The Emancipated Spectator

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Ranciere insists, as we have heard, that art cannot be designed to emancipate and that emancipation cannot be prescribed. Emancipation must be self-wrought or it is not emancipation. The aim of political art is often taken as the creation of "an awareness of political situations leading to political mobilisation." p.74. However Ranciere claims that "there is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact of understanding the world; no direct road from intellectual awareness to political action." p.75. The Emancipated Spectator originated in former Althusserian French philosopher Rancière’s reflections upon the role of the spectator in contemporary art at the fifth Summer Academy of Arts held in Frankfurt in 2004. His reconsideration of this topic afforded him the opportunity to challenge some of the theoretical and political presuppositions that inform the criticism of the practices and strategies of contemporary political art. Rancière discusses critically Marxist and postmodern social and cultural critiques. He is familiar with and sensitive to modernist, avant-garde and contemporary art, theatrical performance, photography and cinema while seeking to displace the oppositions that structure the debates that surround them: activity and passivity; individuality and community; ignorance and knowledge. Our annual gathering for everyone who loves, makes and lives theatre and the performing arts - online again for the second time. 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.

So while the historian will still want to figure out what happened (or probably didn’t) in the darkened Munich porno theater where Export’s Action Pants was supposedly staged, the invisibility—or even unlikeliness—of the event itself does not invalidate its history as a performative. What the recent explosion of live art makes clear is that art’s contemporaneity has always relied on a capacity to mobilize ongoing and subtle performatives: things and thoughts made in the present by audiences confronting something in the past. Any artwork, no matter how fleeting, perforce comes from the past (even Sehgal’s situations have their rehearsals) and must speak to us in the present if they are art at all. Contemporaneity can consist of nothing else, whether we are dealing with the ongoing liveness of Raft of the Medusa or of This Progress. Maria S. H. M. (left) and Abigail Levine reenacting Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, New York, spring 2010. Photo: Scott Rudd. It would be assumed that the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place. It would be assumed that there is no fatal mechanism transforming reality into image; no monstrous beast absorbing all desires and energies into its belly; no lost community to be restored. What there is are simply scenes of dissensus, capable of surfacing at any place and at any time. p.48. The current scepticism is the result of a surfeit of faith. It was generated by the disappointed belief in a straight line between perception, affection, comprehension and action…" "The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated. p.103 The author has some thought-provoking ideas, and he writes in such a clear, logical way that I ended up liking this book a lot, even though I didn’t quite agree with all his points. The book comprises five essays (the results of various talks given all over the world), all of which are highly intelligent, well-developed, and far too long and detailed for me to discuss here, so I’ll just list them briefly. Devoted & Disgruntled is a nationwide conversation about theatre and the performing arts, run by theatre company Improbable.

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 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 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. Does the desire to reduce the distance between the spectator and the art, that has become de rigour, serve only to create that distance? Ranciere argues that it does, by reinforcing or creating "embodied allegories of inequality." p.12. The class basis of this is underlined: "In the past, property owners who lived off their private income were referred to as active citizens, capable of electing and being elected, while those who worked for a living were passive citizens, unworthy of these duties."… "Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we understand (that) the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing, themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection." p.13

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 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 r Aesthetic Separation and Community “Bathers in Asnières”, 1884, retouched 1887, painting by Georges Pierre Seurat, via National Gallery, London. 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). It's not every day that the art world decides to adopt a new philosophical leading-light, so judging by the list of international art institutions and universities at which Ranciere has presented previous versions of these essays, its clear that he has become the latest French thinker to make the crossover from the academy to the artworld." JJ Charlesworth Art Review, January, 2010

The Torso is currently in the Vatican Museum and is considered evidence of the high point of classical aesthetics.The Algerian-born Jacques Ranciere, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Paris Saint-Denis, is the latest in a long line of "new" French philosophers. Ranciere, who has risen to fame recently in the English-speaking world through his conceptualisations of critical theory and aesthetics, separation, community and the contemporary image, is a "post-Marxist", even though he co-authored the seminal Reading Capital with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in 1968. 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. If we take Rancière’s statement alluding to equality between image and lived reality, this is where we can further assume a theatrical iteration of this painting. We can shift the focus in the painting from us watching people watching a marriage ceremony, and we can dissolve the surface of the canvas and enter the scene. We can even continue this by imagining the scene expanding into the room in which it is is displayed. For any critical assessment of Ranciere's theoretical work on the spectacle must allow for bodies and actions, gatherings and audiences that are no longer what they were in Debord's time, with the important theoretical and practical difference being that almost no one today believes that the society of the spectacle can be reversed or used against consumer capitalism. 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.