The Political Space of Art

The Dardenne Brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial

Benoît Dillet, Tara Puri

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783485697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte e politica

This book studies the tension between arts and politics in four contemporary artists from different countries, working with different media. The film directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne film parts of their natal city to refer to specific political problems in interpersonal relations. The novelist Arundhati Roy uses her poetic language to make room for people’s desires; her fiction is utterly political and her political essays make place for the role of narratives and poetic language. Ai Weiwei uses references to Chinese history to give consistency to its ‘economic miracle’. Finally, Burial’s electronic music is firmly rooted in a living, breathing London; built to create a sound that is entirely new, and yet hauntingly familiar. These artists create in their own way a space for politics in their works and their oeuvre but their singularity comes together as a desire to reconstruct the political space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought by the disenchantment of 1970s: the end of art, postmodernism, and the rise of design, marketing and communication. Each artwork bears the mark of the resistance against the depoliticisation of society and the arts, at once rejecting cynicism and idealism, referring to themes and political concepts that are larger than their own domain. This book focuses on these productive tensions.

Chapter One

Aesthetics, Poetics and Techno-Aesthetics

That artworks intervene politically is doubtful; when it does happen, most often it is peripheral to the work, if they strive for it, they usually succumb to their own terms.

—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory¹

This chapter attempts to outline a few approaches to art in order to demonstrate not only the diversity and the richness of art criticism and philosophy of art but also to present some of the main influences at work in this book. We would like to begin by borrowing Jacques Rancière’s useful cartography of art as ‘three major regimes of identification’, that are, but cannot be reduced to, historical periods within history of art.² These modes of identification are established by distinguishing different ways of linking the production of works of arts to their specific forms of visibility. First, in the ‘ethical regime of arts’, the images are judged according to their truth and their origin, and are conditioned by religion and law. Rancière here refers to Plato and his polemics against false images (simulacra), and therefore the ban on poetry and theatre. Indeed, this dichotomy between the real and the copy, the genuine and the artificial, has dominated the practice and theory of art till rather recently, where though the terms of the debate have changed, the frisson of the authentic continues to play itself out in different ways.

The second regime is the ‘poetic or representative regime of arts’ that is associated with Aristotle, due to his conceptualisation of the logical structure of narratives as consisting of a beginning, a middle and an end. The work of art in this regime expresses a particular shape, for the artist gives deliberate form to the raw material; this Aristotelian theory is also called ‘hylomorphism’. Rancière notes that there is a hierarchy at work in this regime: the action and the narration prevail over the characters or the descriptions. It is the content and the meaning rather than the form that count. Interestingly, Rancière equates this representative regime of arts to the ‘poetic’ regime of arts in order to also include the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European academies of fine arts and their hierarchies of genres. We want to draw attention to Rancière’s own understanding of poetics here, since there are other conceptions of poetics that can be mobilised to revitalise art and political criticism today.

The major contribution of Rancière to art theory is his renewal and displacement of ‘aesthetics’ as the third regime of identification. For him, aesthetics is no longer this science of feeling and taste that comes into play when one is brought face to face with an artwork. It is about the ‘ways of sensible being’ rather than ‘ways of doing’.³ It is also in this regime of art that the logical and causal schemas of the representative regime of art (inherited from Aristotle) are abandoned, for instance in nineteenth-century novels. He diverges here from aesthetics in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, which was too philosophical, for they did not really refer to the great artists of their time in their aesthetic writings.⁴ For Baumgarten who first used this word in its modern sense in 1750, aesthetica meant the faculty of an inferior knowledge, produced by the contemplation of an artwork and the sensibilities it arouses rather than emerging from the intellect. Aesthetics was then imagined as a discipline of its own in which the domain of sensibility itself becomes an object of knowledge.⁵ The rationalist foundation of this discipline has little to do with what Rancière understands by aesthetics, even though he refers to the work of Friedrich Schiller who was a contemporary of and commentator on Kant and Hegel.

While Jimenez is right to insist that ‘we can, without fear of an anachronism, speak of a “Platonic aesthetic”’ if we account for Plato’s considerations on the essence of beauty, his definition of mimesis and the role of art in the city-state, Rancière himself follows from Deleuze and Lyotard’s aesthetic theories, which are further supplemented by his re-activation of Schiller’s 1794 work, Aesthetic Letters.⁶ Rancière attempts to democratise aesthetic enjoyment by removing the class bias associated with this attitude. Since the realm of the sensible does not match the realm of the intelligible—as Kant explained, the faculty of imagination deregulates the faculty of reason—it is precisely there that the aesthetic experience can announce or even materialise a new distribution of politics. The immanent and democratic order of aesthetics redistributes the roles and hierarchies in place in society. For Rancière, aesthetic experience rests on this idea of sharing: he uses the French word partage, often translated as ‘distribution’ in English. The aesthetic experience then works at creating the community, and everyone participates in the experience of the sensible.

FROM AESTHETICS TO POETICS

We begin our study from the same diagnosis as Rancière about the difficult relationship between art and politics, with philosophy as a mediator. While surrealists in the 1930s and situationists in the 1960s demonstrated the possibility of moving from the artistic realm of the avant-garde to a radical critique of politics, such a movement from the aesthetic to the political stopped in the 1970s and the 1980s. Instead, aesthetics became a refuge from the tumult of politics for some critical theorists and philosophers: Deleuze’s books on cinema in the 1980s were first interpreted through this lens, as were some of Lyotard’s works on the sublime in Kant, but it is Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension that is probably the best example of this retreat.

For Rancière, what art gives to politics is not projects of subordination or emancipation but what it already shares with politics: ‘bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible’.⁷ Rancière does not think that aesthetic experience is a ‘method’ for emancipation; this would be too logical and belong to the Aristotlean representative regime of art. There is no royal road from art to politics, but ‘scenes of dissensus’.⁸ This dissensus reorganises the sensible: ‘it brings back into play both the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world’.⁹ It is a moment of rupture, suspension and play that lies potentially in every situation, when the capacities and the incapacities are re-distributed to produce new senses and meanings. In sum, what is crucial for Rancière is the already-existing true equality in the aesthetic attitude: ‘it is the employment of the capacity of anyone whatsoever, of the quality of human beings without qualities’.¹⁰ These scenes of dissensus can take place anywhere, at any time, and can be produced by anyone. Aesthetics, for him, is the place where new forms of life can and usually do emerge. Rancière refers to Foucault’s famous expression the ‘distant roar of battle’, to note that the subjected are never entirely dominated but, as Foucault puts it, beneath the peace, the passions and the cries of battle can still be heard.¹¹ This becomes evident in our own reading of artworks, for instance in the films of the Dardenne brothers discussed in chapter 2, the characters (particularly Rosetta) have to fight the ordered landscape of the city—its geometry of power—to find these moments of rupture and suspension. Rosetta’s character is made of different elements in the film: the mud of the forest next to where she lives and the infernal noise of the motorway she has to cross are visual and sonorous coordinates that are composed poetically. There is a poiesis, a gathering of these elements to produce the artwork, that makes up an aiesthesis. We will come back to this distinction.

Deleuze’s own reflections on art are inscribed within the perspective opened by Blanchot’s meditations on the impersonality of art, the role of death and solitude, and the origin of art in the human. What is particular to Deleuze’s theory of art is sensation, but a conception of depersonalised sensation; it is as if the work of art records a specific sensation that endures through time, no longer dependent on the artist who has made it, regardless of who is looking, listening, touching, tasting or smelling it.¹² Sensation then is primary to art, not the beautiful or the sublime as with post-Kantian aesthetics. Works of art are ‘blocs of sensation’; they have chronicled and preserved the creative catastrophe necessary in any art production. Although Deleuze displaces the aesthetic attitude from the subject to the impersonal, he remains within the aesthetic regime of art as outlined by Rancière, since he remains at the level of perception, and perhaps even at the level of judgement.¹³ Deleuze abhorred judgement, but his conception of ‘percept’, which can be defined as modes of perception or blocs of sensation, retains some traces of judgement, even when these percepts are disembodied and disincarnate. This diffused mode of perception means that judgement can play itself out in a non-hierarchical way.

We want to hold on to Rancière’s re-elaboration of aesthetics as a regime of visibility and intelligibility beyond the active/passive opposition that is tied up with questions of the spectator and the artist’s positions, but we want to supplement this with Boris Groys’ poetic approach to art. In the introduction to Going Public (2010), ‘Poetics vs. Aesthetics’, Groys explains that he wants to shift the discussion of art criticism away from aesthetics (examining what the artwork looks like and where it comes from) to poetics, by focusing in the first instance on the conditions of existence of the artwork. We want to integrate a certain conception of poetics (or poiesis) into our own approach to provide a way to move past the active/passive polarity so present in traditional art criticism. It is certain that a spectator is not merely passive and enthralled by the creator’s action, that her response to the artwork is active and creative.

What Rancière however misses, or perhaps dismisses, in Aristotle’s conception of poetics is the distinction between action and production, and the fact that artworks exist under the conditions of poetics. Poetics is concerned with presence or the ‘bringing into being’, that is, how a work of art comes into existence, from non-being to being. As Giorgio Agamben notes, we are accustomed today to think of productive activity (poetics) as practical activity(praxis) while the Greeks distinguished between poiesis in the sense of producing and bringing into being, and praxis in the sense of doing and acting.¹⁴ Poiesis is then related to what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call the open; it is a ‘bringing forth’ of the effects. Yet, the problem in Aristotle was the emphasis on the producer rather than on the product and the consumer, to use some conventional notions. Another conception of poiesis or poetics therefore takes into account the economic dimension in art, or at least the emphasis on production in the work of art.¹⁵ By integrating the diagnoses of the post-Fordist economy, financial capitalism and neoliberalism, we can therefore enlarge our traditional understanding of the artist as a producer, and the spectator as a consumer. New artistic practices and theories have emphasised the changing roles of the artist and the spectator, and we need to think of them as being both producers and consumers in alternate ways. The artist cannot subtract herself from the consumer society which she needs to account for nowadays, since this hyperconsumerist society is her primary material.

Rancière does not see these new roles that artists have taken over the last thirty years or so. He wants to defend the spectator against all accusations (especially from Bourdieu and other sociologists of art) of being an entirely dominated, unthoughtful and passive consumer, who needs to be taught the rules and norms of art. Rancière consequently gives the spectator the glamour that was once stolen from her. Yet, by remaining at the level of aesthetics, Rancière forgets the production of the artwork; not that the aesthetic effects of a work can be controlled by the artist or the process of production, but that production itself belongs to art. The aesthetic experience becomes available only through an understanding of the process of creating the artwork, once it is cleared of any intentionality and strict empirical analysis.

The main problem with aesthetics is that in a world dominated by digital technology and visual media, everyone is a producer of images, and aesthetics fails to provide an explanation for a large part of the art that directly accounts for this new economy of images. Groys writes polemically that contemporary life is so aestheticised, with the obligation to ‘self-design’, that ‘the aesthetic attitude does not need art, and it functions much better without it’.¹⁶ Indeed, Ai Weiwei taps into this zeitgeist when he claims, echoing Duchamp’s ideas about art and artistic practice, that an artist can be an artist even when he produces nothing.¹⁷ Today’s post-Fordist mode of production attempts to integrate all forms of aestheticisation of life, yet art does not cease to resist this tendency of total aestheticisation (hence Groys’ proposition). Another formula that follows from Groys is that, ‘in terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand comparison to even an average beautiful sunset’.¹⁸ It is not that nature is more real or true than art’s artifice or simulacra; on the contrary, we came to enjoy the average sunset only after our eyes were trained and conditioned by landscape painting. The English term ‘landscape’ itself comes from the seventeenth-century Dutch art terminology. As Maldiney puts it, art (especially abstract art) ‘transposes forms that recount’; these forms ‘recount as gossip all incidents and accidents of the daily world’.¹⁹ Far from being in competition with ‘nature’ or ‘reality’, art records the gestures, the mov...

Table of contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Aesthetics, Poetics and Techno-Aesthetics
• 2 Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers
• 3 Arundhati Roy’s Language of Politics
• 4 Ai Weiwei’s Useless Materials
• 5 Burial’s Muffled Soundscape of London
• Conclusion
• Bibliography