Contingent Factors: A Response to Claire Bishop's "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics"

Letters and Responses

Contingent Factors: A Response to Claire Bishop's "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics"

Liam Gillick

Gillick, Liam. "Contingent Factors: A Response to Claire Bishop's "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics"" Editorial. October Magazine Oct. 2006: 95-107. Print.

Date: 10/15/2012

List of primary claims made in this reading:

In Bishop’s text, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, there were many factual errors and misrepresentations made by the critic, Bishop, on behalf of the artists she references in regards to the structure of “relational art” constructed by Bouirriaud’s text, Relational Aesthetics.

This response by Liam Gillick, one of the artists’ work whom she references, corrects the research errors in Bishop’s article as well as tries to rectify the misinterpretation, poor presentation, and over simplification of both his and Tirivanija’s work, leveling the playing field for further critique.

Bishop responds to Liam Gillick by thanking him for his thorough fact checking and noting his lack of theoretical and methodological discourse on the argument presented in Bishop’s Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, which had initiated the correspondence. 

Gillick corrects many of the factual errors in Antagonism and Relational Aesthtics,  but did little else in furthering the argument of  democracy executed in relational art. I think it is important to “stand-up” for your practice, as Gillick does, and “right” obvious misrepresentations, but I also feel that there is no avoiding critics’ using strategic elements of an artists’ practice to validate their personal argument or discourse. That being said, both responses were attacks on the others’ professionalism disguised in a “debate” of the structure of “relational aesthetics.”

 Key Quotes:

“This tension between democracy and liberalism should not be conceived as one existing between two principles entirely external to each other and establishing between themselves simple relations of negotiation. Were the tension conceived this way, a very simplistic dualism would have been instituted.” –Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (2001)

“This is the true nature of Mouffe’s plea for a more sophisticated understanding of the paradox of liberal democracy, which concerns the recognition of the antagonism suppressed within consensus-based models of social democracy, not merely a simple two-way relationship between the existing sociopolitical model and an enlightened demonstration of its failings.” (Pg. 100)

“It is not true that so-called “relational art” insists on use rather than contemplation.” (Pg. 100)

List of facts/stats discussed in this reading:

Bourriaud curated an exhibition, Traffic, at CAPC in 1996.

Relational Aesthetics was published in 1998.

Question of the reading?

Is it necessary for the artist to “stand up” for his/her work? Or is it the responsibility of the critic to represent artist in a format he/she chooses to be represented?

How can conversations such as these be productive?