Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Performance Interventions)

Bourriaud makes several very important contributions to understandings of the form in Relational Aesthetics. He enumerates and details the trend in visual, sculptural and installation art, discussing many vivid examples in detail. He sets it within art historical and theoretical contexts. And he argues for what he sees it achieving. While it does n

Harvey argues that ‘[t]he present economic difficulties in both the US and Britain, as well as throughout Europe, are essentially being deepened for a political reason rather than out of economic necessity. That political reason is the desire to have done with capital’s responsibility to cover costs of social reproduction’ (ibid., p. 269),

Socially turned theatre and performance, likewise, actively engage their audiences.

– social engagement and equality of opportunity – are, for me, two of its most precious possibilities.

Nicolas Bourriaud has famously termed socially ‘relational’ (Bourriaud, 2002)

The type of pluralist community relational art might offer, Morgan suggests, is that evoked by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms ‘being-with’, ‘being-in-common’ and ‘being-with-each-other’, which accommodate difference in mutuality (ibid., pp. 16 and 26; see, for example, Nancy, 2000).

to extend this invitation to engage socially very widely, across all audiences equitably, perhaps even democratically.

Rather, he claims that it attempts to ‘create various forms of modus vivendi permitting fairer social relations’ (p. 46) in what he terms ‘everyday micro-utopias’ (p. 31).

Nicholas Bourriaud, Jessica Morgan, Claire Bishop and Shannon Jackson.