The Emancipated Spectator

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This is a set of five essays that follow up themes of the equality of intelligence formulated more than 25 years earlier in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1981) and Proletarian Nights (1981). See my previous blogs (reposted from http://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-emancipated-spectator-2008-this-is.html) It's not every day that the art world decides to adopt a new philosophical leading-light, so judging by the list of international art institutions and universities at which Ranciere has presented previous versions of these essays, its clear that he has become the latest French thinker to make the crossover from the academy to the artworld." JJ Charlesworth Art Review, January, 2010 He sees these left-field theories as perpetuating the idea of a public that are presumed to be 'ignoramuses' by an intelligensia. If The Society of the Spectacle tells us anything at all, it is to underline the message about our own inability. "It thereby constantly confirms its own presupposition: the inequality of intelligence". p.9 In fact all humans will take a unique path from what they already know to what they do not yet know if given an environment where this is possible. A person will translate experience into words and then test the statements that result. p.11. This of course follows on directly from Jacotot's theory espoused in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Aesthetic Separation and Community “Bathers in Asnières”, 1884, retouched 1887, painting by Georges Pierre Seurat, via National Gallery, London. We live in a time of separation. People are lonelier than ever before, which is unusual given the sheer number of people on Earth: we are numerous but alone. Western societies where advanced capitalism and rugged individualism have free reign produce an epidemic of loneliness and mental illness. Our connections with others have dispersed. The only relations that remain are those perpetuated and mediated by capital, those relations where there’s always self interest involved.

By Rancière’s time, critical theory had become pervasive in almost every field of study, from the theater to paintings to the social body and the economy itself. According to Rancière, the critical approach attempts to make one aware of the repressed, ugly parts of the system in which they are complicit in. Two people who aren't from the UK gathering information about theatres/companies/alternative venues that commission/put on interesting queer work and who are open to experiential/immersive performances that are movement-based. What does this mean? I take it to mean that we should focus on a collectivising praxis to make the best of our capacities and resources rather than hoping people will sign up to a single tightly formulated ideology. I would see this as elemental as our basic human abilities. In this follow-up to his fruitful The Future of the Image, French philosopher Rancière argues forcefully against familiar critiques of the ‘spectacle’ ... This persuasive argument is fleshed out through close readings of art, ¬photography, literature and video installation, and a drily amusing analysis of leftwing ‘melancholy’ and ‘rightwing frenzy’ in critiques of ¬capitalism."—Steven Poole, Guardian Devoted & Disgruntled is a nationwide conversation about theatre and the performing arts, run by theatre company Improbable.Marina Abramović, interviewed for MoMA documentation “What Is Performance Art?” available online here. What Rancière names as the ‘aesthetic break’ designates a break with ‘the regime of representation or the mimetic regime’ (60). Representation or mimesis means an inherent and unambiguous concordance between different kinds of sense. Critical thought has tended to connect the power to produce ethical or political effects with the character of the autonomous artwork itself. This idea of their connection has remained the model for political art, Rancière argues. The ‘aesthetic break’ is understood as a break with the regime of primarily mimetic representation upon which political art has depended, whether that means the reproduction of commodities or consumer spectacles or the photographic representation of atrocities. The `aesthetic’ names the break in this continuity between representations and their supposed social and political effects. In the immediacy of theatre and forms of relational visual art there is no separation between performing actors or artist and the audience. The French curator Nicolas Bourriaud is the leading theorist of relational aesthetics for whom visual art in the 1990s became a form of social exchange generated through the relations, encounters and interaction between people that artists would facilitate. But Rancière suggests that artists should investigate the power of the aesthetic itself – the rupturing of artistic cause and political effect – to produce political effects. He suggests we must overturn "the dominant logic that makes the visual the lot of multitudes and the verbal the privilege of the few." p.97. Although this appeals to me it is complicated by the oral verbal also being the lot of multitudes and on the other hand the growing literature on visual cultures. "An image never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit." p.99. Working class artists are likely to find themselves outside the game. Only a few can emerge into the light of publicity through the chicanery of selective filters.

Devoted & Disgruntled: What are we doing to make the opera industry truly reflect the diversity of the country, on and off stage? Recently I saw the 'Seduced by Art' photography and painting show at London's National Gallery. The show opens with Jeff Wall's large 1978 'The Destroyed Room' photograph. Wall is said to use a 'strategy of quotation without direct imitation' and it is implied as a key to reading the whole show. The influence of Delacroix's 1853 painting “The Death of Sardanapalus” is claimed. I'd rather have seen it separate from being told how to look at it. I very much felt that such curatorial guidance was closing off any of my own thought. That is stultification. My own thoughts on seeing this work in reproduction were very different. I did not want to have this framework forced onto my first viewing of the actual print. However I suspect that Wall may have made this claim originally as much as a strategy to have his work shown as Art as something he wished to frame the work with. The Algerian-born Jacques Ranciere, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Paris Saint-Denis, is the latest in a long line of "new" French philosophers. Ranciere, who has risen to fame recently in the English-speaking world through his conceptualisations of critical theory and aesthetics, separation, community and the contemporary image, is a "post-Marxist", even though he co-authored the seminal Reading Capital with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in 1968.Perhaps “presence” today is ontologically related to these public spaces of surveillance? It was possible for this viewer to be moved by Abramović’s own imprisonment in the artwork and to feel empathy. I cried, she cried, and in that limbic sense our mirror neurons were certainly co-present. Against this the early musichall audience were moved from sitting around tables drinking into the fixed rows of seats - a late C19th commercialised audience - often seen as a strategy to pacify, but I suppose it could have been a drive to get more paying customers into a space. The bourgeois audience being politely quiet and immobile did not mean that they were mentally passive. However held up as a model for rowdy working class audiences to judge themselves against was used as a way to denigrate the physically active audience and so working class cultural expression. There are three key aspects of the The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife that can support an approach to the painting as a form of theatre: Perhaps because he foregrounds the traction of symbolic transformation on material change, Rancière’s work has been most readily absorbed into contemporary art discourse." Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 'From The Cult of the People, to the Cult of Ranciere', Mute vol 3 n.3, 2012

Mike Kelley, Mike Kelley: Minor Histories—Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 114–15.

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French philosopher Jacques Ranciere is a refreshing read for anyone concerned with what art has to do with politics and society."— Art Review Open Space Technology (OST) is a great way for groups to think, talk and take action together. It can work for as few as 5 people, and as many as 5000. A basic assumption that I make is that the system must manage the media and state cultural institutions well enough to insure that challenges to its survival do not de-stabilise its grip on power. The way this hegemony is maintained is widely known as Ranciere points out. Gatekeepers or managers, patrons and politicians, all contribute to maintaining a status quo, a class system. At the same time they must provide the system with sufficient criticism to inoculate it. In our ongoing adult learning series, In Focus, we link works from our collection with key art historical, theoretical or philosophical texts. Aimed especially at third-level students, but accessible to all, this series aims to support in-depth engagement with our collection and the selected texts. The clarity of Sehgal’s practice in regard to collecting and the market needs further research. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was pleased to be the first owner of The Kiss; director Madeleine Grynsztejn now happily admits that they are one of several owners of the piece: “I guess it’s kind of an edition, and we have the artist’s proof” (comment to the author, February 2010). Sehgal’s fondness for oral history and notarized exchange makes this (“artist’s proof”) as valid a nomenclature as any; time will tell whether these “multiples” inform the structure of Sehgal inventories and catalogues raisonnés to come, and whether the oral and body knowledge of the works will be allowed to mutate without intervention by the artist.