Relational aesthetics reduce art to bodily affective experience rather than representation

Evidence

The vanGoghga, let’s call it, blends physical exertion and aesthetic reception, interpellating a subject of utter sensation whose discipline attunes cultural consumption and corporeal optimization. In this limbering, it instantiates the embodied bent of the more haute contemporary artworld’s movements of “socially engaged art” and “relational aesthetics.” For the spectator to use their body to produce an “experience” logically augments both the remodeling of the gallery into a social space providing food, dentistry, or therapy, and the hulling of artforms down to affective transfer. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 14

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines relational aesthetics and socially engaged art through bodily experience production.
• XREF: The relay from immersive installation to ‘art as experience’ feeds the later argument about immediacy privileging affect over form.