The Emancipated Spectator

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A group of French artists proposed a projected tiled “I and US”, comprising in a space where someone could exist in complete solitude, encapsulating the modern need to be apart, disconnected from the inflow of images and capital, something which is rendered impossible in the ordinary life in the Parisian suburbs.

bilgin konumuna geçmek için değil, tercüme sanatını daha iyi uygulayabilmek, tecrübelerini kelimelere dökebilmek ve kelimelerini sınayabilmek; entelektüel maceralarını başkalarının faydalanması için tercüme edebilmek ve onların kendi maceralarını sundukları tercümeleri kendi diline tercüme edebilmek In chapter three he uses a phrase from Mallarme, 'Separes est on ensemble', to explore how we can be both individuals that think for ourselves and achieve a liberating 'solidarity' that doesn't flatten our differences. He goes on to discuss how this idea relates to our contemplations on art. He is emphatic that the sensory world of the artist is separate from that of the viewer and that there is no right way to think about art and never has been. Some of the most influential conventional writing about art has been a celebration of interpretation set free of any original intent, use or context. Things that are not used for their intended purposes. Human beings are tied by the same field of sensation which defies their way of being together in the world. Politics should aim to transform this sensory field, to show the community new ways of experiencing themselves, new ways of configuring their relations to each other. Seurat’s painting, Bathers at Asnières, for Rancière, encapsulates the conflict inherent in the notion of community leisure itself:Ranciere who was part of this '68 generation comments: "For me, as for my generation, neither of these endeavours was wholly convincing" p.18. However, his own version of 'going amongst the workers' was to research working class activity and writing of previous century. He did glean some useful education about workers from these archives and his findings are published as 'Proletarian Nights: the workers dream in C19th France'. 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. 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

Ranciere insists, as we have heard, that art cannot be designed to emancipate and that emancipation cannot be prescribed. Emancipation must be self-wrought or it is not emancipation. The aim of political art is often taken as the creation of "an awareness of political situations leading to political mobilisation." p.74. However Ranciere claims that "there is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact of understanding the world; no direct road from intellectual awareness to political action." p.75. The idea that individuals need to be thinking for themselves is hardly new and it is to Ranciere's credit that he refreshes it and leads on to a set of philosophical problems about the relation between the individual and the collective. The rest of the book mainly concerns these questions. For Ranciere both conditions are co-terminus without any need for consensus. In fact dissensus is better. Dissensus is almost our natural condition as autonomous individuals in a dynamic state of communication about their inevitably different subject positions. Emancipation is then down to "collectivising our capacities invested in scenes of dissensus". The Emancipated Spectator is intended to improve our comprehension of art and deepen our grasp of the politics of perception ... [it has an] impressive concern with the political analysis of art and the use of imagery”— Times Higher Education 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. 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.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 were two people (myself - Amy Golding and Ben) making verbatim shows with care leavers. One around politics and one around mental health and immigration. We discussed the importance of anonymity of the people sharing their stories with us due to safeguarding and potential repercussions amongst peers or with service providers. 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. 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. For any critical assessment of Ranciere's theoretical work on the spectacle must allow for bodies and actions, gatherings and audiences that are no longer what they were in Debord's time, with the important theoretical and practical difference being that almost no one today believes that the society of the spectacle can be reversed or used against consumer capitalism.