Towards a politics of (relational) aesthetics

Third Text

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 267-275

  Downey, Anthony ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249145154     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528820701360534     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. The subject of aesthetics and art criticism has been explored in Suzanne Perling Hudson's 'Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism', October, no 104, 2003, pp 115-30.
2. More recently, Art Monthly undertook a lengthy discussion of aesthetics throughout 2004 and early 2005. See J J Charlesworth's 'Art and Beauty', Art Monthly, no 279, 2004
3. For a critique of Charlesworth, see Mark Wilsher, 'Judgement Call', Art Monthly, no 280, 2004.
4. For a critique of both Charles worth and Wilsher, see Sarah James's insightful overview, 'The Ethics of Aesthetics', Art Monthly, no 284, 2005.
5. Elsewhere, as noted by James, the subject of aesthetics has produced a number of more far-reaching debates, including Dave Beech and John Roberts's The Philistine Controversy, Verso, London, 2002;
6. and Isobel Armstrong's Radical Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. In the context ot philosophical enquiry, the recent translation of Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum, London, 2004, has further developed enquiry into the apparent opposition to be had between the terms 'politics' and 'aesthetics', whilst Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005, has promisingly sought to subject philosophy, through the discourse of aesthetics, to the 'truth-event' of art itself. (Briefly, the 'inaesthetic' is defined by Badiou as 'a relation of philosophy to art which, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy'. Badiou, the subject of aesthetics has produced a number of more far-reaching debates, 2002 op cit, p 10. )
7. One of the more extended critiques of Bourriaud has been proposed by Claire Bishop in her essay 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', October, no 110, 2004, pp 51-80.
8. A defence of, in part, Relational Aesthetics and his own work in the context of Bishop's criticism of it was subsequently published by Liam Gillick. See Liam Gillick, 'Contingent Factors: A Response to Claire Bishop's "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics'"', October, no 115, 2006.
9. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, [1998] 2002, p 11. Hereafter referred to as RA with page number following.
10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are prominently discussed throughout Relational Aesthetics. 'Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight. ' Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol 2, trans Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p 21.
11. Alex Farquharson noted the recent coining of the term 'new institutionalism', a development within which independent curators have rearticulated the function of the museum space, especially in north central Europe. He observed that 'One of the defining traits of "new institutions" is that exhibitions no longer preside over other types of activity' and institutions become multifunctionah 'The most politicized new institutions', Farquharson continues, 'aspire to a similar condition of collective autonomy writ large. Many see their experiments as logical responses to the most pressing socio-political issues of the day: the shrinking welfare state, the erosion of the social bond, the privatization of public space, the global hegemony of neo-liberal economics and so on. ' Alex Farquharson, 'Bureaux de Change', Frieze, no 101, 2006, pp 157 and 159.
12. Catherine David, 'Introduction', in Documenta X, exhibition catalogue, Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997, p 10
13. Jacques Rancière interviewed by Truls Lie, 'Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done'. First published in Le Monde diplomatique, Oslo, 8 November 2006 (Norwegian version). Available at: http:// www.eurozine. com/ articles/2006-08-11-lieranciere-en.html (accessed 11 January 2007).
14. Bishop, 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', op cit, p 65
15. Bishop has since developed her critique of the reception of relational art practices and the criteria used to evaluate their 'value', arguing that art criticism increasingly relies on the criteria of artistic self-effacement and an overtly political register that champions social responsibility and an ethics of collaboration in relational art practices. Bishop writes: 'There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art [in these forms of art criticism] because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze and compare such work critically as art. ' See Claire Bishop, 'The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents', Art Forum, February 2006, p 180.
16. In albeit truncated terms, the essence of the disagreement between Bishop and Gillick centred on the former's use of Mouffe and Laclau, specifically their deployment of the term 'antagonism'. For Mouffe and Laclau, antagonism and an agonistic social identity are the basis of a democratic order. Mouffe furthered such proposals in The Return of the Political when she proposed antagonism as the basis of modern identity: 'When we accept that every identity is relational and that the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determination of an "other" that is going to going to play the role of a "constitutive outside", it is possible to understand how antagonisms arise. . . This can happen when the other, who was until then considered only under the mode of difference, begins to be perceived as negating our identity, as putting in question our very existence. From that moment onwards, any type of we/them relationship, be it religious, ethnic, national, economic or other, becomes the site of political antagonism. ' See Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, Verso, London, [1993] 2005, pp 2-3.
17. To this we could add a discussion around the extent to which 'aesthetics' and 'politics' have been unnecessarily divided into an antagonistic rather than complimentary relationship. This issue was raised in Sarah James's Art Monthly article cited above. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, James observed that aesthetics and politics have been imbricated from the outset. On Rancière's theory, James notes that he 'claims that the so-called modernist narrative misses the point. Whereas it sees aesthetics as the constitution of a sphere of autonomy which has subsequently collapsed in the last decades of the twentieth century, in fact, the terms that it opposes have been tied together since the beginning of the aesthetic regime of art. Crucially, Rancière argues first that in this regime the definition of a specific aesthetic sphere does not withdraw artworks from politics. On the contrary their politically is linked with that separateness and, second, that the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere is not the autonomy of artworks. When this representational regime of art collapses, artworks are merely defined by their belonging to a specific sphere. But that sphere has no definitive boundaries; the autonomy of art is also its heteronomy. ' See James, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, 2006, op cit, p 11.