What Does Relational Aesthetics Work on? A Transitional Approach to the Relational Paradigm in Human and Social Sciences Based on Lygia Clark and Marina Abramović Artworks
Nicolas Bourriaud has provided recent developments in arts with a theory of relational aesthetics, which is not based on forms, but on “proximity” – the arts operating within the sphere of intersubjectivity. This paper, which presents the works of two female artists, Lygia Clark and Marina Abramović, aims at completing not only Bourriaud’s corpus but as well the typology he has initiated with the care, which “figure” the paper places at the principle of the phenomena and judgments Bourriaud’s aesthetics describes. Grounded in the theories of transitional psychoanalysis, the paper further discusses the issue of relational aesthetics, and shows how it works and what this work achieves, objectifying not only its intersubjective characteristic, but the work of hapticity (sense and emotion), and the narcissistic identity that is worked out. Then it proposes a definition of the paradigm of relational aesthetics, in order to critically engage qualitative developments of human and social sciences, and notably of geography, and to reflect the spatial turn.