Relational Aesthetics Go Political

You probably don’t even understand what this means, because you’re nothing but a fart faced kid:

By contrast to the formalism of the often de rigueur relational aesthetics, French theorist Jacques Ranciere enlists an ontological argument to detect and describe similar construction in art performance and political performance. Which I find similar with most of your arguments that are about the role of art; especially when you describe at the end of your text in “The Politics of Perception” (with Claire Pentecost). Could you give some examples? What could be the forms of resistance?

You’re right, at the close of that text we traced a totally ontological line from Merleau-Ponty to Castoriadis, with Guattari in the background, who would be a direct mediator with relational art. You seem a little dubious about the results! Claire and I are interested in the affects of resistance and alterity, which are not only the affects of fire and let’s bang it up in the streets. There can also be longer-term projects, involving some kinds of care and changes in daily life, aspects which feminism has given more attention to. That work with tacit dimensions of knowledge and feeling also extends into performance and of collaboration, where the people involved are the artistic material and the work is trans-subjective, it consists in the effects it has on others. We did try an experiment the summer before last, called the Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, which involved around a dozen people moving through the vast Midwestern territory for about ten days, contacting other groups, visiting sites, trying to understand where we are and where we could be in this weird, half-devastated former industrial region, which is also ravaged by agribusiness and more recent forms of corporate hyper-exploitation, not to forget an enormous heritage of racism and the prison industry too. I don’t think you can do that kind of experiment in an artistic frame – we certainly did not – but there are some spinoff works that can be worth showing as traces or proposals for the future. Generally speaking, the reception and elaboration of artistic gestures requires more attention than is usually given, as you can see by the fact that there is so little important art criticism, with the exception of maybe Boris Groys or Suely Rolnik. All the interesting catalogs are mostly about politics, geography and sociology, which is obviously important and welcome, but it leaves a hole at the very center of the artwork. The problem is that there is no good language for affect, you have to invent a style to express it. In our co-written text we wanted to explore various economic, philosophical and artistic issues while also developing a style between us. It’s just one further attempt. Of course I dislike relational art because it always seems like an advertisement for a relational process that never happened. Still the ontological dimension exists and I am looking for more ways to work with it.

[via Continental Drift]

You should also read Art and the World Economy, in case you want to have your mind blown.