Visual Art and Social Structure: The Social Semiotics of Relational Art
This article elaborates the dialectical relationship between art forms and the social structures in which they are produced, by extending Robert Witkin’s taxonomy first presented in his 1995 book Art and Social Structure. Witkin tracked the history of visual art from pre-modern times, for which he invented the label invocational art, to the advent of Modernism, described in terms of evocational and then provocational art. This paper extrapolates Witkin’s model to include post-Modernism, for which the author’s term revocational art is coined, and it concludes with a discussion of Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of Altermodernism, his term for describing the relationship between contemporary art practices and the social conditions of today, for which the author suggests the term convocational art, a synonym for Bourriaud’s term relational art. The paper concludes with a demonstration that social semiotic theory can be a powerful tool for the analysis of relational art. (By: Prof Howard Riley, Head of School of Research, Dynevor Centre for the Arts, Swansea Metropolitan University )

relationship synonym

relationship synonym