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Reviews

Aesthetics: Art and Non-ArtDan Karlholm

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art by Jacques Rancire, trans. Zakir Paul, London and New York: Verso, 2013, 304 pp., 20.00

The translation into English of philosopher Jacques Rancires magnum opus on aesthetics, which fi rst appeared in French in 2011, is a major event. For more than a decade now, the author has been one of the key theorists of art, due, in particular I suppose, to his proposal on historically unfolding regimes of art, from an ethic regime in Western antiquity, to a representational regime predominant throughout the classic age (Foucaults term) to an aesthetic regime of the arts from around 1800 continuing uninterrupted into our times (although the latter extension is not covered in the present publication).

There have been historical references, names, quotations and examples attached to Rancires arguments on this reconceptualization of artistic modernity in his previously published texts, in particular The Politics of Aesthetics (2000; 2004), but also The Future of the Image (2003; 2007), and The Emancipated Spectator (2008; 2009). But if these texts have been primarily demanding, for an art historian or non-philosopher, on an intellectual level, his latest book reverses the relation between information and conceptualization, facts and philosophy. What comes across as demanding in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art is the plethora of empirical detail, although the book is elegantly written, and, as far as I can tell, superbly translated. This amassment of historical circumstance, contingencies and minutiae is not to be deplored, as such; only it appears to reverse the typical procedure, whereby an archival research phase is followed by a conclusion or summary. Rancire, however, professed his conclusions years ago, and what we are offered here is the argument belatedly fl eshed out through the archival bodies of modern art and culture.

The text is composed of fourteen case study-like chapters or successive scenes from 1764 to 1941, or from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to James Agee and Walker Evans (and Clement Greenberg).

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While each scene is arranged to reveal a version of the authors rather familiar argument, the reader receives new knowledge about both well-known and obscure details of the last centuries, along with fresh aspects of the gradually unfolding aesthetic theme. Through a clip from a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled The Poet, we are introduced into the intellectual circles of Boston in 1841, where, according to the author, before Paris, London or Moscow, for example, the modernist ideal in all its radicalism the ideal of a new poetry of new man, was fi rst put into words (56). The idea is presented that a Hegelian contemporaneity of thought and world is what modernity refutes. Instead, the modern world is characterized by a gap between temporalities (63). This interesting remark resembles the following from The Politics of Aesthetics: the temporality specifi c to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities,1 which links modernity to the aesthetic regime, despite the authors current claim to offering something like a counter-history of artistic modernity (xiii). Whatever it is called, this book is a most fruitful rereading of artistic modernity, where the crux of modernism (versus postmodernism) is put to rest, since no longer deemed a viable, descriptive concept. I fi nd this persuasive and well-argued regarding the period covered here, which comes to a halt before the Second World War, and thus bypasses the problems of our supposedly contemporary era.

We are guided, instead, through pantomime as anti-theatre (80), serpentine dance as an abstract, pure display of forms (100), theatre without action (113), sculpture as deliberately created bodies lacking heads and limbs (160), a cinema of the fact (228), to name a few of the books adventures. One of the best scenes is devoted to Charlie Chaplin via Viktor Shklovskys critical judgment of 1923. The legendary fi gure of Charlot is entirely assimilated into the unfolding potentialities of cinematic art but also, according to Rancire, relegated to the margins of this art, identifi ed with a performance, which cinema is merely the means of recording (192). Chaplins movements on fi lm are no longer expressive or representative, but a way of inscribing signs on a white surface (193). The coverage of examples thus ranges from the sphere of fi ne art to popular culture, from painting and sculpture to photography, fi lm, dance, theatre, performance, and several cross-

mediations between these. The latter, of course, form part of the argument, namely that the previous representational regime, as well as a stereotypical defi nition of modernism, had built its historical case on the autonomy of the individual arts, whereas, this author argues, a generalized concept of Art was born, along with art history, in the mid-eighteenth century. While this particular claim is not original, the corollary is, namely that the development of modern art was rather the opposite of a purported purifi cation or separation of the individual arts: the movement belonging to the aesthetic regime, which supported the dream of artistic novelty and fusion between art and life subsumed under the idea of modernity, tends to erase the specifi cities of the arts and to blur the boundaries that separate them from each other and from ordinary experience (xii).

This is an important and central clarifi cation, which indicates, in my reading, a few of the problems I have with this argument as a whole. Certainly, the old model of relative specifi city between the arts, within an established hierarchy of academic art in the West, gave way to a more relaxed one with the emergence of the aesthetic regime. But were boundaries between the arts and the domain of non-art really both blurred as well? The fi rst verb here erase is hard and defi nitive, seemingly pointing to an irreversible reduction, but the second verb blur is, apart from being a staple of postmodernist discourse, soft and diffi cult to determine. Are we to understand that a blurred boundary simply presents an unfocused view, aesthetically speaking, or that the boundary has become theoretically impossible to draw? Did a public staging of a dance performance, for example, using modernist backdrops and following an atonal musical score, blur the boundaries between these arts? I am not sure it did, but if so, boundaries within the domains of dance, painting and music, respectively, were still vital, if also, perhaps, increasingly diffi cult to see or to draw. If blurring was indeed an aesthetic interest, this would have required the maintenance of boundaries. Ever since Romanticism, a tendency can be detected, for sure, towards intermingling, cross-mediation, and total works of art (Wagner), but this is also balanced with other trajectories, other strong tendencies throughout this period. Clement Greenberg pointed to one important trend within the confi nes of Western, modernist painting,2 but the very strength of his well-known critical

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interpretation has paradoxically backfi red and come to threaten its general validity, and has since been unduly extended, paraphrased and misrepresented by so many of those who have wanted to nail down modernism as monolithic, formal, rigid, over, etcetera. Such generalized Modernism is, arguably, literally a postmodern phenomenon, that is: a term of retrospective (xiii) value as Rancire seems to imply by picking that word as a determinant to modernism used not during the period of modernism but from around the event of its gradual dissolution around the 1960s onwards, with reference to abstract art and the lessening of mimetic impulses.3

Now, what about blurring the boundary between the arts and ordinary experience? Certainly, the arts in question during this era many times did their best to overcome, transgress or deny the boundary between art and life, but the perpetuation of such blurring activities, I would say, is essential for avant-gardism as such. The avant-garde hardly desired to break through to, and remain on, the other side of art. Borders to blur must by all means remain. My problem with this part of the argument, I realize, has to do with the authors most general formulation, here and in earlier texts, of what aesthetics means. These are the opening sentences of the book:

This book deals with the same topic in fourteen scenes. This topic is announced by its very title: Aisthesis. For two centuries in the West, aesthetics has been the name for the category designating the sensible fabric and intelligible form of what we call Art. (ix)

He adds that this Greek term denotes the mode of experience, according to which, for two centuries, we perceive very diverse things, whether in their techniques of production or their destination, as all belonging to art (x). Previously, the formulation was even sharper: the word aesthetics refers to the specifi c mode of being of whatever falls within the domain of art.4 When he testifi es, furthermore, to his reliance on Immanuel Kant for his theory of the aesthetic regime, the identifi cation between aesthetics and art becomes even more puzzling. Kant famously subsumes fi ne art to what could be called an aesthetic universe of form (and relative formlessness), where it co-habits with fl owers, birds, sea shells and the like.5 Rancires emphasis

on sensible experience explains his preoccupation with aesthetics, and all of the arts, but it bypasses completely the fact that aesthetic experience transgresses, potentially, the realm of art. The differentiation between ordinary experience and experiences of art may indeed be blurry, aesthetically speaking, without impacting the ontological difference of the objects of the equation. It may be hard to differentiate, for example, the intense blue of an Yves Klein monochrome from that of an equally visually striking blue shirt it may be equally pleasurable, or the reverse. Characteristic of art during and after modernism, however, is that the art coeffi cient, so to speak, cannot be discerned or identifi ed with an aesthetic point of view only.

The structure of the book is modelled on Erich Auerbachs classic text Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953). This explains the composition, where each chapter begins with a longer quotation from some archival source, whether a literary work of art, a review, article, etcetera. The ensuing essays work to unpack the implications of the somewhat arbitrary selection from the period under investigation. I will return to Auerbach in my conclusion, despite, or rather because of, the fact that he is not dealt with in the text, although acknowledged in the Prelude, and referred to once. But fi rst, I would like to comment on the fi rst selection: a textual fragment from Winckelmanns History of Ancient Art (1764), dealing with the famous fragmented marble sculpture of Hercules known as the Belvedere Torso. This part is followed by the section from G. W. F. Hegels Aesthetics (1828) that deals with beggar boys depicted in Murillos seventeenth-century paintings. These two scenes are odd in the mix in that they illustrate responses to historical art as opposed to all of the following examples, which are devoted to then current artistic achievements in some shape or form, from Stendhals novel Red and Black (1830) to Agee and Evans photo documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The bulk of the examples in Aisthesis, conforming to materializing the aesthetic regime of the arts, is thus also dealt with by Auerbach, who studies the same novel by Stendhal and ends with Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927). There would be opportunities, one would think, to both acknowledge and take issue with this predecessor in the text, but the author never argues directly with named opponents. Whenever he is critical of others, these are lumped together as nameless ignorants:

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some argue that, others disagree, it is readily said (50), etcetera. There are strikingly few references to current research within the evoked disciplines of art, cultural history, and aesthetics, by the way, especially considering the vast terrain covered.

The fi rst scene devoted to a section from Winckelmanns history of ancient art would perhaps have been better off as a kind of prologue, since this example actually precedes the aesthetic regime of the arts as previously defi ned, although that is of course what the author tries to complicate here, which is fi ne as such. The section mulling over Winckelmann is largely compelling, especially regarding the emergence of a theme of inactivity or passivity that the author argues is constitutive of the aesthetic regime as opposed to the active programme of poeisis and mimesis, with its rules, plots, clear beginnings and ends, characteristic of the representational regime, and also with respect to the history of the people, through the history of art, that Winckelmann helps inaugurate. On the whole, however, the author reads Winckelmanns text as if the latter already belonged to Romanticism, and as if Winckelmann found the mutilated state of the statue as such a refi ned form of perfection, in the quasi-whole form of the fragment.

Here is Winckelmann: Abused and mutilated to the utmost, and without head, arms, or legs, as this statue is, it shows itself even now to those who have the power to look deeply into the secrets of art with all the splendor of its former beauty (1). The statue is broken, brutally put, but regardless of how it is now, those sensible and knowledgeable enough today, like the author himself, can still enjoy the statue as it once was, in its former beauty. The antiquarian, whose whole history of art was written in front of more or less fragmented bits and pieces of antiquity, manages to see through the present state of mutilation, although being fully sensible to its melancholic as well as erotic allure.6 Winckelmann manages, in his own words, to behold in imagination the body of Hercules as such. He can detect no veins, but indeed a belly made only to enjoy not as a marble fragment, needless to say, but as a well-trained male body part. He sees the head (that is lacking), the breast and the thighs; the bones appear covered with a fatty skin, and the muscles are full without superfl uity (12), he writes, despite the fact that there are no bones here, no skin or muscles, only stone. He manages to see the

desirable, perhaps even perfect, body of an athlete, despite the statue and its deplorable contemporary state of ruination.

Auerbach is dismissed as too confi ned to an older model of mimesis as imitation, while this is not how Rancire defi nes mimesis. In a recent interview, he clarifi ed his position:

what constitutes mimesis as an order is not a norm for the imitation of reality, but the fact that imitation or representation is included within a number of rules, within a whole division between what is artistic and what is not artistic, between the noble genres and the non-noble genres, etc. I understand mimesis as the classical order, a total order that subjects the representation of reality not only to a certain number of restrictive norms, but to a certain hierarchical model. So what I fi nd important, and what separates me from Auerbach, is that the question of what is called realism is connected to the destruction of the fundamental model of Aristotles poetics, where the work is defi ned fi rst of all by its plot, and the plot is defi ned fi rst of all as a chain of actions.7

But when Auerbach reads Flaubert to fi nd that nothing happens to these mundane and ordinary individuals,8 this short observation, at least, is fully congruent with Rancires own contention, for example, that [t]o have the power to do everything, and consequently to do nothing, to head towards nothing: this is the troubling logic laid bare by this literature (50).

Considering, fi nally, the divide between art and non-art, that is supposedly blurred or erased by the aesthetic regime of the arts, much more needs to be said about the last seventy years of art making in the increasingly globalized West than is said here. The author hints at the possibility of a continuation, and I hope this is realized eventually. The fact that Rancire has long proclaimed disinterest in art from the 1960s onward, despite several fruitful preoccupations with instances of contemporary art today, and that this account ends before the Second World War, saves him from dealing with a situation where advanced art is more determined by a generic form of conceptualism, rather than a sensible aestheticism, no matter how much interest

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in aesthetics is noticeable on the current art scene. But this very interest testifi es, in my view, to a widespread dissatisfaction with the conceptual conditions of possibility, or post-conceptual confi nement of contemporary art,9 rather than mirroring or representing the supposedly aesthetic regime of the arts today.

Notes1 Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.

Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York, 2004, 26.2 Clement Greenberg, Modernist painting, in Clement Greenberg: The

Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John OBrian, Vol. IV, Chicago, IL, 1993, 8593.

3 Terry Smith, Modernism, The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, Vol. 21, New York, 1996, 776.

4 Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 22.5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York,

1974, 66 ( 16). 6 Cf. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History,

New Haven and London, 1994.7 Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Kim West, Senses of the sensible:

Interview with Jacques Rancire, Site, 33, 2013, 19.8 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new intro. by Edward W. Said, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2003.

9 Cf. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London and New York, 2013.