War artist: Steve McQueen and postproduction art.

The British edition of Glamour, a magazine solidly committed to a celebration of celebrity culture, also wants to contribute to the "war against terror," it seems, and had recently planned a picture feature on British war widows who had lost their husbands in Iraq or Afghanistan. Attempts were made to contact widows who had to be both photogenic and aged between thirty and thirty-eight, but the planned feature was dropped after Military Families Against the War refused to cooperate. (10) Nevertheless, the story is symptomatic of what Bourriaud calls the "society of extras" where:

Everyone sees themselves summoned to be famous for fifteen minutes,

using a tv game, street poll, or news item as go-between. This is the

reign of "Infamous Man", whom Michel Foucault defined as the anonymous

and "ordinary" individual suddenly put in the glare of media

spotlights. Here we are summoned to turn into extras of the spectacle,

having been regarded as its consumers. (11)

For Bourriaud, the "society of extras" is an advanced form of the "society of the spectacle," as theorized by Guy Debord in the 1960s, and is the backdrop for his two highly influential art manifestos, published in English as Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Postproduction (2002).

Bourriaud's writings endorse Debord's critical ideas about advanced capitalism, but reject his dismissive attitude toward the art world. For Debord, professional art was irredeemably part of the spectacular-commodity economy, and he was only interested in the merging of art and everyday life. In contrast, Bourriaud argues that the gallery or museum can offer a "space partly protected from the uniformity of behavioural patterns" where "social experiments" and "hands-on utopias" can be explored. (12) Much of Relational Aesthetics identifies and endorses artists active in the last decade whose work involved conviviality and collaboration. These "micro-utopias" are not to be treated as self-contained affairs, Bourriaud insists, but as "part of an eclectic culture where the artwork stands up to the mill of the "Society of the Spectacle." (13)

These ideas are at the core of Relational Aesthetics and have been criticized from various angles: rehashed sixties happenings; democracy without antagonism, Debord without revolutionary politics, and so on. (14) Nevertheless it is striking how the ideas provide a framework for assessing the achievement of "Queen and Country." While the project is rightly credited to McQueen, it gains its strength through the active involvement of bereaving families outside of the art world. It has been discussed in the specialist art press but has also been extensively discussed in the mainstream press in Britain and further afield. It is also one of the few examples of contemporary art that has been mentioned in the Houses of Parliament. The work itself is accessible and has multiple social functions, most obviously as a site of mourning, a spur to critical reflections on the "war on terror" and a challenge to the "society of extras."

Relational Aesthetics is complemented by Bourriaud's second book Postproduction (2002). The basic Debordian framework ("society of the spectacle"/"society of extras") is the same, but the focus is now upon contemporary art that uses pre-existing artefacts as raw material to be edited, programmed, or sampled. Bourriaud is the first to acknowledge his indebtedness to another key notion associated with Debord and the Situationists--detournement--but insists that what he is identifying is a new articulation of familiar elements. He is particularly keen on comparisons between contemporary art and deejaying and has a special section in which he identifies art equivalents to crossfading, pitch control, toasting, cutting, and the playlist. (15) Again, Bourriaud has been criticized for simply using attractive, up-to-date analogies to disguise old ideas and techniques that used to be called the readymade, montage, or appropriation.

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Equally impressive are the affinities between Bourriaud's ideas on postproduction art and the achievement of "Queen and Country." The work basically involves a double appropriation of two modest, often overlooked, types of imagery: the postage stamp and the family photograph. Other artists--John Heartfield, for instance--have been drawn to stamps as conveyors of state ideologies; and more recently, feminist artists like Jo Spence have treated the family album as a site of class and gender struggles. But McQueen's work is different. In his hands, private family photographs become part of a public, accusatory archive.

CONCLUSION

A one-day conference devoted to the ideas of Bourriaud was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2004. Dave Beech covered the event for Art Monthly, writing: "Not since the early years of Postmodernism's theoretical reign has the art community been so intimidated, enthralled or annoyed by a theory than it is today by Nicolas Bourriaud's writing on relational aesthetics and postproduction." (16) Upon reading the review, it becomes clear that Beech is annoyed rather than intimidated or enthralled. However, Art Monthly has also provided a platform for others who are more sympathetic, like art historian and critic Marcus Verhagen. He concludes his article "Micro-Utopianism" with the following judgement:

At its best, relational art brings viewers together in temporary

configurations that buck the trend towards fractured communities and

regimented social dealings. The micro-utopia comes with a minimum of

theoretical baggage. It is a pared-down utopianism, but that may at

times be a strength. It is neither nostalgic nor totalising. It is

responsive to local contingencies. And, unlike classic utopianism, it

isn't tied to the ideology of progress, which has with time become a

fig leaf for commercial expansionism and neo-colonialism. It may not

shake the foundations of the present order, but at least it chips away

at the noxious conviction that there is no alternative to it--and that

is a start. (17)

McQueen's name does not appear in either of Bourriaud's books, and I doubt if he would want to be described as a relational aesthetician or a postproduction artist. Nevertheless, I suspect that he would sympathize with the passage just cited. Without irony, "Queen and Country" fosters an active, critical citizenry. In this day and age, that is quite an achievement.

DAVID EVANS is a research fellow in photography at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, England. He is secretary of the online photography magazine criticaldictionary.com.

NOTES 1. Gill Smith, e-mail correspondence, July 3, 2007. 2. Artists in war zones have received most publicity, but the Imperial War Museum has also been commissioning work on other dwerse themes such as army recruitment (Ray Walker, 1981); the military burns unit (Jeffrey Camp, 1987); women in the military police (David Hurn, 1987); and even the tailoring of army officers' uniforms (Shanti Panchal, 1986). 3. Nico Israel, "Atelier in Samaraa: Nico Israel on Artists on the Iraq Front," Artforum XLII: 5, January 2004, 36. 4. Ibid. 5. "Channel 4 goes inside the mind of Bobby Sands," the Independent, May 16, 2007. 6. Sarah Whitfield, "Exhibition reviews/London/Douglas Gordon/Steve McQueen," Burlington Magazine 145, January 2003 (Vol. 145, no. 1198), 46. Whitfield was referring in particular to two films McQueen made in 2002: Carib's Leap, about the mass suicide in 1651 of a large number of Caribs who refused to surrender to French soldiers on the island of Grenada, and which, for Whitfield, also evoked memories of 9/11; and Western Deep, about the Tautona gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, the deepest in the world. Both were shown at Documenta 11, an event noted for its foregrounding of issue-based documentary photography, still and moving. 7. Joanna Lowry, "Slowing Down: Stillness, Time and the Digital Image," Portfolio 37, June 2003, 52. 8. Ibid. 9. Charles Darwent, "Art at the Extremes," Art Review, June 2006, 82. 10. "Magazine requested 'photogenic' war widows," the Independent, September 22, 2006. 11. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002), 113. 12. Ibid, 9. 13. Ibid, 31. 14. See, for example, Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 110, Fall 2004, 51-79; Hal Foster, "Arty Party," London Review of Books, December 4, 2004, 21-22; Tom McDonough, "The Most Beautiful Language of My Century": Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 190-195; Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 160-171, 190-195. Also relevant is the response of artist Liam Gillick to Bishop's 2004 article, and her counter-response. See October 115, Winter 2006, 95-107. 15. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002; new edition, 2005), 39. 16. Dave Beech, "Relational Aesthetics/The Art of the Encounter," Art Monthly 278, July August 2004, 46. 17. Marcus Verhagen, "Micro-Utopianism," Art Monthly 272, December 2003 January 2004, 4.