Contemporary Art and and Politics of Aesthetics

36 JACQUES RANCIEREThis means that the argument could be overturned. The museummeans homogeneity and heterogeneity at once. Photography meansreproducibility and uniqueness as well. Photographic reproducibilitydoes not make for a new community of sense by its own power. It has tobe grasped within a wider form of visibility and a wider plot of intelligibility.It has to lend its possibilities to the enhancement or debasementof a form of presence, or a procedure of meaning. Rauschenberg'suse of photography does not open a new age of art. It only givesadditional evidence against the modernist identification of "flatness"with autonomous art and the self-containment of painting. It highlightswhat a reader of Stephane Mallarme's "pure" poetry already knows:flatness does not mean the specificity ofa medium; it means a surface ofexchange; exchange between the time of the poem and the drawing of aline in the space; between act and form; text and drawing or dance; pureart and decorative art; works of art and objects or performances belongingto individual or collective life.Ifthe production of new evidence against the Greenbergian paradigmof flatness could be viewed as the closure of an era, it is obviously foranother reason. It is because there was a definite politics of aesthetics atwork in that "formal" paradigm: that politics entrusted the autonomouswork with a promise of political freedom and equality, compromised byanother politics of aesthetics, the one which gave to art the task ofsuppressing itself in the creation of new forms of collective life.The point is that the radicality of "artistic autonomy" is part of awider plot linking aesthetic autonomy with some sort of political-orrather metapolitical-implementation of community. Aesthetics-Imean the aesthetic regime of the identification ofArt-entails a politicsof its own. But that politics divides itself into two competing possibilities,two politics of aesthetics, which also means two communitiesofsense.As is well known, aesthetics was born at the time of the FrenchRevolution, and it was bound up with equality from the very beginning.But the point is that it was bound up with two competing forms ofequality. On the one hand, aesthetics meant the collapse of the systemof constraints and hierarchies that constituted the representational regimeof art. It meant the disInissal of the hierarchies of subject matters"genres, and forms of expression separating objects worthy or unworthyof entering in the realm of art or of separating high genres and lowContemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics 37genres. It implied the infinite openness of the field of art, which ultiInatelymeant the erasure of the frontier between art and non-art,between artistic creation and anonymous life. The aesthetic regime ofart did not begin-as many theorists still have it-with the glorificationof the unique genius prodUCing the unique work ofart. On the contrary,it began, in the eighteenth century, with the assertion that the archetypalpoet} Homer, had never existed, that his poems were not a work ofart, not the fulfillment ofany artistic canon} but a patchwork ofcollectedtales that expressed the way of feeling and thinking of a still-infantpeople. ,On the one hand, therefore} aesthetics meant that kind of equalitythat went along with the beheading of the King of France and thesovereignty of the people. Now, that kind of equality ultimately meantthe indiscernibility of art and life. On the other hand, aesthetics meantthat works of art were grasped, as such, in a specific sphere ofexperiencewhere-in Kantian terms-they were free from the forms of sensoryconnection proper either to the objects of knowledge or to the objectsof desire. They were merely "free appearance" responding to a free play,meaning a nonhierarchical relation between the intellectual and thesensory faculties. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, FriedrichSchiller drew the political consequence of that dehierarchization.The "aesthetic state" defined a sphere of sensory equality where thesupremacy of active understanding over passive sensibility was nolonger valid. This meant that it dismissed the partition of the sensiblethat traditionally gave its legitimacy to domination by separating twohumanities. The power of the high classes was supposed to be the powerof activity over passivity, of understanding over sensation} of the educatedsenses over the raw senses, and so on. By relinquishing that power,aesthetic experience framed an equality that ....ould be a reversal ofdomination. Schiller opposed that sensory revolution to political revolutionas implemented in the French Revolution. The latter had failedprecisely because the revolutionary power had played the traditionalpart of the understanding-meaning the state-imposing its law uponthe matter ofsensations-meaning the masses. The only true revolutionwould be a revolution overthrowing the power of active understandingover passive sensibility, the power of

42 JACQUES RANCIEREof capitalist power and class war hidden behind great ideals, as it isthe militant practices of John Heartfleld's photomontage, shOWingfor instance the capitalist gold caught in Adolf Hitler's throat.Political art thus means creating those forms of dialectical collisiondissensus that put together not only heterogeneous elements buttwo politics of sensoriality. The heterogeneous elements are putgether in order to provoke a clash. Now, the clash is two things atOn the one hand, it is the flash that enlightens. The connection ofheterogeneous elements speaks out of its legibility. It points tosecret of power and violence. The connection of vegetables andrhetorics in Brecht's Arturo Ui conveys a political message. But onother hand, the clash is produced insofar as the heterogeneity ofelements resists the homogeneity of meaning. Cauliflowers remain cauliflowers,juxtaposed to high rhetorics. They carry no message. They aresupposed to enhance political energy out of their very opaqueness.Ultimately, the mere juxtaposition of heteroclite elements is endowedwith a political power. In Godard's film Made in USA the hero says, '1get the impression of being in a film of Walt Disney, played by HumphreyBogart, therefore in a political film:' The mere relationship ofheteroclite elements appears, thus, as a dialectical clash playing witnessto a political reality of conflict.Political art is a kind of negotiation, not between politics and art, butbetween the two politics of aesthetics. This third way is made possibleby continuously playing on the boundary and the absence of boundarybetween art and non-art. The Brechtian identity of allegory and of thedebunking of ailegory supposes that you can play on the connectionand the disconnection between art and cauliflowers, politics and cauliflowers.Such a play supposes that vegetables themselves have a double ·existence: one in which they bear no relation to art and politics and .another where they already bear a strong relation to both of them. Therelations of politics, art, and vegetables existed before Brecht, not onlyin impressionist still lifes, reviving the Dutch tradition, but also inliterature. One novel by Emile Zola, Le ventre de Paris, had notably usedthem as both political and artistic symbols. The novel is based on thepolarity of two characters. On the one hand, there is the poor oldrevolutionary who comes back from deportation to the new Paris of LesHailes, where he is overcome by the flood of cabbages-meaning the. flood of consumption. On the other hand, there is the impressionistContemporary Art and the Politics ofAesthetics 43singing the epics of the cabbages, the e~ic of modernity, theirOn architecture of Les Hailes, and the piles of vegetables thatmodern beauty in contrast to the old pathetic beauty symtheGothic church nearby. The political ailegory of the cauwaspossible because the connection of art, politics, and vegeconnectionof art, politics, and consumption-alreadyas set of moving borders, enabling artists to both cross theand make sense of the connection of the heterogeneous eleandplay on the sensory power of their heterogeneity.means that the mixing of high art and low art, or the mixing ofcommodity, is not a discovery of the sixties, which would havezealize and undermined modem art and its political potential. Ond political art had already been made possible by that mixbya continuOUS process of border crossings between high and lowart and non-art, art and the commodity. This process reaches backthe past of the aesthetic regime of art. You cannot oppose anof the celebration of high art to an epoch of the trivialization orof high art. As soon as art was constituted as a specific sphere ofJtllste , at the beginning of the nineteenth century, its products begannceto fall irito the triviality of reproduction, commerce, and commodity.as soon as they did so, commodities themselves began to travel inopposite directions-to enter the realm of art. Their power was directlyIdentified with the overwhelming power and beauty of modem life, ashappened in Zola's epics of cabbages. They could also fall into the realmof art by becoming obsolete, unavailable for consumption, and therebyturned into objects of aesthetic-disinterested-pleasure or uncannyexcitement. Surrealist poetics, as well as Benjamin's theory of ailegory orBrecht's epic theater, thrived on this border crossing. And so too did allth~ forms of critical art that played on the ambiguous relationship of artand commerce, right through to many contemporary installations. Theyblend heterogeneous materials borrowed from artistic tradition, politicalrhetoric, commodity culture, commercial ads, and so on, in order todisclose the connections of high art or politics with capitalist domination.But they could do so owing to the ongoing processes that hadalready erased these borders. Critical art thrived on this continuousborder crossing, this two-way process of prosaicization of the poeticaland of poeticization of the prosaic.If this makes sense, it may be possible to reframe, hopefully on a

44' JACQUES RANCIEREfirmer footing, the political issues involved in the discussion abouternism and postmodernism. 'What is at stake in contemporary art isthe fate of the modernist paradigm. Its validity is neither weakerstronger than before. In my view, it always was a very restrictivepretation of the dialectic of the aesthetic regime of art. 'What is atis the fate of the third politics of aesthetics. The question is not: arestill modem, already postmodem, or even post-postmodem? The questionis: 'What exactly happened to the dialectical clash? 'What happenedto the formula of critical art? I shall propose some elements for apossible answer with reference to exhibitions which, in the last fewyears, offered points of comparison with the art of the sixties or seventies,and thereby some significant markers ofthe shift.First example: three years ago, the National Center for Photographyin Paris presented an exhibition called Bruit de fond. The exhibitionjuxtaposed recent works and works from the seventies. Among the latteryou could see Martha RosIer's series "Bringing the War Home;' photomontagesthat bring together advertiSing images ofAmerican domestichappiness and images ofthe war in Vietnam. Nearby, there was anotherwork related to American politics, taking the same form of a confrontationoftwo elements. The work Les temps du monde, made by Wang Du,consisted of two objects. On the left, there was the Clinton couple,represented in the pop manner, as a pair ofwax-museum figures. On theright, there was a huge sculpture of Courbet's Origine du monde, which,as is well known, represents a woman's sex. So in both cases an image ofAmerican happiness was juxtaposed with its hidden secret: war andeconomical violence in Martha RosIer, sex and profanity in Wang Du.But in Wang Du's case, both political conflictuality and the sense ofstrangeness had vanished. 'What remained was an automatic effect ofdelegitirnization: sexual profanity delegitimizing politics, the wax figuredelegitimizing high art. But there was no longer anything to delegitimize.The mechanism spun around itself. It played, in fact, a doubleplay: on the automaticness of the delegitimizing effect and on theawareness of its spinning around itself.Second example: another exhibition shown in Paris three years agowas called Voila: Le monde dans la tete. It proposed to document acentury through different installations, among them Christian Boltanski'sinstallation Les abonnes du telephone. The principle of this installationis simple: there are two shelves on either side of the gallery withContemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics~one:> from all over the world, and two tables between them~ sit down and peruse whatever directory you like. Thiscould remind us of another political work of the nineties,piece The Other Vietnam Memorial. That "other memoofcourse, the memorial for the anonymous Vietnamese victims.Borden bad chosen the names written on the memorial by ranickingout Vietnamese names in a phone directory. Boltanski's~n!on still deals with a matter of anonymity. But that anonymity isembedded in a controversial plot. It is no longer a matter ofnames to those that the winners had left unnamed. The names ofrJieanonyxnous become, as Boltanski put~ it, " specime~s of humanity:'~~d example: in 2003, the Guggenheun Museum m New York pre­~~ '" .,bibiti on ,,n,d Moving pioM". Th' pu'!'o" wos to iIlu,·~.. hoW the eXtensive use of reproducible media in contemporary art-was rooted in the critical art practices of the sixties and the seventies,questioning both mainstream social or sexual stereotypes and artisticautonomy. Nevertheless, the works exhibited around the rotunda illustrateda significant shift away from that straight line. For instance,Vanessa Beecroft's video showing nude women standing in the setting ofthe museum was still put forward as a critique of feminine stereotypes inart. But obviously those nude and mute bodies followed another direction,. escaping any Signification or conflict of significations, evokingGiorgiO de Chirico's metaphysical painting much more than any kind offeminist critique. As you climbed up the round ramp of the Guggenheim,many videos, photographs, installations, and video installationsenhanced, instead of critiqued, a new kind ofstrangeness, a sense of the·mystery entailed in the trivial representation ofeveryday life. You sensed· it in Rineke Dijkstra's photographs of ambiguous teenagers, as well as in· Gregory Crewdson's movielike representations of the strangeness ofeveryday events, or in the Christian Boltanski installation includedthere, one composed of photographs, electric fixtures, and bulbs, whichmay symbolize-according to the piece-either the dead of the Holocaustor the fleetingness of childhood. At the top of the exhibition therewas a kind of backtrack from the dialectical art of the clash to thesymbolist art of mystery as it culminated in the video installation madeby Bill Viola, Going Forth by Day, composed as a cycle of frescoes,embracing the cycles ofbirth, life, death, arid resurrection, as well as thecycle of fire, air, earth, and water. .4S

48 JACQUES RANCIEREredemption. The conjunction of the images of Nazi extermination,American happiness, and Giotto's "arustorical" art bears witness to theredeeming power of images, which gives to the living and the dead "aplace in the world:' The dialectic clash has become a mystery of copresence.Mystery was the key concept of symbolisPl. The retum ofsymbolism is obviously on the agenda. When I use this term, I am notreferring to the spectacular forms ofrevival ofsymbolist mythology andthe dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as in the work of Matthew Barney.Nor do I refer only to the effective uses of symbolism such as the workby Viola that I mentioned earlier. I am referring to the more modest,almost imperceptible way in which the collections of objects, images,and signs gathered in our museums and galleries are increasingly shiftingfrom the lOgic ofdissensus to the lOgic ofthe mystery, to a testimonyof co-presence. 'The shift from dialectics to symbolism is obviously linked to thecontemporary shift in what I called the aesthetics of politics, meaningthe way politics frames a common stage. This shift has a name. Its nameis consensus. Consensus does not Simply mean the agreement of thepolitical parties or of sodal partners on the common interests of thecommunity. It means a reconfiguration of the visibility ofthe common.It means that the givens ofany collective situation are objectified in sucha way that they can no longer lend themselves to a dispute, to thepolemical framing of a controversial world within the given world. Insuch a way, consensus properly means the dismissal of the "aestheticsofpolitics:'Such an erasure or a weakening of the political stage and of thepolitical invention of dissensus has a contradictory effect on the politicsof aesthetics. On the one hand, it gives a new visibility to the practicesof art as political practices-I mean practices of the redistribution ofspaces and times, offorms ofvisibility ofthe common, forms ofconnectionsbetween things, images, and meanings. Artistic performances mayappear, and sometimes do appear, thereby as the substitutes of politicsin the construction of dissensual stages. But consensus does not merelyleave the political place empty. It reframes, in its own way, the field ofitsobjects. It also shapes, in its own way, the space and tasks of artisticpractice. For instance, by repladng matters ofclass conflict with mattersof inclusion and exclUSion, it puts worries about the "loss of the sodalContemporary Art and the Politics ofAesthetics 49bond;' concerns with "bare humanity;' or tasks of empowering threatenedidentities in the place of political concerns. Art is summoned thusto put its political potentials to work in refrarning a sense ofcommunityand mending the social bond. In my view, the shift from the criticalparadigm onto the forms of the joke, the collection, the invitation, andthe mystery testify to that reconfiguration ofthe political in the form ofthe ethical.Against the substitution, in art, of ethics for politics, certain projectstoday do seek a political role for art. These address matters of thedistribution of spaces and issues of redescriptions of situations. It ismore and more about matters that traditionally belonged to politics.This situation has lead to new attempts to make art directly political. Inrecent years many artists have set out to revive the project ofan art thatmakes real objects instead of prodUCing or recycling images, or thatundertakes real actions in the real world rather than merely "artistic"installations. Political commitment thus is equated with the search forthe real. But the political is not the "outside" of a "real" that art wouldhave to reach. The "outward" is always the other side of an "inward:'What produces their difference is the topography in whose frame therelation of in and out is negotiated. The real as such Simply does notexist. What does exist is a framing or a fiction of reality. Art does not dopolitics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that challengethe existing distribution ofthe real and the fictional.Making fictions does not mean telling stories. It means undoIng andrearticulating the connections between signs and images, images andtimes, or signs and space that frame the existing sense ofreality. Fictioninvents new communities of sense: that is to say, new trajectories betweenwhat can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done. It blursover the distribution ofplaces and competences, which also means thatit blurs over the very borders defining its own activity; doing art meansdisplacing the borders of art, just as doing politics means displadng theborders of what is recognized as the sphere of the political. It is nocoincidence that some of the most interesting artworks today engagewith matters of territories and borders. What could be the ultimateparadox of the politics of aesthetics is that perhaps by inventing newforms of aesthetic distance or indifference, art today can help frame,against the consensus, new political communities of sense. Art cannot

50 JACQUES RANCIEREmerely occupy the space left by the weakening ofpolitical conflict. It hasto reshape it, at the risk of teSting the limits ofits own politics.ALEXANDER POTTSNotes1. Balzac, The Wild Asss Skin, 15.2. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, 9.103. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment. 4· BOurriaud, Relational Aesthetics. The Romantic Work ofArtIn this article I examine the longer-tenn history of a dialectical tensionbetween the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic characteristic of modernthinking about the arts, with a view to reframing our understanding ofthe anti-aesthetic imperatives operating in the late modem or postmodemartistic imaginary. I focus on the early nineteenth century, theromantic period, when anxiety about the impossibility of contemporaryart ever realizing the aesthetic values associated with the whole orcomplete work first became a Significant issue. This anxiety began toshape the context within which contemporary artists were practicing. Inthis moment, urgent questions began to be posed about how a significantart might be sustained in circumstances where a split seemed beopening up between what art (and the experience of art) prOmised todeliver and the actual condition of the artwork in the modern world.These questions emerge particularly clearly in Hegel's theories on theaesthetic dating from the 1820S, and his thinking on the subject isparticularly pertinent to the present-day context in light of the reaffirmation,in the past few decades, of his supposed proclamation of theend of art. 1 This article, though, does not highlight the Hegel whoenvisaged art's larger Significance in the modern world as superseded byphilosophical reflection on the aesthetic. Rather, I focus on the Hegelwho speculated, often very suggestively, on the fonns in which artactively persisted in his own time. These were forms that he saw ascompelling to a modem subjectivity precisely because they representedthe antithesis of the ideal fonns of art in earlier cultures, most notably