Sliding Doors: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions

This paper looks at the interactivity of Carsten Höller’s Test Site 2006, using Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998). In the first part Gell is used to examine the interactive relationships between artist and participants mediated by the slides, the aesthetic quality and political significance of which are then revealed in the second part with reference to Bourriaud.

This article considers the relationship between drawing and sound in the work of American artist Trisha Donnelly (born 1974). Against recent theories of the demise of individual media, Donnelly’s work is seen to indicate a more complex set of cross-modal and inter-medial relationships.