Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Rirkrit Tiravanija, aus der Serie "Stages / Stationen", Bangkok (Wahlen), 1992
space and gallery space, and the real world progression of the art
institution into entertainment complex, creates both a disturbing
endpoint where domestic space become indistinguishable from
commercial space, (for Bourriaud only considers the transition going
one way, not the other) and masks the understanding that this is
already happening. The new digital behaviorist topography of the city
completely dissolves the symbolic divisions between personal and
public. The city itself becomes an expression of interrelations,
consciousness of material conditions evaporate, creating systems of
control invisible to those who are placed inside it. With the onset of
the satellite, the panopticon has become as ubiquitous as the sky
itself.
Nan Ellis argues that this dematerialization is the foundation of a
distinctly postmodern anxiety of the city, "[w]here modernist fear and
the positivistic climate in which it occurred led to efforts to detect
causes and effects...postmodern fear amid the refining antitechnocratic climate has incited a series of closely related and
overlapping responses including retribalization, nostalgia, escapism,
and spiritual return." Or in Bourriauds words, "...we are hoping for a
return to traditional aura..." The understanding, or reflection, of these
evolutions of subjectivity and space are important to consider in
reexamining the subjectivity of the viewer, and how control can be
disrupted, but relational aesthetics seems to go only so far as
recreate these systems, literalize their movements, without providing
any moments of resistance. Instead it is staged t as an inevitable
outcome, by reinscribing these existing structures of control as "a
realm of possibilities," of a "possible future," as "microtopias." This is
exactly the system of domination that Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari describe in "Mille Plateaux", writing, "Attention has recently
been focused on the fact that modern power is not reducible to the
classical alternative "repression or ideology" but implies a process of
normalization, modulation, modeling, and information that bear on
language, perception, desire, movement etc,, and which proceed by
way of micro assemblages."