Video, for example, is nowadays becoming a
predominant medium. But if Peter Land, Gillian Wearing and Henry Bond, to name
just three artists, have a preference for video recording, they are still not
“video artists.” This medium merely turns out to be one of the best suited to
the formalization of certain activities and projects.” ~Nicolas Bourriaud
Henry Bond (b. 1966) is a London-based street photographer and psychoanalyst.
Bond graduated from the University of London in 1988, and was among the ranks of those who went on to be known as the YBA's. He then went on to earn his Master's at Middlesex University, and his Doctorate's at the University of Glouchestershire, studying psychoanalysis. He was particularly influenced by the teachings of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and went on to publish Lacan at the Scene (2009), in which Bond applies Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to homicide-related crime scenes.
Henry Bond is most well known for his street photography. His work deals with ideas of surveillance, voyeurism and paparazzi photojournalism. These themes arise in both Point and Shoot (2000), and the video that Bond created, titled "The South of France" (featured below). It is this type of video work that Bourriaud references when dropping Bond's name in his Relational Aesthetics. I believe that his argument, though a little vague and ill supported, is trying to convey that artists of the current era are less likely to be defined by a single genre.
