Relational art

Relational Art is an art form that emerged in the 1990s, which considers humans as creative beings within the universe of their own relationships and the social context in which they take place. It requires the participation of the audience in the construction of the artwork, making it a political and social art form.

Relational Art rethinks the figures of the artist, the artwork, and the audience, seeking the origin of a sort of collective creativity expressed through new practices in modes, techniques, and purposes. The relational artist does not produce aesthetic objects but creates situations capable of stimulating the creativity of the involved parties, making the artistic moment the dialogue, confrontation, and relationship among them.

The final artwork is subordinate to the process of its construction. The motivation behind the artwork becomes preeminent, the process through which it takes place, in a common area where the boundary between authorial and collective blurs, where the relational character determines the need for the presence of the audience, establishing an artist-audience collaboration that is not necessarily declared but evident.

The fundamental theme of relational art research is the relationship between art and life, understood on the individual and social philosophical-existential plane. The relational artist, neglecting the production of artworks, focuses on the possibilities of intervention on the involved parties in a relationship of mutual influences and interrelationships.

Relational art encompasses conceptual currents and movements from the 1960s onwards, in which the spectator is called to participate in the artwork, becoming a part of it. The privileged expressive forms are installations, films, videos, collective projects, performances, or any other tool capable of bringing out unconscious meanings, new realities, or new interpretations of reality, proposing a path of growth and awareness of the dynamics of everyday life and individual action within a collective social context. Other features are improvisation and real-time staging.

The purpose of this art is to support aggregating existence models and create new places of sociality. Compared to traditional artworks, which can be observed at any time by a general and universal audience, relational artworks are accessible only at the precise moment of their realization and by a collected audience, perhaps randomly gathered for the occasion.

Contemporary art

In contemporary times, two groups of artists emerge, broadly distinguished by their approach to the realization and commercialization of their artworks. The majority of artists, inspired by the muses, belong to the first group. They become part of the "art world" due to their activities, such as painting, drawing, performing, regardless of their artistic preparation. Each of them produces something that some might characterize as art, and then tries to figure out how to get paid for what they do. In fact, there is no precise path to finding someone interested in buying what they produce. There is a small number of art collectors, usually wealthy, while there is a broad base of art producers that spans all socio-economic levels. Only some of them succeed; most do not.

The other group of artists consists of people who study the market and understand through analysis where the market is positioned. Then they produce their artworks to adapt to it. The result of this approach is that the market analysis creates the success of the commercialization of a specific "style," and no matter what level they set their ambitions, such artists achieve success at a much higher level than the previous method.

Artworks

In this context, relational art, or relational aesthetics, proves to be a suitable interpretive model for Oreste's works. In fact, the term, coined by Nicolas Bourriaud, encompasses "a set of artistic practices that take as their theoretical and practical starting point the set of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."

Bourriaud argues that "the role of works of art no longer intends to create imaginary and utopian realities, but rather to be real ways of life and models of action within existing reality, whatever scale the artist chooses."

As already mentioned, relational art produces intersubjective encounters through which meaning is collectively elaborated, situations that interact with the participant, rather than being 'seen' by a 'spectator'. The interaction itself is the work of art, not something that has been produced as a 'thing'. In the art of experience, the event is the thing.

Relational aesthetics is a way of considering the productive existence of the viewer, the space of participation that art can offer. In relational art, the artist is no longer at the center, no longer the creator of the soul, the master or the celebrity, but only the catalyst. They initiate a question, frame a viewpoint, or highlight an everyday moment. And then, they wait for a response from people. Thanks to the definition of relational art, Oreste's works could be configured as interactions between subjectivities, of which, at times, textual documentation exists.

The books illustrate the experience that occurred, recording its phases. Although they only exist as such after the experience has ended, the final product is not generated outside of what happened to create it.

The Books of Oreste

The initial management of the texts aimed to preserve their intrinsic communicative character, which establishes the boundaries of their effects in the shared space between author and readers, and these could not be subjects from whom to receive economic contributions, except for covering printing expenses by those who demonstrated a real interest in them (those who requested a complimentary copy showed that they had not understood the purpose of the operation).

Subjectivities in communicative relationships must be respectively free, otherwise only subordination aimed at pleasing the other is given. Selling a product has nothing to do with the effects of the artistic experience, but tends to depersonalize both subjects: the author, who submits to the logic of the client, and the one who experiences the purchase, which impoverishes the meaning of the work by reducing it to mere exchange value.

Certainly, today an artist is condemned by the absence of patrons who no longer allow them to live solely as an artist and therefore to have the time to think and nourish their creative ability, thus being able to leave traces of it through the production of works.

The world dominated by objects leaves no room for subjectivities that are immersed in countless self-censorships. The sale of the book also disconnects the author from the reader and the contents are distorted, as well as distorting, and reproduce the mechanism of alienation from reality.

After all, those who write do so because they have not had enough opportunities to speak, and in some way the written text tries to remedy at least the expressive moment of the missed communicative process.

A published book is like throwing a bottle with a message inside.

A clarification is necessary. In the paratextual apparatus of the books, it is stated:

"Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, as well as any reference to circumstances and facts that really happened is purely coincidental."

It seems to be a misleading statement aimed at avoiding unpleasant legal consequences for the dissemination of personal content. We can say that all the contents appear real, the names have been changed, and the places made vague to avoid the identification of the subjects involved.

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Note

Nicolas Bourriaud writes that "the human is the interhuman" and places the relational art in a 'relational aesthetics, with socio-political values. The definition of relational art is affirmed with his book Esthétique relationelle. In this category he included all the artistic expressions that, since the Nineties of the Twentieth Century, manifested through the notions of interactivity, user-friendliness and facilitate relationships among people.

Bourriaud, N., Esthétique relationnelle, édition Les presses du réel, Dijon, 1998.