The systems mechanistic functioning is obvious to all even if it cannot be articulated in the terms of critique. In the politics he proposes: Let us take a moment to connect these ideas to The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife. The painting can be read as a depiction of a crowd surrounding two individuals, Aoife and Strongbow; however if we accept Rancière’s cohesion between the collective and the individual, we can instead understand all the people in the painting (including Aoife and Strongbow) as a collective or a mosaic of individuals, with an equality given to each of them. This, perhaps, does not correspond with either the artist’s intentions or the real political implications of this event. There is a hierarchy offered by the artist, which you can read about here in this post on the painting’s history, characters, and symbolism.

Ranciere directs this analysis at some of my favourite French theorists from Guy Debord to Pierre Bourdieu. Debord's 1967 'Society of the Spectacle', and its idea of a worId transfixed by consumption, was something I almost r He surmises that by the Sixties the use of Marxist ideology had led to two requirements from its adherents: Apparently, at a performance art workshop, Abramović asked Sehgal openly how he managed this, when her practice requires her to continue selling photographs and videos. He answered that his training began in economics and that through this discipline he learned how exchange could be based on consensus about value rather than about objects. Carol Kino, “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue,” New York Times, March 10, 2010: AR25. Rancière argues that political or critical art had traditionally taken for granted a straightforward relationship between political aims or effects and artistic means or causes with the ambition, which he considers sheer supposition, to raise an apparently passive spectator’s political awareness leading ultimately to her political mobilisation. Political art revealed that commodity and market relations lie behind beautiful appearances and are their truth. It aimed to disabuse the spectator and induce a sense of complicity, guilt and responsibility in her. As archetypal means of achieving those ends, Rancière cites Brecht’s theory and practice, the political montage of German Dada, and the American artist Martha Rosler’s series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful , 1969–1971 that juxtaposes photographs of luxurious petty-bourgeois interiors cut out from House Beautiful magazine with images of the Vietnam War from Life magazine. Rosler’s work, which continues a tradition of twentieth century committed art, reveals to the spectator a hidden reality of imperialist violence behind happy and prosperous domestic interiors.He then goes on to a comment by GWF Hegel in ' Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art' (1835) on a paintings of beggar boys in Seville by B.E. Murillo (c1650). The subject is judged fit for painting and Hegel insists that the important thing is that the beggar boys are doing nothing, and don't seem to care about anything. In this they illustrate the essential virtue of gods, who are made in the image of the ruling class. Is Hegel relating to the aesthetic ideal of detachment and of course the ruling class ideal of doing w.t.f. they like? Or was he simply having a laugh at the expense of the airs and graces assumed by the ruling class? Ranciere comments that his idea of the pensive image is an idea of a sort of inactivity and that Hegel has interpreted the painting for his own uses.

This session was looking at ethics related to the use of other people's stories/testimonies in making theatre. We also ended up discussing verbatim techniques. Devoted & Disgruntled Online 2022: What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts? (19-21 March) What each individual has in common is the fact that their intellectual journey is unique and it is this very uniqueness that is the basis of our sense of community. We should not see our expressive power 'embodied' by designated others but accept it as the normal everyday capacity of each of us as individuals, in the same way that the power to speak is an equal ability learnt by all humans. p.17 This reminds me of Raymond Williams idea that 'culture is ordinary' and with Joseph Beuy's 'Everyone is an artist'. Culture works through an "unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations." p.17. The implication is that as soon as the process is planned or designed as a process of cultural reception with an effect in mind, it leads to something that is no longer a place where each individual is using her intelligence to make their own aesthetic judgement. This point is core to the argument in The Emancipated Audience. However individual freedom as a core value does not mean he espouses 'bourgeois individualism'. Ranciere's understanding of community recognises it as an amalgam of myriad individual intelligences. Our 'aesthetic sensorium' as expressed in artworks is then marked by the loss of a destination or social purpose for art. p.70. Social emancipation is an aesthetic process. It calls for the 'dismemberment' of the sensory regime of the body that has been instituted as a classist belief system since Plato made his formulation that the souls of rulers are made of gold and the souls of artisans are made of iron. p.70. ALLOW ME, THEN, TO STAGE AN IMAGE: The performative public of Sehgal’s Guggenheim work forms a chiasmus with the public performative of Abramović’s recent activities. That is, if Sehgal propels the public into speech acts that constitute the work of art (e.g., that are performative), Abramović has often positioned the public as passive witnesses to reperformance. This is not to minimize the sheer ambition of Abramović or to disparage the heuristic value of her projects. In fact, her work serves to illuminate the dependence of reperformance on the artistic documentation that Sehgal so assiduously eschews. Working against museums’ attempts to convert ephemeral performance events into concrete, fungible assets (via authenticated, collected documents that can become scripts for “authorized” reenactments), Abramović’s reconstructions ultimately reveal the impossibility of stable authenticity where performance art is concerned. Her 2005 Guggenheim series set into high relief the modesty and transience of those ’70s events (most staged in galleries, performed for tape in the studio, or enacted on the street—definitely not in museums). And as art historian Mechtild Widrich has shown (building on the work of Amelia Jones and others), those 2005 reperformances were often constructed from staged photographs (as with Export’s work, to take only the most intriguing example), resulting in a mise en abyme of reproduction in which there is never any secure, original “performance” to be restaged.⁸ Instead of the authentic re-creation of “presence,” where we could (re)experience an “original,” what Abramović produced was another link in the chain of performatives—those successive iterations that continuously constitute the audience for “the performance” and produce the palimpsest of memories we call “the work.” By analogy with what Michel Foucault called the author function, we might call these accumulated performatives “the artwork function”: the aggregate that, when successful, builds the collective and experiential substance of the living work of art.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. Multiple D&D Satellite events in partnership with NSDF. Open Space events will be running across the week.

Devoted & Disgruntled is a nationwide conversation about theatre and the performing arts, run by theatre company Improbable. 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.Join us for our 14th annual Devoted & Disgruntled event on 'What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts?'

The Emancipated Spectator originated in former Althusserian French philosopher Rancière’s reflections upon the role of the spectator in contemporary art at the fifth Summer Academy of Arts held in Frankfurt in 2004. His reconsideration of this topic afforded him the opportunity to challenge some of the theoretical and political presuppositions that inform the criticism of the practices and strategies of contemporary political art. Rancière discusses critically Marxist and postmodern social and cultural critiques. He is familiar with and sensitive to modernist, avant-garde and contemporary art, theatrical performance, photography and cinema while seeking to displace the oppositions that structure the debates that surround them: activity and passivity; individuality and community; ignorance and knowledge.A contemporary example is said to be the contemplative films of Abbas Kiarostami, like 'Roads of Kiarostami' (2005). Another example is 'Shirin' (2009) a feature film in which the viewer is confronted by the faces of an audience of women watching an unseen film. The audience are therefor left to imagine the events being seen by the women. He then transfers his attention to the electronic screen via Jean-Luc Godard's mammoth eight episode 'Histoire(s) du Cinema' (1998). The pensiveness in this video series is: 1. In the form of an arrested gesture... 2. Which then triggers another story. p.129. Ranciere analyses this an an 'intertwining' of narrative and 'infinite metaphorisation'. Godard sees cinema as having "betrayed its vocation by sacrificing the fraternity of metaphors to the business of stories." p.130 [8]