Papastergiadis on Ranciere

In ‘Aesthetics and politics in the age of ambient spectacles’ Nikos Papastergiadis compares the ideas of theorists Jacques Ranciere and Gerald Raunig as they relate to the relationship between art and politics. Papastergiadis believes that the question of whether or not art is enmeshed in the everyday is irrelevant, but the nature of this entanglement is what is of importance. He writes

The point is not if art is entangled with social, political, and economic structures, but how it weaves itself into these scenarios, and whether or nor it can retain a critical force.

Focusing on Ranciere, Papastergiadis asserts that it is aesthetics that defines the relationship between art and politics. He cites as a key text, Ranciere’s The Politics of Aesthetics, which he says defines aesthetics as the reconfiguration of the perceptual order through the recoding of everyday objects and relations. This Ranciere argues, leads to the creation of new modes of political subjectivity. Papastergiadis asserts that the affirmative link that Ranciere identifies between aesthetics and political transformation is indicative of the terms in which politics exist within art. Ranciere defines a ‘distribution of the sensible’, as an alternative to philosophies and authoritarian practices that limit the capacity of individuals to be active in acts of governance. Ranciere argues that aesthetics and politics both address this process, and each do so within the operations of their own systems. He states that aesthetics and politics, as they may operate to promote the ‘distribution of the sensible’ do so in opposition to any order of aesthetics and politics that constrains democratic dialogue. Aesthetics is said by Ranciere to be capable of overturning existing hierarchies of signs to contrive new narratives and forms that link individual affect to a social existence.

Institutional Critique

In his essay 'institutions, critique, and institutional critique', Alexander Alberro argues that while many of the critiques made by artists against the art institution in the 1960s and 1970s were rigorous in presenting the discrepancy between the myths perpetuated by the museum and the economic and social realities that actually structure it, such critiques ultimately advocated for the continuing existence of such institutions. Alberro explains that by demanding that such institutions 'straighten up' and end such discrepancies, the artists in question thus argue for instatement of the museum ideal. Mel Ramsden describes such institutional critiques as ameliorative, in that they call for specific changes in the institution of art but affirm its basic underlying structure as one that is worth repositioning. For Alberro, the works of artist Louise Lawler that address the making, showing, selling, and viewing of art as such practices exist within the art institution, do so with the hope that by making evident the institutional boundaries that govern such practices, the 'initial promise' of the institution may be regained.

Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut, 1984

Louise Lawler Silver dye bleach print

Gardening, Art, Life.

Having attending Tending (what an awkward turn of phrase) with Lucas and Diego, I left feeling inspired. Not to make art though, but rather to work more on my garden. While I felt like my engagement with the project was, at the time based firmly in an art context, the effect it had on me was ultimately quite a practical one, applicable to ‘real life’. My desert theme garden at home definitely does not exist in an art context, no matter how many art students and artists have worked on it over the years, and no matter how many decorative skulls I may produce in the SCA plaster room to add a much needed flourish or two. It even took the form of a ‘Georges Bataille ‘til I Die’ eye themed tribute garden at one point, and while pretty pretentious (and not my idea) it remained in the realm of the domestic.

The experience brought to mind a conversation I had with Michael Goldberg last year, when, while having a bit of an episode, I ended up yelping, on the verge of tears, ‘I hate art, I have no ideas, all I want to do is bloody garden, and I can hardly hand in my garden for assessment can I?’ If nothing else, this course will ensure that I never make that statement again.

Another key issue for me was the idea of social engagement in art, of art that seeks to make a difference, and to impact on people and communities. This is a funny area for me, and something I think about a lot, because with a background in neuroscience and to a lesser extent healthcare, there’s always this feeling that if I really cared, instead of engaging with people through art, I’d be, for example, administering vaccination programs to remote Indigenous communities. For me personally, the idea of making these types of works seems, paradoxically, almost unethical. When people say, ‘well, we’re not curing cancer’, I feel a panic fear like maybe I should be. People might recall Sydney artists spat+loogie (Lara Thoms and Kat Barron), who featured in Primavera 2009 with a piece called PIE. The premise was that a member of the public was invited to have a one-on-one conversation with an artist or curator, or other art world type who had agreed to participate in th eproject, over a slice of pie. At the conversation’s end the person could then choose to share the pie or shove it in the face of the artist. Well, Kat is now studying medicine and will soon be a doctor, and her partner runs an organic vegetable co-op. It's a different kind of engagement.

Lastly here is a picture of some of my plants (please excuse the rabbit).

Aesthetics and Politics -Raunig

In aesthetics and politics in the age of ambient spectacles, Nikos Papastergiadis looks not at the question of whether art is caught up with social, political, and economic structures, but taking it as a given that it is, examines the nature and effectiveness of this entanglement. Papastergiadis posits Gerald Raunig as a theorist who sees art and politics as 'discrete fields resting on the same terrain' and examines the concept of 'flow' as it relates to this dynamic. The Deleauzian concept of concatenation, referring to a temporary chain like connection, in this case between art and politics is seen by Raunig as being mutually transformative, while avoiding the creation of a fixed hierarchic relationship between the two. Raunig also applies to notion of transversality to what he calls 'transversal activism'. Here it is the intersection of aesthetics and politics is that is examined, which each field capable of exerting transformative action upon the other but ultimately remaining discrete areas of discourse.

To whoever recalled Interogation Machine I'm gonna kill you.

In Slavoj Zizek's foreword to Alexi Monroe's book Interrogation Machine he makes an analogy between the actions of NSK musical group Laibach and Robert Schumann's piano composition Humoresque. Zizek describes how Schumann's 1838 piece is written as a song without the vocal line, so the composition then becomes a piano accompaniment to an absent vocal. Zizek explains that later in the piece the absent vocal line itself becomes absent from the composition, with the notes 'losing what they never had'. Monroe later writes

Laibach interrogate regimes by rendering audible/visible a series of connections that "common sense" ideology has to keep concealed in order to maintain the ideological self reproduction of "the system".

Or as NSK themselves explain in the video posted by Matthew, every political system includes its own inherent systems of transgressions which must remain unspoken and hidden in order to be self perpetuated. Laibach, by adopting these transgressions more fervently and more openly then the systems themselves, bring such transgressions to the surface, because it is only here that they may then be neutralised. The promotion of these transgressions by Laibach as a means to critique them is what creates such an uneasy tension within the group's work.

Sittings of public art: integration versus intervention - Miwon Kwon

In Sittings of public art: integration versus intervention Miwon Kwon charts the trajectory of public art from an initial art-in-public-places paradigm to an art-as-public-space paradigm, and examines the cases of two public art 'failures', Richard Serra's Tilted Arc and John Ahearn's installation of three bronze cast sculptures in the South Bronx, and how they inform the meaning of site-specifity.

Kwon describes how public art has shifted from the art-in-public-places paradigm of the 1960s, that is, from modernist, typically abstract sculptures, that were often enlargements of existing museum pieces, to a public art that sought to be integrated, inhabitable, and functional.

Kwon contrasts two approaches to site-specific public art in the disruptive model of Serra's Tilted Arc and the assimilative model of Ahearn's figurative South Bronx project. Tilted Arc, a 12 ft high, 120 ft long, wall-like steel sculpture cutting across New YorkCity's Federation Plaza, approached the idea of site specificity from a critical standpoint, and is argued by Kwon to be deliberately interruptive and oppositional. Serra's non-assimilative work acknowledges the often socially dysfunctional nature of public space, and was eventually removed following protest. Like Serra, Ahearn also concerned himself with the site-specificity of public art, but unlike Serra, opted for an assimilative approach. Ahearn's three figurative bronze sculptures of a group of his neighbours arose from the idea of a site defined by it's community, or inhabitants, and sought to reflect the lives of these inhabitants within the work. Ahearn's integrationist approach was ultimately rejected by the community he sought to represent, and suggests questions relating to the definitions of site, public, and community.

Collective Practice

The Introduction to Conversation Pieces sees author Grant Kester describe an art practice that is process rather than object based, and involves encounter, dialogue, and conversation. Kester discusses the work Shelter for Drug-addicted Women instigated by the collective Wochenklausur in 1994. The work, or rather "concrete intervention" to use the term preferred by the collective itself, saw almost 60 experts over the course of two weeks participate in panel discussions held on a boat in Zurich. The aim was to develop and instigate a plan to help drug addicted homeless women, and the result was a twenty bed shelter that ran for eight years.

Cue discussion of is it art, or activism? What is the difference? Is there a difference? Does it even matter?

I'd prefer instead to discuss a relatively minor point that struck me. Strangely, Kester chooses to liken the actions of Wochenklauser to the work of early 20th century German Dadaists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfied. Kester's argument is that the boat talks instigated by Wochenklauser saw a sort of recontextualising of the expertise and actions of the experts of various political persuasions. He sees the art-context of the discussions as functioning to emancipate participants from their officious roles and obligations, allowing them to act freely in a way that would not be possible within the bureaucratic and administrative confines of social work/public health/activism. Kester likens this to the compositional juxtapositions and recombinations of imagery in the photomontages and collages of the Dadaists. Kester here seems to be clutching at straws in a ham fisted attempt to describe a lineage from the historical avant garde to works such as Shelter for Drug-addicted Women. It almost seems as if his desire to place this kind of work in an historical Art context is a sort of preemptive rebuke to those who will argue that it isn't art. It just comes across a little awkwardly.

Commodity Fetishism

I still get struck, when reading Society of the spectacle, by how digestible, snappy, sort of sound-bitey it is. I've seen photocopied posters of sections of the Theory of the Dérive text sell for ten bucks each at the MCA Zine Fair, 'ne travaillez jamais' home made tattoos (perfect for when you grow up to work at the ASX), and watching the Society of the Spectacle film on YouTube, you could almost see it playing in American Apparel.

It's just so well packaged and quotable. Apt because,

Critical theory should communicate itself in its own language. It is the language of contradiction, which should be dialectical in its form as it is in its content.
- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

In her article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics Clare Bishop argues that Nicholas Bourriard fails to address the issue of the quality of the relationships constructed in the works referred to in Relational Aesthetics. I've only read about half of Bourriard's text so can only speak with limited authority, but my experience of it thus far has been the near constant reappearance of a little voice that asks "Yeah, so what?" Bishop takes the standpoint that the construction of a relationship so as to (merely) create a situation of dialogue is in itself insufficient. Bishop discusses Santiago Sierra as an artist who, rather than constructing 'microtopias' in the form of situations or scenarios in which the (art) public can form some sort of (art) community, is instead concerned with the potential tension and antagonism of such situations. The response elicited by a work such as Sierra's 160cm Line tattooed on Four Paid People (2000), is not one simply of a participatory experience, and the work is better because of it.

An exercise in Relational Aesthetics - The Ordinary Collective's It Just Leaves Me with an Empty Feeling

In the section Relation Form (the chapter preceding this week's reading) in Relational Aesthetics Nicholas Bourriaud makes explicit the central notion of 'dialogue' to the work of art. For Bourriaud this dimension of dialogue is what gives form its 'productive status' and situates it in the realm of an 'encounter'.

At the recent Underbelly Arts Festival at Fraser Studios, Sydney based group The Ordinary Collective sought to address the issue of the disatisfying 'coldness' of many such encounters, particularly in relation to digital art. Artists Tega Brain, Cady Brain, and Brendan Phelan assembled what at first appeared to be brightly coloured living room, complete with various armchairs, rugs, and other furnishings, within the studios. Relaxing into one of the supplied armchairs on opening night, the viewer faced a TV set showing an analogue test pattern. On second glance it became apparent to the reclining viewer that the 'test pattern' was in fact an aerial shot of the 'living room' filmed from a video camera suspended from the ceiling and playd back in real time, the various coloured furnishings supplying the test pattern of which it was now apparent the viewer featured.