'Problems and transformations in critical art'

Jaques Ranciere
Problems and transformations in critical art, 2004.

Ranciere writes about the problems of didactical critical art as well as the ‘spectacularisation’ of relational art that seeks to repair the social bond.
He says that the mixture of high art with popular culture is indebted to surrealist collage. Newspaper cut outs and cloth where used to mix the strangeness of aesthetic experience with the becoming-life of art with the becoming-art of ordinary life. Collage reveals one world hidden beneath another: capitalist violence behind the happiness of consumption, market interests and violent class struggle behind the apparent serenity of art. An example is Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projections of homeless people onto American monuments (denouncing the expulsion of the poor from public space).
In the society of the spectacle Debord says that the ‘spectacle’ is the way in which the state maintains its control over us. The Situationist International (S.I) began as an avant-gardist art collective, but eventually Debord realised that to revolutionise life, an art practice had to be abandoned as ‘art is removed from life’ so the SI turned into a political agitation troop who had an important role in the May 1968 uprisings.
Ranciere writes that if art products do not cease to cross into the domain of commodities, then commodities and functional goods do not stop crossing the border in the other direction. So all objects are available to art and for subversion.
This crossing of borders constitutes a ‘third way’ of micropolitics of art – between the opposed models of art becoming life and art as resistant form. This process underpins performances of critical art and helps us to understand its contemporary transformations & ambiguities.
Ranciere finishes the paper by offering a reason why relational and critical art has come about - due to a shrinking 'public space' and an effacement of political inventiveness in a time of consensus. This has given a substitutive political function to the mini-demonstrations of artists.