Taking place in the skies over London, the plazas of Rotterdam, and the hallways of museums worldwide, a new kind of art has emerged since the 1990s. Known as Relational Art, this conceptual practice features audience participation in ways never before realised, often using new media and social networking. In this book, academic and artist Craig Smith outlines a rigorous theory of Relational Art, explaining why audience interaction and collective art production has become so relevant.
Tracing the development of the movement, from its beginnings with the 1996 Traffic exhibition in Bordeaux and Nicolas Bourriaud's treatise Relational Aesthetics, to the diverse and international scope of Relational Art today, this provocative book explores the foundational impact this movement has had on contemporary art and exhibition making.
Taking the reader through a range of case studies, such as Olafur Eliasson's iconic Weather Project at Tate Modern, and uniting ideas from artists, art critics, curators, philosophers and audience members, it reveals the practices integral to the movement and how these have affected aesthetic, theoretical and economic forces in the art world. Through a guided tour of thought-provoking and influential works, he demonstrates that Relational Art has permanently altered the nature of art and its global audiences.

Craig Smith is Associate Professor of Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of Florida, USA.

List of Illustrations
Introduction

1. Space
The Literalist Site
The Mobile Site
Case Study 1. Producing You Differently: Literalism in Duke Bailey's 2004 Art Fair Appearance
Case Study 2. Lee Walton's Stacked
2. Time
Case Study 3. Immersion in the Time of Art: Matthew Bakkom's Intimacy Machine
3. Participation in Relational Art

4. Interactivity in Relational Art

5. Participation and Interactivity Case Studies
Case Study 4. Bodily Interactivity Without Computers: Broken Bones and Pivi's Grass Slope
Case Study 5. The Weather Project: Participation to Interactivity to Participation
Case Study 6. The Thames Whale
Case Study 7. Abusive Crowd Interaction and the Sports Arena: New Orleans 2005
Case Study 8. College Station and the 12th Man
6. Relational Art and Social Identity
Selected Case Studies

Summary
Notes
Bibliography