The Emancipated Spectator

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Recently I saw the 'Seduced by Art' photography and painting show at London's National Gallery. The show opens with Jeff Wall's large 1978 'The Destroyed Room' photograph. Wall is said to use a 'strategy of quotation without direct imitation' and it is implied as a key to reading the whole show. The influence of Delacroix's 1853 painting “The Death of Sardanapalus” is claimed. I'd rather have seen it separate from being told how to look at it. I very much felt that such curatorial guidance was closing off any of my own thought. That is stultification. My own thoughts on seeing this work in reproduction were very different. I did not want to have this framework forced onto my first viewing of the actual print. However I suspect that Wall may have made this claim originally as much as a strategy to have his work shown as Art as something he wished to frame the work with. Devoted & Disgruntled: What are we doing to make the opera industry truly reflect the diversity of the country, on and off stage? Join us for our 14th annual Devoted & Disgruntled event on 'What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts?' We are left with many questions. Does a documentary with a voice-over give too much interpretation? Can such a didactic form still ask you to think about something, rather than telling you? Does the selection of what to shoot, how long to shoot it, what sort of shot to use, still constitute a selection and so a way of directing the viewer how to think about something? Of getting the viewer to see the world in a particular way. My hunch is that we should not be concerned so much about the artworks as the frames and spaces in which they are seen. Ranciere directs this analysis at some of my favourite French theorists from Guy Debord to Pierre Bourdieu. Debord's 1967 'Society of the Spectacle', and its idea of a worId transfixed by consumption, was something I almost revered in my twenties. In spite of the academic groundwork done in the previous 20 years that I was aware of, reading Ranciere's analysis felt like shaking off a long dead leech. Ranciere is perhaps the first higher ranking philosopher to dare confront icons of the Marxist radical left with their, and our, own classism.

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: in a series of letters, 1794/5. By using these canonic examples of European learning he is of course paradoxically affirming his belonging to the Humanist community of learning. 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: Mike Kelley, Mike Kelley: Minor Histories—Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 114–15. 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.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? Ranciere points out the Left's dream of a community in harmony, as against the goal of a community of dissensus and struggle, is a utopian one. Dissensus here is the inevitable 'conflict' or 'tension' between the essentially different sensory worlds of two or more individuals. This has been forgotten by 'the modernist dream of a community of emancipated human beings' p.60. The 'intertwining of contradictory relations' can itself produce community. "The paradoxical relationship between the 'apart' and the 'together' is also a paradoxical relationship between the present and the future." p.59 However, Rancière is critical of Brechtian distanciation as a way of making political art. He doubts the pretentions to political efficacy of strategies intended to express repressed desire or render palpable class domination. He sees no reason why the ‘clash of heterogeneous elements’ and the sense of strangeness that photomontage evokes should either help the spectator understand the nature of domination or determine her political decision to change the world. He is critical of a political art and aesthetics that presuppose an uncomplicated transit between modes of artistic production (collage, photomontage) and the subjective determination to act politically. The Emancipated Spectator argues that the artistic procedures of the avant-gardes did not produce politicised and revolutionary ideologies and practices but were sustained by them. What was always the disguised weakness of the political efficacy of the procedures of twentieth century political art is exposed with the erosion of the ideologies and practices of revolutionary politics and workers’ movements. The critique of the spectacle, Rancière argues, was a response to this weakness and developed further the postmodern suspicion of and disappointment with the political capacity and efficacy of the image. In this post, we are looking at the painting The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife by Daniel Maclise. We will explore this work while considering viewers of art as active participants. This discussion is supported by Jacques Rancière’s essay The Emancipated Spectator. Here, we are invited to synthesise Rancière’s thinking with our potential experiences of this painting. Key artwork Rancière argues that political or critical art had traditionally taken for granted a straightforward relationship between political aims or effects and artistic means or causes with the ambition, which he considers sheer supposition, to raise an apparently passive spectator’s political awareness leading ultimately to her political mobilisation. Political art revealed that commodity and market relations lie behind beautiful appearances and are their truth. It aimed to disabuse the spectator and induce a sense of complicity, guilt and responsibility in her. As archetypal means of achieving those ends, Rancière cites Brecht’s theory and practice, the political montage of German Dada, and the American artist Martha Rosler’s series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful , 1969–1971 that juxtaposes photographs of luxurious petty-bourgeois interiors cut out from House Beautiful magazine with images of the Vietnam War from Life magazine. Rosler’s work, which continues a tradition of twentieth century committed art, reveals to the spectator a hidden reality of imperialist violence behind happy and prosperous domestic interiors.

This chapter is the most abstruse and theoretically abstract. It reminds me of Barthes third term of semiotics from Image - Music - Text (1977). [7]. Ranciere writes that an image "contains … a thought that cannot be attributed to the intention of the person who produces it and which has an effect on the person who view it without her linking it to a determinate object." "This indeterminacy problematises the gap that I have tried to signal elsewhere between the two ideas of the image: the common notion of the image as a duplicate of a thing and the images conceived as an artistic operation." p.107 What all of these attempts at institutionalization reveal is a surprising truism: that we, the public, are primary to the performatives of event-based art. The “information economy” and the “experience economy” demand no less—but those cynical terms do not determine the outcome of every encounter. The late-’60s moment in which agency and participation began to seem incendiary (pit your body against the machine, make the personal political) is also the epoch in which such strategies entered the safe house of the aesthetic, posing alternate possibilities for experience that remain provocative. Contemporary appeals to the aesthetic of experience, then, always need to be leveraged by our own demands to experiment. We are responsible for our own performativity and for the politics we make of “emancipated” experience. Best to enter these ludic contracts as both knowers and dupes—only then might we really manage to do things with art. 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). This 'zone of indeterminacy' also exists between art and non-art, thought and non-thought, and activity and passivity. Photography has often found itself in this zone. He then has a very neat summary of the changing status of photography from Baudelaire thinking it a threat; to Benjamin seeing it as a disruption of the paradigm of Art but in a positive way. Now exhibited 'photography' takes neither position and instead imitates the modes of art. He refers to Rineke Dijkstra's pictures of Polish girls on a beach (2005).This session was looking at ethics related to the use of other people's stories/testimonies in making theatre. We also ended up discussing verbatim techniques. Finally a passage from Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?' (1991) is quoted at length. His summary is that this is about the link between "the solitude of the artwork and human community" p.55. "For the complex of sensations to communicate its vibration, it has to be solidified in the form of a monument. Now the monument in turn assumes the identity of a person who speaks to the 'ear of the future'." p.56 There are three key aspects of the The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife that can support an approach to the painting as a form of theatre: Seyircinin edilgen olma durumunun artık sona ermesini ve yaşayışla iç içe geçen sanat eserlerinin üretiminin desteklenmesini öngörüyor. Müze ve sanat merkezlerine hapsolan üretimlerin artık hareket etmesini, nefes almasını istiyor. Perhaps “presence” today is ontologically related to these public spaces of surveillance? It was possible for this viewer to be moved by Abramović’s own imprisonment in the artwork and to feel empathy. I cried, she cried, and in that limbic sense our mirror neurons were certainly co-present.

He then describes a contemporary art project 'I and Us' that was made on a working class estate in contemporary Asnieres by the art group Campement Urbain. The need expressed by the inhabitants in this stressed area was for a place of contemplation, a place to be alone. I.e. a break from the stress of being together to be individual, a space for contemplation. The first chapter puts forward the core idea that there has been a myth of peoples passivity generated from the established left which has been a central plank of classism by persuading people of the inequality of intelligence between them and their masters. Ranciere talks about abrutir rather than oppression. The crude idea of the inert masses was disposed of well before John Carey's 'The Intellectual and the Masses: : Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939' came out in 1992. Before that the idea of the myth of the audience as passive victims of the mass media was taken apart by many in Media and Communication studies. See Ien Ang's 1995 summary in which he concludes: "Media audiences are not 'masses' - anonymous and passive aggregates of people without identity. …media audiences are active in the ways they use, interpret, and take pleasure in media products. …We cannot say in advance which meanings and effects media content will have on audiences" (Downing et al. Sage, 1995, p.219). So Ranciere is following a well established media studies trend that he probably contributed to with his earlier writings.He discusses Alfredo Jaar's 1994 work on the Rwandan genocide 'Real Pictures' and in particular his work called 'The Eyes of Gutete Emerita'. (An image used as the books cover in the edition I read) "The traditional thesis is that the evil of images consists in their very number, their profusion effortlessly invading the spellbound gaze and mushy brain of the multitude of democratic consumers of commodities and images." p.96. What we see on the mainstream media, according to Ranciere, is mainly the faces of rulers, experts and journalists telling us how to interpret images. But even that somewhat dated idea suggests that we do not choose what to watch and he starts to fall foul of his own critique. It is now possible to bypass a lot of this with selective viewing of the personal networks of imagery. "The system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of 'deciphering' the flow of information about anonymous multitudes." p.96. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 21, 23.