«Artists are increasingly comparable to shamans, because shamans are individuals who seek to establish contacts with other worlds». Nicolas Bourriaud
The relational dimension of art, that is, the idea that the artwork exists and activates itself in the relationship with the viewer, has always existed. Already in the 19th century, Eugène Delacroix discusses it in his diaries, where he describes the triangulation of artist-artwork-audience using a meteorological metaphor in which the painter is compared to rain and the painting to the cloud that forms from its evaporation, destined to rain again on the viewer. This concept is the cornerstone of the essay Relational Aesthetics, published in 1998 following three years of research in artists’ studios by art historian and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who two years later would found the Palais de Tokyo contemporary art center in Paris, together with Jérôme Sans.
AA.VV., “1+1. L’arte relazionale”, installation view at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, ph. M3studio, courtesy MAXXI, Roma
The book, initially circulating mainly among artists and now considered a classic of critical literature and translated into dozens of languages, arose from the need to find a common denominator among the practices of about thirty young artists, then at the beginning of their (brilliant) careers, including Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick and Dominique González-Foerster, who often worked together despite being very heterogeneous from a formal point of view, and about whom critics spoke, in the absence of more effective definitions, of neo-conceptual or post-Fluxus art. Starting from the weakness of this theorization in qualifying the innovative specificity of their poetics, Bourriaud develops his theory of relational art, to which he attributes a variety of artistic practices united by the fact that they identify as their theoretical and/or practical horizon the sphere of human interactions and their social context, rather than a symbolic, autonomous and private space of distant Romantic ancestry.
AA.VV., “1+1. L’arte relazionale”, installation view at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, ph. M3studio, courtesy MAXXI, Roma
A fundamental consequence of the intuition at the basis of the book is that works belonging to this field escape the parameters usually reserved for artifact-works, postulating for their interpretation a new aesthetic theory capable of judging and commenting on them in terms of the interhuman relations that they figure, produce or evoke. If the creative generation in the 1990s was driven by the desire to overcome the traditional definition of art to experiment with openness to the other by building spaces of collaboration or devices of conviviality as tools to perceive the world, what has changed a quarter of a century after the book’s publication in a global system where the crisis of the human scale now appears evident? If the technostructure that envelops our planet, increasingly uncontrollable, seems to want to expel the human from its processes, the question of the person and the relationships maintained by people has become a political stake.
AA.VV., “1+1. L’arte relazionale”, installation view at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, ph. M3studio, courtesy MAXXI, Roma
Where human presence on the Internet tends to coincide with what we call Big Data, that is, traces of personal data that we leave at the mercy of a certain number of operators, the human user has become a hunted animal. The more we move toward a reification that transforms the living into a dissectable and marketable entity, the more the living, and therefore also the human itself, disappears. It therefore appears of capital importance, today, to return to considering the human as a horizon, no longer unique, but anchored to an ecosystem that includes data, objects, animals, nature, technological creatures and everything that belongs to the whole of its environment, to hypothesize a new space for action within a relational landscape that exceeds the human being. If the social sphere, understood in a global sense, is the product of an immense and permanent negotiation, of a perpetual montage or, if we prefer, of a collective fiction, the primacy of relations over things appears not so much an ideological choice, but a pragmatic necessity.
AA.VV., “1+1. L’arte relazionale”, installation view at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, ph. MUSA, courtesy MAXXI, Roma
And it is precisely here that politics and art meet: if the former could be defined as the “montage” that we want to elaborate together as a collectivity, the latter could be considered as a sort of alternative laboratory in which what politics has systematized is deconstructed and reorganized. The fundamental political dimension of art comes, therefore, from the fact that it obliges us to think that the world in which we live in, the institutions that govern us and the society to which we belong, are nothing other than constructs of a temporary montage. According to Bourriaud, the greatest challenge of politics and artistic practices in the 21st century is to reintroduce the human into the areas from which it has withdrawn, such as computerized finance, markets at the mercy of robotic and mechanical regulations or the quantifiable logics of profit, without returning to thinking that the human being is at the center of the planet. It is therefore a matter, also through the rethinking of (relational) art, of emerging from postmodernity, ceasing to live and think in the “after”, to build a new era founded on dialogue and differences.
AA.VV., “1+1. L’arte relazionale”, installation view at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, ph. MUSA, courtesy MAXXI, Roma
These reflections constitute the reference hinterland of 1+1 Relational Art, the first major retrospective in the world dedicated to this movement, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud himself, currently ongoing at MAXXI in Rome. The exhibition brings together 45 artists from different generations (Francis Alÿs, Kutluğ Ataman, Vanessa Beecroft, Monica Bonvicini, Britto Arts Trust, Angela Bulloch, Sophie Calle, Maurizio Cattelan, Lygia Clark, Braco Dimitrijević, Annika Eriksson, Alicia Framis, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Joseph Grigely, Jens Haaning, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Kimsooja, Ben Kinmont, Maria Lai, Mark Leckey, Ken Lum, Lee Mingwei, Gianni Motti, Grace Ndiritu, Hélio Oiticica, OPAVIVARÁ!, Gabriel Orozco, Philippe Parreno, Pia Rönicke & Zeynel Abidin Kızılyaprak, Cesare Pietroiusti, Premiata Ditta, Anri Sala, Julia Scher, Santiago Sierra, SUPERFLEX, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gillian Wearing, Franz West, Elin Wikström, Ian Wilson), whose works involve participatory processes of creation or fruition.
AA.VV., “1+1. L’arte relazionale”, installation view at MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, ph. M3studio, courtesy MAXXI, Roma
The exhibition path is articulated as a varied landscape in which the visitor is invited to experiment mentally (and sometimes also physically) with different operational modalities of reprogramming the real, allowing themselves to be guided by the intuitions of some of the most authoritative voices in the international artistic panorama. At the same time, the exhibition accounts for the evolution and diffusion (which from a certain point of view we could define as normalization) of an approach to art that, having emerged as a contextualized trend in a precise cultural conjuncture, proves to be today an attitude more than ever frequented by contemporary creativity.
Info:
AA.VV. 1+1. Relational Art
Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud with Eleonora Farina associate curator
29.10.25 – 01.03.26
MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
Via Guido Reni 4a, Roma
www.maxxi.art
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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