to call it that?
they don't want us to.
Why would they want to avoid that association?
Do people shrink from affiliation with movement in general now?
sigh..

Then there was the dude who graduated last year (Matthew Paul Jinks?) what made a cofeeshop out of his studio for a semester? I think that sums it up; one liners are not always bad.

OK, So:
Some stock responses to relational work:
_RISKY!!_ _ART?!_

Boring, on the whole, I think, a little bit, and I think a lot of people think that too. It should be understood, though, that that table at that bar was doing some of the work that I think we're being asked to do by NB; we were a clan slung together by the art context we were hyper-aware of our implication/participation in. Plus, relational work is being done all the time by the bevy of art/political organizers that anyone in chicago can join. Projects and events are enacted with serious devotion to context creation. All the time. We made an at-cost speakeasy in our storefront... It's a dumb move, but so's writing about and pushing movement that has so little to say. Critical Art Ensemble and InCUBATE don't want to stand next to Rikrit because they want to change the world, not point out how the bourgeois hang out in it. He was married to Elizabeth Peyton for Jesus' sake, how political is she?