Jacques Ranciere

I am backtracking to the quote we talked about last week on the history of the temporary links and exchanges that take place between ‘art machines’ and ‘revolutionary machines’. The relevance of the relationship or specific ‘non-relationship’ between art and politics or aesthetics and politics.

Ranciere states, “Critical art, as art which plays both on the union and the tension of aesthetic politics, is possible thanks to the movement of translation which, for quite some time already, had crossed back and forth over the line separating the specific world of art and the prosaic world of commodities”.

We are steps beyond Debord and the artists ability to directly critique and subvert the commoditisation of culture and its reliance on ‘signs’ and ‘spectacles’. The very indiscernible nature of contemporary art and its marriage with commodity and popular culture, results in the risk of any critical art being inscribed “in the perepetuity of a world in which the transformation of things into signs is redoubled by the very excess of interpretative signs which brings things to lose their capacity of resistance” (Ranciere).

Aesthetics (dictionary): the science which deduces from nature and taste the rules and principles of art; the theory of fine arts; the science of the beautiful, or the branch of philosophy that deals with its principles or effects; the doctrines of taste

Aesthetics in art has its own politics or two opposing systems, that which wants art to dissolve into ‘life’ at the expense of its own elimination and the logic of art entering into politics precisely (and of value), because it has nothing to do with it. Political or critical arts task is then to juggle the tension between art becoming ‘life’ (and thus politics) and the existence of an aesthetic sensorality that has specifically set itself aside from other forms of sensory experience (that of life). From a non-art world it borrows a political intelligibility, and thus combining a heterogeneity that comes from art, and it is this very co-existence and balance between art machines and non art/ revolutionary machines that make possible combinations of elements capable, as Ranciere puts it “of speaking twice over; on the basis of their legibility and on the basis of their illegibility”.