The Emancipated Spectator

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He takes the example of a montage titled “Balloons” by Martha Rosler. In the image we’re presented with a Vietnamese man carrying a dead child, but the image is placed in the frame of a comfortable upper class US home. On one hand, the montage is a critique of how the public perception was shaped by mass media, the war, murder, banality, barbarism, all filtered through the sterile screen into the air-conditioned, well-furnished room of the complicit American.

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.

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: He talks about the spectator as “separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act” (Rancière, 2009). To resolve this problem of passivity, theatre-makers Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) attempted to create versions of theatre with active participants as audiences. However, Rancière identifies a myth that the spectator is ever passive, and challenges art that makes a conscious attempt to activate the spectator by experimenting with ways of abolishing the gap between the audience and the performers. According to Rancière, this is simply replicating an authority over audiences by prescribing modes of connection between the spectator and art. Rancière points out that the audience can never be passive. He does not see a structural opposition between collective and individual, image and lived reality, or activity and passivity. 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

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. 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. Isabella Bruno, interviewed as part of documentation for the MoMA retrospective. See “Cleaning the House” workshop link. Here, Ranciere's principal theoretical argument is that the position of the spectator in contemporary cultural theory is reliant on the theatrical idea of "the spectacle", a concept the author employs to describe any performance that puts "bodies in action before an assembled audience". For Ranciere, the masses, exposed to what Guy Debord in 1967 called "the society of the spectacle", are usually understood as passive. Consequently, poets, playwrights and theatre directors such as Bertolt Brecht have tried to convert the inert spectator into a committed aesthete and the spectacle into a political presentation. The politicized aesthetic that emerges from this book perhaps precludes a thorough and satisfying engagement with the actual practices of collaborative and relational art; the critique of the spectacle more or less exhausts the ambitions of political art for Rancière. The book’s remarks on the actual political efficacy of political art are significant. Its sustained defence of the spectator amounts to an important critical exploration of the intentions of contemporary artists and develops Marxist and postmodern cultural and critical theory that reminds its reader, in ways reminiscent of Barthesian theories of reading and textuality, of the political nature of spectating and aesthetic experience.

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Open Space Technology (OST) is a great way for groups to think, talk and take action together. It can work for as few as 5 people, and as many as 5000. 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 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. These workers, who should have supplied me with information on working conditions and forms of consciousness, provided me with something altogether different: a sense of similarity, a demonstration of equality." "They disrupted the distribution of the sensible which would have it that those who work do not have time to let their step and gazes roam at random; and that the members of a collective body do not have time to spend on the forms and insignia of individuality." p.19. He realised above all that "there was no gap to be filled between intellectuals and workers". p.20. [3]

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 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. 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. gördüklerini ve gördüklerinden ne anladıklarını söylemelerini, bunu teyit etmelerini ve teyit ettirmelerini ister. Cahil hocanın bilmediği, kabul etmediği şey, zekâların eşitsizliğidir. Her mesafe olgusal bir mesafedir ve her entelektüel edim cehalet ile bilgi arasında katedilen bir yoldur -bütün o sınırlarıyla birlikte her türden sabitliği ve konumlar hiyerarşisini hiç durmaksızın ortadan kaldıran bir yol."In our ongoing adult learning series, In Focus, we link works from our collection with key art historical, theoretical or philosophical texts. Aimed especially at third-level students, but accessible to all, this series aims to support in-depth engagement with our collection and the selected texts. His art lies in the rigor of his argument—its careful, precise unfolding —and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actress, as an imbecile.”—Kristin Ross Against this the early musichall audience were moved from sitting around tables drinking into the fixed rows of seats - a late C19th commercialised audience - often seen as a strategy to pacify, but I suppose it could have been a drive to get more paying customers into a space. The bourgeois audience being politely quiet and immobile did not mean that they were mentally passive. However held up as a model for rowdy working class audiences to judge themselves against was used as a way to denigrate the physically active audience and so working class cultural expression.

He surmises that by the Sixties the use of Marxist ideology had led to two requirements from its adherents: Although Ranciere critiques class while rarely mentioning the word, he stops short of any insight into the affective dimension of class, by which I understand as the emotional toll exacted by class oppression. He does not go into that kind of knowledge or the way that trauma can be a barrier to knowledge. Affects that impact on people fundamentally tend to happen at an impressionable age - and the false idea of an inequality of intelligence and status fostered by the school system is one of the most poisonous. I recently heard this described by a middle class woman as a daily pencilling of the lines that separate, until the division was etched into her being. Ranciere who was part of this '68 generation comments: "For me, as for my generation, neither of these endeavours was wholly convincing" p.18. However, his own version of 'going amongst the workers' was to research working class activity and writing of previous century. He did glean some useful education about workers from these archives and his findings are published as 'Proletarian Nights: the workers dream in C19th France'.Discussing the possibilities of community ownership of music venues in Oxford to help bring about more venues.