Your Gravitational Now Response
Our senses receive, evaluate, and produce our day-to-day reality. The collection of our feelings, our memories, our personal values, and things we are certain or uncertain about, along with our thoughts either strong or trivial, continually create our very existence and the way in which we interpret things.
Our imaginations can give way to interpreting what we see and how we react to what we see. We can create a complete new view by manipulating our senses based on changing one thing in our surroundings. The example given was imaging the street now sloping downwards and how everything shifts – houses, sky, light, and other people. This exercise was a manipulation of our brains. The students knew what was factual but they were able to see things in a different light by making a change via their senses.
In art, altering the use of objects or space from their original purpose can give the artist leeway or something new to work with. It gives them an allowance of room to work and create. Interpretation of art is multifaceted in that individuals have their own reaction to an individual piece. Your senses may not like what I as an artist have created, and I may think this is my best work to date. Our senses and knowledge of art is ever-evolving and opens the door for different views of what art is and what is aesthetically pleasing to one’s eye.
From Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) Response
Art is still one practice in which humans have the ability to socialize. Visitors to an art exhibit have an increased chance of striking up a conversation unlike other types of social offerings such as television or the internet. In an open forum, such as an art exhibit, visitors will interject their opinions especially when they strike a nerve. Both positive and negative reactions can be seen and heard. Being in an open environment gives way to this opportunity unlike being at home in your own space watching television or surfing the internet.
Todays’ art is different than the past. Artists have more options than to form imaginary and utopian realities. In relational art, the artist’s audience is visualized as a community and not just a moment in time between an individual person and the object being viewed. The audience allows for collective meanings shedding a whole new light on the artist’s works. According to Bourriaud, “Art is a state of encounter” and the exhibit is an “arena of exchange.”
Artists styles have changed greatly and practices now include many inventions of our everyday lives. Recycled goods are here and now. Modernity has opened the doors to many new opportunities for the artist of the day. Items tossed to the curb now end up in art exhibits, something our ancestors would have never seen coming.
“Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum,” state Bourriaud.
