I recently read Leslie Hill and Helen Paris’s Performing Proximity, which explores the use of physical intimacy in theater performance. The book’s exploration of proximity has many connections with Bourriaud’s idea of relational aesthetics, and the book explores the way in which physical space affects that relationship.
Examples brought up in the book of relational performance done by their performance troupe, Curious, include gathering audience members into a lifeboat with the performers, projecting an image onto an audience member’s palm, sharing the smell of chocolate with audience members, and sending a whispered story into the audience members’ ears via headphones. These kinds of relation are made possible by the physical intimacy of Curious’s performances to the audiences.
Art employing relational aesthetics has the opportunity to engage with different senses than art with a standard artist/spectator divide. Like Felix Gonzales-Torres’s works that engage with the taste of candy or the Living Theater’s work in which audience members touched performers bodies, social art can be in closer physical proximity to participants and thereby connect to their senses in different ways.
Here’s a (somewhat lengthy) lecture they give on the topic: