The Emancipated Spectator

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A group of French artists proposed a projected tiled “I and US”, comprising in a space where someone could exist in complete solitude, encapsulating the modern need to be apart, disconnected from the inflow of images and capital, something which is rendered impossible in the ordinary life in the Parisian suburbs. Marina Abramović, interviewed for MoMA documentation “What Is Performance Art?” available online here. What I see in Ranciere is a persistent gnawing away at classism whilst also carefully keeping his place in the dominant stage with neo-classical references and clever word play. When Bourdieu admits that extreme expressions of class disgust had been censored from Distinction he says: "one cannot objectify the intellectual game without putting at stake one's own stake in the game -- a risk which is at once derisory and absolute" (p.163). On the other hand, it brings the logic of imperialism home, it brings the consequences to its doorstep and makes the screams of the innocent difficult to ignore. It attempts to shake them from their apathy. It also tells us that the comfortable upper middle class suburban life is maintained through war and disaster somewhere else, making the contradictions of global capitalism ever more unavoidable.

ALLOW ME, THEN, TO STAGE AN IMAGE: The performative public of Sehgal’s Guggenheim work forms a chiasmus with the public performative of Abramović’s recent activities. That is, if Sehgal propels the public into speech acts that constitute the work of art (e.g., that are performative), Abramović has often positioned the public as passive witnesses to reperformance. This is not to minimize the sheer ambition of Abramović or to disparage the heuristic value of her projects. In fact, her work serves to illuminate the dependence of reperformance on the artistic documentation that Sehgal so assiduously eschews. Working against museums’ attempts to convert ephemeral performance events into concrete, fungible assets (via authenticated, collected documents that can become scripts for “authorized” reenactments), Abramović’s reconstructions ultimately reveal the impossibility of stable authenticity where performance art is concerned. Her 2005 Guggenheim series set into high relief the modesty and transience of those ’70s events (most staged in galleries, performed for tape in the studio, or enacted on the street—definitely not in museums). And as art historian Mechtild Widrich has shown (building on the work of Amelia Jones and others), those 2005 reperformances were often constructed from staged photographs (as with Export’s work, to take only the most intriguing example), resulting in a mise en abyme of reproduction in which there is never any secure, original “performance” to be restaged.⁸ Instead of the authentic re-creation of “presence,” where we could (re)experience an “original,” what Abramović produced was another link in the chain of performatives—those successive iterations that continuously constitute the audience for “the performance” and produce the palimpsest of memories we call “the work.” By analogy with what Michel Foucault called the author function, we might call these accumulated performatives “the artwork function”: the aggregate that, when successful, builds the collective and experiential substance of the living work of art.Do you think the Daniel Maclise’s interpretation of this event reflects sympathies with the Irish nationalist cause or a desire to exercise high drama and theatricality? See Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 2009; Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998); Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). On Seven Easy Pieces, see also Johanna Burton, “Repeat Performance,” Artforum (January 2006); 55–56. The idea of pensiveness is first ascribed to Honore de Balzac in his novella 'Sarrasine' (1830) via Barthe's famous analysis in S/Z (1970). Balzac ends his narrative indeterminately by finally leaving the protagonist 'pensive', with the suggestion of a continuing and undefined thought process that goes beyond the narrative. Ranciere goes on to discuss the incidental micro events described in 'Madame Bovary' (1856) by Gustave Flaubert. The micro events are like silent pictures inserted into, but also above, and beyond the narrative. "The pensiveness of the image is then the latent presence of one regime of expression within another." p.124 Human beings are tied by the same field of sensation which defies their way of being together in the world. Politics should aim to transform this sensory field, to show the community new ways of experiencing themselves, new ways of configuring their relations to each other. Seurat’s painting, Bathers at Asnières, for Rancière, encapsulates the conflict inherent in the notion of community leisure itself:

What Rancière names as the ‘aesthetic break’ designates a break with ‘the regime of representation or the mimetic regime’ (60). Representation or mimesis means an inherent and unambiguous concordance between different kinds of sense. Critical thought has tended to connect the power to produce ethical or political effects with the character of the autonomous artwork itself. This idea of their connection has remained the model for political art, Rancière argues. The ‘aesthetic break’ is understood as a break with the regime of primarily mimetic representation upon which political art has depended, whether that means the reproduction of commodities or consumer spectacles or the photographic representation of atrocities. The `aesthetic’ names the break in this continuity between representations and their supposed social and political effects. In the immediacy of theatre and forms of relational visual art there is no separation between performing actors or artist and the audience. The French curator Nicolas Bourriaud is the leading theorist of relational aesthetics for whom visual art in the 1990s became a form of social exchange generated through the relations, encounters and interaction between people that artists would facilitate. But Rancière suggests that artists should investigate the power of the aesthetic itself – the rupturing of artistic cause and political effect – to produce political effects.

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için öğrenir. Onun bu yolu katetmesine yardım edecek cahil hocanın böyle bir ad almasının sebebi, hiçbir şey bilmemesi değil, "cahilin bilmediğini bilme iddiasını" reddetmesi ve bilgisiyle hocalığını birbirinden ayırmasıdır. Öğrencilerine kendi bildiğini öğretmez; onlardan şeyler ve

What does this mean? I take it to mean that we should focus on a collectivising praxis to make the best of our capacities and resources rather than hoping people will sign up to a single tightly formulated ideology. I would see this as elemental as our basic human abilities. Ranciere would say that any situation is readable in an emancipatory fashion if we don't bow down to the strategies of abrutir but engage our minds in an effort to deconstruct the forces that would limit and channel our thinking. This is not easy to do as a lone mind, and I find it happens better in discussion with others. In The Emancipated Spectator, a key concern is the equality of intelligence. What Rancière offers is equality amongst onlookers. In this particular event, at this particular depicted moment, each and every person is observing the same thing equally; it is a democracy of looking, creating a unique number of specific versions of engagement.

Discussion

A high sense of drama is conjured by the dispositions of the people in the painting, and the symbolism in the objects that Maclise includes. He surmises that by the Sixties the use of Marxist ideology had led to two requirements from its adherents: Viewing is a routine human activity, an activity comprising of selection, comparison, interpretation and of making connections. And it is part of a process that inevitably leads to the viewer creating something of her own, even if it is a negation; a turning away, yawning or choosing another path. As he says spectators are "only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them." p.16