Undoing Aesthetics

undoing aesthetics‏

It seems that for every generation of artists and thinkers about art there is a favoured philosopher, an avatar for their preoccupations and critical frameworks. A concept and a name begin to circulate around artistic networks. Filtered through articles and citations, a body of thought becomes, often to the surprise of its author, the theoretical touchstone for a discipline he or she may be only remotely connected with. For example, at one end of the 20th Century the French philosopher Henri Bergson found prominence through the attentions of European sculptors; and towards its end psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva found herself coopted into a discourse around feminism, desire and the image.

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It is exciting when we are offered direct access, live and in person, to those intellectuals who have become iconic in this way but who are known largely through their published works. Yet it can also be a confounding experience. For while the contemporary art world picks out--with magpie-like unconcern for academic propriety--the sparkly bits from the oeuvres of political philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, cultural theorists and even art historians, things can go wrong when those who have been temporarily lured into the ambit of contemporary art try to return the compliment.
In association with the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, Tate Britain presented a one-day conference featuring Eric Alliez, professor of contemporary French philosophy at Middlesex University and co-author of La Pensee-Matisse, 2005, and L'oeil-cerveau: nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne, 2007; Georges Didi-Huberman, professor of art history at EHESS, Paris, whose recent books include Confronting Images, 1990, and La ressemblance par contact, 2008; Elisabeth Lebovici, art historian, critic and co-author of femmes/artistes, artistes/femmes, 2007; and the man who is currently dominating anthologies and essay footnotes, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Jacques Ranciere, whose book, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2000, has provided an echo chamber to recent conceptions of the social dimension of art.

The film featured the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf calling for one thousand people to audition for a part in a film about themselves. He is filmed filming their desperate attempts to grab hold of an audition form; things turn ugly and a near riot breaks out with people being trampled underfoot. Later, during an audition, a young man affects blindness to impress the director, who dismisses his charade. Apparently for Didi-Huberman this cinema verite exemplified 'The Extra' becoming the subject of the film. But in fact the director abuses his power and manipulates the crowd with the false promise of 'being on camera'. Unlike Warhol's screen testers, individuals are homogenised into a desperate and dangerous mob. It struck me how this also differed from Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave, 2001, where the miners' reenactment offers a genuine history of those who had been 'without name or speech'.

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Lebovici's paper, titled 'This is Not My Body', took as its starting point the cover of a well-thumbed paperback book of Roland Barthes, illustrated with a painting by Sophie Tauber Arp. From Sophie and Hans Arp, Lebovici's presentation ranged through Dada and Surrealism, Louise Bourgeois, Carolee Schneeman, Claude Cahun, the Judson Dance Theatre and Zoe Leonard, via the writings of feminist theorists such as Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She cited Wittig: 'only the feminine is a gender--the masculine is still regarded as the universal'. Battling against technical glitches, Lebovici could not always show the works she referred to. Paradoxically, her thesis turned on the notion of invisibility as a strategy. She argued that, forced to emblematise 'difference', women artists recognised their invisibility as both a condition and a potential strategy. She proposed that women artists adopted the tactic of invisibility, of masking, acting out and appearing in disguise in order to challenge the aesthetic image, and the image as gender. Lebovici briefly discussed Sophie Tauber Arp's acceptance of the pre-eminence of Hans Arp, introducing the concept of voisinage or 'neighbourliness'. Here two distinct yet complimentary orders work side by side, as with the Arps who represented two sensibilities working in concert. Rather than pursuing a central argument, however, Lebovici offered a montage of practitioners and quotations that was frustratingly wide-ranging, offering a reiteration of familiar themes in feminist art history rather than new perspectives.
Also referring to photographs by Walker Evans, Lewis Hine and the contemporary artist Rineke Dijkstra, he designated a zone 'between thinking and unthinking--between art and non art, passivity and activity'. Their subject matter is the social: the poverty of a sharecropper's kitchen, a factory worker who is only a child, an awkward eastern European teenager on the beach. But the composition of each image is aesthetic and those portrayed are abstracted, 'disappropriated'. Each subject offers their face but conceals their thoughts. For Ranciere, beauty lies in this expression of indifference.

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With regard to Hines' child worker, Ranciere cited Hegel's observation that what makes the Olympians divine is that they do nothing. He pointed to the popularity of a European genre of painting featuring beggar boys playing or eating. They are squalid, yet in their unashamed idleness they ascend to the realm of the divine. For Ranciere this is where the political lies: 'Pensiveness suspends the representational logic of action, suspends conclusion.' He cited Flaubert as offering a literary equivalent where a servant, an insect and an aristocrat can all occupy the space of the novel through a random series of 'sensory micro-events'.
Ranciere showed two film clips: one by Abbas Kiarostami of a boy on a mission to collect a notebook who is deflected from a direct route by a zig-zag hillside path, making his journey abstract; and a video titled The Art of Memory by Woody Vasulka, 1987. This computer-generated flow of montaged images offered some strikingly problematic juxtapositions. The mushroom clouds of an atomic bomb or atrocities from Vietnam flowed arbitrarily along with a stream of images and colours, undifferentiated from one another. As an artist in the audience later remarked, this work was reminiscent of sophomoric editing exercises in downloading images from the internet, sadly characteristic of the adolescent male.