Jaques Ranciere and the politics of aesthetics
How should we understand art today? Is “modernism” a useful category?
How can art be political?
Jaques Ranciere
career began as follower of Louis Althusser (structuralist Marxist) in 1960s
1974 - break with Althusser - criticism of his philosophy as Intellectual elitism
move towards a politics of radical democracy and equality
since 1990s - focus on ‘the politics of aesthetics’
Against Modernism:
“Modernist discourse presents the revolution of pictorial abstraction as painting’s discovery of its own proper ‘medium’: two-dimensional surface. By revoking the perspectivist illusion of the third dimension, painting was to regain the mastery of its own proper surface. In actual fact, however, this surface does not have any distinctive feature. A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible.’ (Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.15)
‘Modernism’ and ‘modernity’:
In art theory: the influential ideas of Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) - modern art ‘purifies’ its medium (e.g. Jackson Pollock’s action painting)
In cultural theory, modernity refers to a certain historical era, which differs from theory to theory, which defines a particular type of art and culture.
‘The idea of modernity is a questionable notion that tries to make clear-cut distinctions in the complex configuration of the aesthetic regime of the arts. It tries to retain the forms of rupture, the iconoclastic gestures, etc., by separating them from the context that allows for their existence: history, interpretation, patrimony, the museum, the pervasiveness of reproduction… The idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogenous temporalities.
The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear…
Regimes of art:
the ethical regime of images
the representative regime of art
the aesthetic regime of art
the ethical regime of images
Public space - ethos, ethics.
Images in their community effect.
Plato considers art corrupt for communities.
the representative regime of art
Art became systematised, with a certain correct way of working. The Fine arts - distinguished from crude, less than work, they are categorised.
Had rules, passed from master to apprentice. Understood around the idea of representation.
Good or bad depending on how well it represents the subject matter.
Poetic in reference to Aristotle’s Poetics. - Instructions.
Different arts represent different subject matter more effectively.
the aesthetic regime of art
‘The aesthetic regime of the arts stands in contrast with the representative regime. I call this regime aesthetic because the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making, but it is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products.
The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres… The aesthetic regimes asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity.’
Anything can be presented as art.
Common ways he thinks art is not politically effective: