Octet: Selected Works from the School of Visual Arts, New York
Relational Aesthetics, a term coined in 2002 by Nicolas
Bourriaud refers to a kind of art that interacts with its
onlookers. Not based on formal concerns of aesthetic experience,
audience participation is a necessary and required aspect of
this type of work. Like the Situationists before them,
practitioners in this field aim towards developing collective
social experiences, and endeavors to fuse art with life. Word As
Image To conceive of words as flesh, or breath or abstract
signs, integrating words with the visual arts has had a cross-
cultural history. From the Rosetta Stone to oracle bones, from
bark cloth paintings, to illuminated manuscripts, words turn
sounds into a concrete script. Simple lines and dots, dabs and
flows, arabesques and undulating rhythms displace the
articulating voice in the external world. Identity and Identity
Politics What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be
part of a marginalized social group? How do race,