#artificial hells

One of Rancière's key contributions to contemporary debates around art and politics is therefore to reinvent the term 'aesthetic' so that it denotes a specific mode of experience, including the very linguistic and theoretical domain in which thought about art takes place. In this logic, all claims to be 'anti-aesthetic' or reject art still function within the aesthetic regime. The aesthetic for Rancière therefore signals an ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art's relationship to social change, which is characterised by the paradox of belief in art's autonomy and in it being inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come. While this antinomy is apparent in many avant-garde practices of the last century, it seems particularly pertinent to analysing participatory art and the legitimating narratives it has attracted. In short, the aesthetic doesn't need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change, because it always already contains this ameliorative promise.

Inasmuch as Laddaga calls for a more integrated mode of addressing [participatory] work ("artistic and ethical", "practical and political"), his writing also points to a tacit hierarchy between these terms: aesthetic experience is "simply" offered, compared to the more implicitly worthwhile task of "real efficacy".  This uneven inclination towards the social components of this project suggests that contemporary art's "social turn" not only designates an orientation toward concrete goals in art, but also the critical perception that these are more substantial, "real" and important than artistic experiences.  At the same time, these perceived social achievements are never compared with actual (and innovative) social projects taking place outside the realm of art: they remain on the level of an emblematic ideal, and derive their critical value in opposition to more traditional, expressive and object-based modes of artistic practice.  In short, the point of comparison and reference for participatory projects always returns to contemporary art, despite the fact that they are perceived to be worthwhile precisely because they are non-artistic.  The aspiration is always to move beyond art, but never to the point of comparison with comparable projects in the social domain.

I just got to this description in Artificial Hells of a Happening in France where one of the performances involved a woman bathing herself on stage and then masturbating with a carrot... and then turning around at the end to reveal that she was transgender.

Art is art to the extent that it is something else than art: that it is a sphere both at one remove from politics and yet always already political because it contains the promise of a better world.