Anne Fritz

Bourriaud Response

My relationship to Rivane Neuenschwander�s ‘I Wish Your Wish 2002’ is perhaps not at all what the artist intended, or at least not in a happy, people-coming-together-in-a-shared-sphere sort of sense. I saw Neuenschwander’s installation at SLAM along with a class group; we had met at class time in the entryway of the museum, had looked at specific works in storage, and had finished our visit by looking within the gallery space itself at Neuenschwander’s recently installed work. It was very visually pleasing, satiny ribbons of lollipop colors hanging neatly but not too neatly in rows across a large wall space. The SLAM write-up describing the installation uses one photograph, but I have attached it in doubled form: though merely duplicated, the photograph shown twice alongside itself comes closer to approximating the way I recall the wall of color than does its single image:

I remember that upon the ribbons were printed wishes. I remember that these wishes had been collected by the artist from assorted people. I remember that visitors were (invited) to take a ribbon from the wall, tie it around their wrists, and that the wish would come true when the ribbon (in the course of time) fell off. More precisely, the SLAM description informs that the work

“is inspired by the church of Nosso Senhor de Bonfim in So Salvador. Visitors to the church select a ribbon, which they tie with three knots, making a wish with the tying of each knot. The ribbon is then tied to the visitor’s wrist. According to tradition, wishes come true when the ribbon falls off the wrist. To make I Wish Your Wish, Neuenschwander asks people of different ages in different countries what they wish for; she then prints the wishes onto thousands of brightly colored ribbons, which are installed in the gallery. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to select from the wishes of others and make them their own.”

What I mainly remember about this work, though, is that I did not take a ribbon. Some classmates made their choices rapidly, others more slowly; wishes from the wall converted swiftly to bracelets. Choosing a ribbon now seems very simple but was then somehow complicated. I think it had to do partly with the idea of wishes as being so individually specific that even if stated upon the ribbon only slightly differently than voiced in my head, the wishes felt far from me; taking one felt less like the adoption and continuance of someone else’s wish such that it would have a better chance of coming true, and more like the adoption of a false identity. Something very internal (a wish, the very thing left unspoken upon the blowing out of birthday candles) was rendered external, and not even mere external but display. At the time, none of the wishes felt precisely accurate, such that taking one would have been somehow condemning rather than extending. I contemplated earnestly the removal of a ribbon, but left without. It is not even that I understood the installation to demand that the wishes of others had to align with my own; it is just that perhaps I wanted them to, or needed them to for the ribbon to feel like a connector rather than separator.

I now look at photos of the installation and find wishes that I would unhesitatingly adopt, wishes that would be mine and others’ simultaneously; how is it that I then resisted ‘I wish you were here’? Perhaps out of grief, out of missing and choosing for that to remain my own, unpublic; perhaps out of indecision as to where ‘here’ would then be or what it would be and feeling that that had to be known or decided before being claimed; I am not sure. But wishes take different forms at different times, and even the same sentence uttered or written years apart may be meant or understood differently. Likewise, the same ribbons hung upon the same wall before the same visitors would likely produce different connections, different ties two years later.

Bourriaud writes that “The aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show…It is in this sense that we can talk of a community effect in contemporary art”(61). If this is the case, then community cannot merely be looked at in terms of all-encompassment, but in how it is defined against the idea of inclusion. As much as community defines in terms of what it is, it also defines in terms of what it is not; there is frequently an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) way to interact with a relational artwork. Bourriaud distinguishes among visitors to Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spills; some take none so as to extend the life of the work, some take one piece, some stuff their pockets. The temporary community created within a relational work is not free from pre-established “social behaviour”(56). There are still expected ways of behaving just as certain behaviors can be expected.

This being acknowledged, beauty can nonetheless be found in the very encounters that relational artworks establish. Beauty is present in the form of linking human beings together, in the relating or sharing of experience, in altering even daily activities in such a way that one is made more aware of inter-connectedness. The very fact, for instance, that I am still thinking of Neuenschwander’s almost-two-years-ago work and the ways that I did or did not connect with it and its implied network at the time demonstrates that I did indeed connect with it, even if not in the expected manner.