No Man's Time: Material Fantasies

The essay concerns the preparation and staging of the 1991 exhibition, No Man's Time, at the Villa Arson, Nice, in which a number of theanyspacewhatever's contributors took part (Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Philippe Parreno). No Man's Time was one of the key exhibitions in the early 1990s in which the tendency subsequently identified by Nicolas Bourriaud as Relational Aesthetics began to make itself evident across a range of young artists’ practices. ‘theanyspacewhatever: an exhibition in ten parts’ examined the legacy and continuation of this tendency in current art practice. I visited the Villa Arson during No Man’s Time and made recordings with several of the participating artists, as well as with Eric Troncy, the curator, and Christian Bernard, Villa Arson’s Director. Edited versions of these interviews were published at the time on Issues and Debates, a special double issue of the magazine Audio Arts (then released on audiocassette), devoted to examining significant tendencies, themes and issues present in contemporary art in Europe at that time (volume 11 nos 3 & 4, published in association with Artscribe International). No Man’s Time: Material Fantasies considers the original exhibition within its artistic, theoretical and broader cultural and political context. It discusses the show’s contribution to the development of Bourriaud’s ideas concerning Relational Aesthetics. This is done through an examination of the conception of the show and an analysis how the work in it explores links and shared resonances between the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, the post big bang economic climate, and the prominent strands of tv and Hollywood entertainment of that moment.