Secret/Wish : the problem of the object in relational aesthetics

Nicholas Bourriaud’s (2002) relational aesthetics interprets art as social or political in nature, underemphasising aesthetic concerns such as the creating of objects as artworks. This article aims to problematise the relational model from a material point of view, based on a “new aesthetics” which Jacques Ranciére discusses as a mode of art-making which he titles “inventory”. In order to do so the article addresses a spectator-orientated artwork entitled Secret/Wish, conceived along with artist Paul Cooper, and installed at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa in 2011. In previous publications on the work I questioned its significance as relational and site-specific according to Nicholas Bourriaud and Miwon Kwon’s theories. I would like to further interrogate their ideas here by investigating Secret/Wish as rooted in the production of authored objects despite its affinity with Bourriaud and Kwon’s perspectives, which denounce the art object as pivotal to artistic production