The Emancipated Spectator

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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 The clarity of Sehgal’s practice in regard to collecting and the market needs further research. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was pleased to be the first owner of The Kiss; director Madeleine Grynsztejn now happily admits that they are one of several owners of the piece: “I guess it’s kind of an edition, and we have the artist’s proof” (comment to the author, February 2010). Sehgal’s fondness for oral history and notarized exchange makes this (“artist’s proof”) as valid a nomenclature as any; time will tell whether these “multiples” inform the structure of Sehgal inventories and catalogues raisonnés to come, and whether the oral and body knowledge of the works will be allowed to mutate without intervention by the artist. Oldukça düşündürücü ve bazı yerlerde tekrar tekrar okuma isteği uyandıran çok güçlü bir kitap bence..

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. 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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French philosopher Jacques Ranciere is a refreshing read for anyone concerned with what art has to do with politics and society."— Art ReviewThe 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. 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. A basic assumption that I make is that the system must manage the media and state cultural institutions well enough to insure that challenges to its survival do not de-stabilise its grip on power. The way this hegemony is maintained is widely known as Ranciere points out. Gatekeepers or managers, patrons and politicians, all contribute to maintaining a status quo, a class system. At the same time they must provide the system with sufficient criticism to inoculate it.