Rebecca Weeks
Artist Led Culture And Cultural Democracy
There is a resistance to the discussion of politics within practice today, resultant in part from the dubious re-writing of modernist history and philosophy. The motivation for this rewrite is to construe political commitment as extraneous to art, and so dismiss the possibility of a politically engaged audience, to caste the expression of a political perspective as threatening, or as something unfit for the gallery to be contaminated by, as if art is somehow separate to politics or life. This resistance to a political discussion results in an obvious contradiction within contemporary culture which is specifically manifested in the realm of 'outreach' around the desire to encourage people into the gallery and into the creation of the art work, at the same time as wishing to keep life, and politics outside of the gallery. This contradiction is also particularly relevant to artist led culture as the inheritor of the critically and socially motivated radical aesthetics and politics that gave birth in the first place to socially engaged practice. 'The Situationist International' amongst other artists groups clearly spelt out in their ambitious manifestos what the future of art and culture could be, their ideologically driven visions were born of their struggle to address the need for the international democratisation of the production and dissemination of art and culture. So ambitious were they that their manifesto extended to an inter- planetary arts policy:
"What would be the principle characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with ancient art?
Against the spectacle, the realised situationist culture introduces total participation.
Against preserved art, it is the organisation of the directly lived moment.
Against particularised art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets."
In comparison with such a heightened sense of purpose and potential to reach into future worlds our current situation leads me to the conclusion that the art world is in league with neo liberalism in paying lip service to the narrative of social justice without any actual intellectual commitment to achieving it, and to think that somewhere along the way artists have lost their awareness of their power to shape the world. Instead of the ongoing struggle necessary to arrive at shared knowledge we currently have the production of a cosy consensus, and so the reaffirmation of the status quo. A double action of giving with one hand and taking with the other, of inviting people in and then pushing people back out can be seen to be operating at the heart of contemporary culture. This deception leads to art which may not be traditional in its form but which does nothing in relation to reconfiguring the relationships around the production and consumption of art, and contributes nothing towards a greater cultural democracy in the long term. In the prevailing model of dissemination any attempt to relate directly to anyone is termed 'outreach', further cementing the concept of 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. The system remains closed; the activities through which people are to engage are prescribed. People are given an activity to do, an information sheet to read, then they go home and nothing changes. If we were actually engaged in communication that was shaping our culture it would be a process which was central to all projects, the fact that we have the term 'outreach', which represents a branch of practice which is all too often marginalised and intellectually stunted reveals a lot about its currently tokenistic status. There are not the intellectual or actual resources at this point to initiate, or to support a real dialogue. It is hard at this stage to envision what a real dialogue might result in or where the will to achieve it would come from.
WHW the curatorial collective have written in the essay which frames their curation of the Istanbul biennial about the operation within culture to keep art and politics separate at the same time as apparently working to enable democracy:
"The irony, of course, is that the art of today is in the service of politics - but politics cheapened to the production of consensus, that is to the reaffirmation of the status quo, invariably clad in the garments of 'democracy'" (WHW: 2009)
So how might we reconfigure culture to begin to support disputation and difference, to support a real dialogue across the population that would then form the culture and the politics around it, rather than serving the established order of things? In order to explore this question we have to consider the forces that anchor things as they are. In 'The Politics of Aesthetics' Rancière describes the established way of things as the “distribution of the sensible”, this distribution deliminates what is possible to see and hear, to say and think, to do and to make. The distribution of the sensible represents the conditions of possibility for perception, thought, and activity. Within Ranciere's analysis the sensible is partitioned into various regimes and therefore delimits forms of inclusion and exclusion in a community. This distribution of the sensible provides the context for Rancière’s definition of politics, not as based around any actual obviously political structure or party; for these forms belong to the police order that attempts to maintain a particular distribution of the sensible. For Rancière politics is the assertion of the universal political axiom: 'we are all equal' and this assertion is applied by those outside of the communal distribution of the sensible, those who are not provided for within the police order. Their ongoing disputes attempt to reconfigure the sensible so that they may be heard and understood. I am particularly interested in Ranciere's placement of those that are outside of representation as those that are active in the disputes that then lead to greater social justice. This is the kind of critical repositioning of the audience that is necessary if we are to enter into dialogue with an empowered public that reconstitutes culture for itself. For Ranciere the reconfiguring of the cultural institutions and therefore their discourses is achieved through 'aesthetic politics', a mode of cultural operation which takes in the power of the aesthetic in operating beyond language and so allows for new realities to be conceived:
"This means that an aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms. The notion of 'heterology' refers to the way in which the meaningful fabric of the sensible is disturbed: a spectacle does not find its place in the system of visible coordinates where it appears. The dream of a suitable political work is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle." (Ranciere 63:2008)
Ranciere's discussion of 'heterology' outlines the simultaneous experience of a readable political signification and a perceptual shock, which resists signification and so disrupts the possible without having to resort to an explicit message, and which has the potential to reshape reality. In this sense then all works seeking to facilitate a real dialogue must walk a tight - rope between the apparent message that threatens to destroy the form of art and the radical aesthetic that threatens to destroy political meaning. In this sense there are parallels between Ranciere's understanding of the importance of the simultaneous existence of a radical aesthetic and its re- ordering impact upon the way of things and Walter Benjamin's discussion of 'the correct political tendency' and the 'literary tendency' or the political intent of a work and its form. Benjamin outlines the clear connection between understanding the aesthetics of a work and its politics in terms of identifying the 'technique' and so entering into a materialist analysis of the impact of its 'technique' or the impact of the form of the art and therefore its 'political tendency' or its affect upon the society it sits within.
"That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency - that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work. The correct political tendency of a work included its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency."(Benjamin:)
For Benjamin the correct political tendency will result in the correct form or aesthetic, and vice versa.
Both Ranciere and Benjamin understand the correct role for art to be one of disputation that can be made without the actual political message intended being made explicit. It is possible to propose engaging wider audiences using such a model that simultaneously facilitates a real dialogue complete with disputes and differences and reflexively explores the critical context for that work. In this sense then a critically engaged work seeking to explore these ideas around cultural democracy must operate as an 'outreach' project and as an 'inreach' project attempting to engage with those without and within the art world in an exploration or deconstruction of how such processes can be meaningful.
Rebecca Weeks
Dec 2009
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter, The Author As Producer,
http://idash.org/~marten/the_author_as_producer.pdf
Ranciere, Jacques, The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution Of The Sensible, trans Rockhill, Gabriel, Continuum, 2007
WHW, “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” IKSV, 2009