<nettime> What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan

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What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan
http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/09/09/img-mgmt-what-relational-aesthetics-can-learn-from-4chan/

by Brad Troemel on September 9, 2010 · 127 comments

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. 
Today’s invited artist wishes to remain anonymous.]

Is it still necessary to define art by intent and context? The gallery 
world would have us believe this to be the case, but the internet tells 
a more mutable story. Contrary to the long held belief that art needs 
intent and context, I suggest that if we look outside of galleries, 
we’ll find the actions, events and people that create contemporary art 
with or without the art world’s label.

Over the past 20 years, the theory Relational Aesthetics (referred to in 
this essay as RA) has interpreted social exchanges as an art form. 
Founding theoretician Nicholas Bourriaud describes this development as 
“a set of artistic practices that take as their theoretical and 
practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their 
social context”[1]. In reality, art erroneously known to typify RA’s 
theorization hasn’t strayed far from the model of the 1960’s Happening, 
an event beholden to the conventions of the gallery and the direction of 
its individual creator. In her essay Antagonism and Relational 
Aesthetics, Claire Bishop describes Rikrit Tiravanija’s dinners as 
events circumscribed in advance, using their location as a crutch to 
differentiate the otherwise ordinary action of eating a meal as art[2]. 
A better example of the theory of RA succinctly put into action can be 
seen in anonymous group activities on the internet, where people form 
relations and meaning without hierarchy.

Started in 2003, 4Chan.org is one such site, and host to 50 image 
posting message boards, (though one board in particular, simply titled 
‘/b/’, is responsible for originating many of the memes we use to burn 
our free time.) The site’s 700,000 daily users post and comment in 
complete anonymity; a bathroom-stall culture generating posts that 
alternate between comedic brilliance, virulent hate and both combined. 
Typically, the content featured is a NSFW intertextual gangbang of 
obscure references and in-jokes where images are created, remixed, 
popularized and forgotten about in a matter of hours. 4Chan keeps no 
permanent record of itself, making an in the moment experience the 
allure of participation. For all of the memes that have leaked into our 
inbox from it, 4Chan maintains a language, ethics and set of activities 
that would be incomprehensible to the unfamiliar viewer. Induction to 
/b/’s world is not fortified and understanding it merely requires Google 
searching its litany of acronymated terms or participating regularly 
enough to find out for yourself.

“It is up to us as beholders of art to bring [unforeseen associations] 
to light, […] to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce 
in the specific contexts they inhabit” [3] concludes Bourriaud in his 
2001 book, Postproduction. One of the unforeseen relationships he 
mentions is that of the contemporary artist and contributive internet 
surfer­ (the kind of Photoshop bandit you can find on /b/). Bourriaud 
understands each as methodological equals, calling them “semionauts”. He 
uses this term to define those who create pathways through culture by 
reorganizing history to bring forward new ideas[4]. In a digital 
environment equally defined by information categorizing and shopping, a 
case for surfing-as-art neatly falls between two historical precedents: 
Duchamp’s specification-as-art and 1980’s artists’ (such as Jeff Koons, 
Sherrie Levine, or Heim Steinbach) interest in consumption-as-art. 
Surfing-as-art and RA both enact Peter Bürger’s description of the 
avant-garde’s intention to merge everyday life with the aesthetic realm.

Marcin Ramocki’s essay Surfing Clubs: organized notes and comments 
describes the rapid conversations on group posting websites using jpgs, 
gifs, video, links, and text as a material;

    The older the club the more convoluted the semiotics of 
communication between surfers becomes. This communication entails 
posting organized content by a challenger, and a decoding of it by other 
participants, who respond with a posting where both syntagms and 
paradigms of the challenge post are identified and playfully manipulated.[5]

The medium, practice and logic of surf clubs outlined in Ramocki’s essay 
matches 4Chan’s /b/ message board identically, though the circumstances 
are obviously different. While /b/ anonymously concerns itself with 
people and events popularized on the internet, the individuals who 
manage surf clubs have social and professional connections to the art 
world, making their primary point of reference art historical. Reference 
should not be the sole criteria for understanding surfing-as-art, 
however. Ramocki, like Bourriaud, premises his belief in surfing-as-art 
not on the type of allusions made in content, but on the production 
method of a post and its network environment. Both describe this 
environment as continuously active, altering or re-contextualizing 
information and making it public with hope for further use by peers.

Zach Anner's attempt to host his own television show on Oprah's new 
television network through an online contest she hosted was supported by 
/b/ unironically

With this condition in mind, it’s fair to call /b/ a massive surf club 
whose conceptual language is determined by those without connections to 
the art world or the need for validation from it. As artist and blogger 
Eryk Salvaggio puts it, “The net can’t handle the pretense of art, or 
anything that seems manufactured, because it has a keen bullshit 
mechanism.”[6] Though /b/ doesn’t need us, contemporary art does need a 
dose of /b/’s refined understanding of actively anonymous group creation 
for us to advance the “bullshit” we cherish.

This notion of ongoing use in surf clubs is also fundamental to RA’s 
attempt to create an art that takes place through the continuous social 
interactions participants have within an environment. Ramocki describes 
surf clubs as more than a dump site for disparate images, but as a 
location where highly specific visual languages are formed and conversed 
in. This corresponds with Bourriaud’s description of the future of 
Relational art;

    artists intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond 
what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an 
ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of use of forms, a 
culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: 
sharing.[7]

From this quote we can draw another relationship: /b/ and other surf 
clubs are digital examples of Relational Aesthetics, artforms that rely 
on social interaction and feedback to take place. But before /b/ can 
totally fall under the hood of RA, there is one last hurdle in aligning 
it with Bourriaud’s theory. Relational Aesthetics reflected Bourriaud’s 
distrust for technology, a feeling so deep he even criticized automatic 
public toilets as instruments that distance the public from itself. 
Bourriaud saw the 1990’s generation’s drive to initiate an art 
consisting of intimate human relations as a reaction to the disembodying 
effects of the digital age.

These theories are now out of date. Understanding our only ‘real’ 
relations as those that occur through physical encounters becomes 
arbitrary when considering the behavioral and situational norms each 
physical encounter presents. Each of these norms acts as an intermediary 
between others and ourselves (though some would argue these norms do not 
regulate, but are our personalities). Like the digital world, physical 
interaction is full of socially bound ‘interfaces’, operating methods 
that determine the substance of relationships. As any millennial can 
attest, the idea that there is an in-person ‘real’ version of you that 
comprises your full identity and an online personage that bears no 
impact on your ‘real’ self, isn’t an accurate description of 
contemporary life. The inclusion of digital sites of interaction as a 
development of Relational Aesthetics is an idea not so strange 
considering the method’s practitioners’ past interest in the economics 
of mass exchange, intermediary points of being during travel and the 
collision of global cultures.

An expansion into the digital world could also help clarify RA in 
practice; it is a theory with an open disdain for art’s commodification, 
though is often exhibited within the shelter of an art institution. This 
discrepancy was best articulated, oddly enough, by dealer Gavin Brown, 
sharply saying in an interview with the BBC:

    Don’t you think that if you wanted to look at the possibilities of 
an art that’s theoretical horizons encompass the realm of human 
interactions in a social context, wouldn’t you want to just go out and 
meet people and have a good life? I mean, to me it seems as though a lot 
of this work is made by people who are scared to live life in the first 
place– incredibly unradical people[8] who play a game of a radical life 
in the safe confines of some Kunsthalle or other museum in Germany or 
France.[9]

Despite Bourriaud’s interest in collaborative art making, his theory’s 
purest realization has been put on hold by institutions that must place 
emphasis on individual creators to maintain their financial well-being. 
While inside of a Liam Gillick exhibit, have you ever forgot that you 
were attending a Liam Gillick exhibit? I haven’t. Ending the 
viewer/creator dichotomy requires no less than the end of the art-star 
system and a participation format that makes room for the errors 
inherent in free will. In his essay Postchronist Manifestation, Dominick 
Chen states

    as long as there exists an asymmetry (or distance) between producer 
and receiver, the modality of cultural production would inevitably lead 
back to a religious power structure.[10]

An art of Relational Aesthetics “far from the classical mythology of the 
solitary effort”[11] would be anonymously produced and give all 
participants the greatest degree of choice possible when determining the 
course of their own experience. Here we arrive again at 4Chan.

After videos of a teen beating his cat (named Dusty) surfaced on 
Youtube, it took /b/ a day to track down the anonymous abuser and have 
him arrested

In addition to the constantly evolving visual and textual language on 
4Chan’s message boards, there is another /b/ activity that exemplifies 
group production in line with RA’s theory. These activities are called 
‘raids’– projects where a person or institution is chosen and a mass of 
anonymous people contribute to bringing on the manipulation of its 
digital existence.

While a surf club may screen capture and edit material in Photoshop to 
post to their board, /b/’s raids are concerned with bringing on an 
evolving change in the source itself, not a visualized hypothetical. 
Surf-clubs have a Relational structure of communication among members, 
but they still maintain the individual creation of static art within a 
designated space. In contrast, raids are a breach of boundaries—a way of 
altering the work’s ‘real life’. William S. Burrough’s proposition that 
art manifest itself (“What if a painting of a bomb exploded in a 
gallery?”) is fitting for raids[12]. These site-specific alterations may 
take place through cracking passwords, using the open editing features 
on a website like Wikipedia, or hacking. Sometimes they even take place 
in person.

Raids have no leaders and the course of their action is decided by the 
collective will(s) of all participants. Without a chain of command, a 
raid is an event constantly in flux. They may end before they even start 
or begin with one plan of action and later morph into many splintering 
reactions. A raid’s anti-hierarchical fragmentation is similar to the 
antagonism Claire Bishop describes in Antagonism and Relational 
Aesthetics. Separate from the temporary microtopias attempted by some RA 
artists, Bishop calls the social works of art that reveal natural 
oppositions between participants an example of relational antagonism. 
She explains that this art making is a way of “exposing that which is 
repressed in sustaining the semblance of harmony.”[13]

Antagonism is a byproduct of free choice and speech– an inefficient but 
necessary way of relating if a project wishes to remain as open as 
possible. 4Chan users tend to value personal liberty above all, making 
the prime targets of their raids people or companies who engage in 
censorship or moral zealotry[14]. Disgust for authority is so engrained 
in /b/’s culture of anonymity that users who attempt to demand raids for 
their own personal gain have became the target of backlash attacks 
themselves. While some group interventions are petty, others are thought 
provoking and intelligently executed, like 2009’s mARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME 
raid, which is /b/’s finest work yet.

When TIME Magazine offered 4Chan’s founder, m00t, as a candidate for 
2009’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year online readership poll, 
/b/ wasted no time launching an attack to propel him to the top spot. 
The resulting campaign included likely thousands of participants’ manual 
labor, the creation and dispersion of sophisticated ballot-stuffing 
software programs and several strategic changes[15] in online 
manipulation methods from March to April of 2009. m00t not only took 
first place, but all of the top 21 people listed in the poll were 
intentionally ordered in such a way that their first names spelled out a 
secret message: ‘mARBLE CAKE ALSO THE GAME’[16]. ‘Marble cake’ is 
alternately described as the name of the chat room where the 
anti-Scientology raid Project Chanology was born, or as an unsanitary 
sex act. ‘The game’ is an inside joke that requires you to not utter or 
think of it to be able to win. You mostly likely just lost the game.

The mARBLE CAKE raid was an impulsive assembly of a group to 
simultaneously make reflexive commentary while literally revising who 
the public thought they voted to be the most powerful that year. The 
ranked influence of the names listed in the top 21 becomes subservient 
to the order of /b/’s encrypted message. This echoes the commonly 
launched criticism of TIME’s yearly “Influential” issue that many of the 
people included are merely entertaining figureheads or patsies who act 
at the behest of even more powerful, discrete interests. More 
specifically, the raid is a work of Relational Aesthetics. Just as the 
empty bottles left over from Rikrit Taravanija’s meals are later used as 
sculptures in their own right, the resulting alteration of TIME’s poll 
becomes a digital monument to /b/’s successfully group-orchestrated 
intervention. /b/’s influence on Time magazine’s website is the 
Relational given form through their own activity.

What we witness by looking at the mARBLE CAKE raid is the result of a 
group of computer programmers who used their knowledge to make a mockery 
of a flawed media structure without retaining individual credit for 
themselves. With this equally creditless result, I’m reminded of the 
symmetrical creativity Dominick Chen calls for in his essay Postchronist 
Manifestation. Chen situates Relational Aesthetics as the second to most 
current form of art making in history. The newest, he claims, is 
as-of-yet unmade, though differs from RA in that it is created and 
interpreted collectively without hierarchy. This ‘new’ form of art does 
not exist inside of traditional institutions and confronts the 
conditions of its participants’ lives within their own environment. What 
Chen describes is in fact Relational Aesthetics as ideally theorized by 
Bourriaud, highlighting the contradiction between the reality of RA’s 
art-star-filled, institutionally reified present incarnation and the 
hope for an emancipatory future inherent in RA’s theory. Chen calls this 
‘new’ form of art ‘X’ but he might as well have named it /b/.



[1] Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics, (Les Press Du Reel, France 
1998) p. 113

[2] Clare Bishop. Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, (OCTOBER 110, 
Fall 2004) p. 69

[3] Nicolas Bourriaud. Postproduction, (Lukas and Sternberg, New York 
2002) p. 94

[4] Nicolas Bourriaud. Postproduction, (Lukas and Sternberg, New York 
2002) p. 18

[5] Marcin Ramocki. Surf Clubs: organized notes and comments. (Self 
published, May 27, 2008) p. 5

[6] Comment by Eryk Salvaggio on Rhizome.org discussion board May 12, 
2008. http://www.rhizome.org/discuss/view/37290

[7] Nicolas Bourriaud. Postproduction, (Lukas and Sternberg, New York 
2002) p. 4

[8] It should be mentioned that his gallery, Gavin Brown Enterprise 
represents several Relational artists, calling into question whether 
this answer was hypocritically sincere, ironic or Sophist.

[9] BBC News. Relational Art: Is it an Ism? 2004. 
http://www.ubu.com/film/relational.html

[10] Dominick Chen. Postchronist Manifestation. Video Vortex Reader 
Responses to Youtube. Edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Neiderer 
(Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2008) p. 74

[11] Nicolas Bourriaud. Postproduction, (Lukas and Sternberg, New York 
2002) p. 10

[12] William S. Burroughs, The Fall of Art from The Adding Machine: 
Selected Essays. Arcade Publishing, 1993. P. 62

[13] Clare Bishop. Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, (OCTOBER 110, 
Fall 2004) p. 79

[14] Julian Dibbell describes 4Chan’s ethos as “radically authorless, 
furiously remixed and compulsively serious” while imagining their 
antithesis as “a strictly disciplined, hierarchical organization founded 
on the exact reproduction of relentlessly earnest, fiercely 
copyright-protected words” in his Wired article The Assclown Offensive.

[15] Because the poll took account of both the number of votes and the 
average rating of influence (a number up to 100 at best), the ballot 
stuffing software distributed among participants needed to take use 
complicated algorithms to insure each of the 21 names would stay high or 
low enough on the list for the mARBLE CAKE message to be spelled 
properly. As the raid continued, TIME caught on to these attempts and 
upped their security measures. Throughout the month the 
mARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME message became illegible many times, forcing 
raiders to adopt new methods to combat Captcha Codes and time 
restrictions. As the amount of manual labor increased, many lost 
interest in the project and moved on. Participants came and went all 
throughout the raid– free choice includes the possibility of refusal.
All images shamelessly stolen from Encyclopedia Dramatica, except for 
the ones stolen from Google image search.

Tagged as: /b/, 4chan, Dominick Chen, Eryk Salvaggio, Gavin Brown, Liam 
Gillick, mARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME, marcin Ramocki, MOOT, Nicholas Bourriaud 
claire bishop, relational aesthetics, Rikrit Tiravanija, William S. Burrough


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