tailieunhanh - Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

They also suggest that experimentation with aesthetic form reflects a desire to experiment with human form. Beholders discover in vandalized works an image of disability that asks to be contemplated not as a symbol of human imperfection but as an experience of the corporeal variation found everywhere in modern life. Art is materialist because it relies on the means of production and the availability of material resources—as Marx understood. But art is also materialist in its obsession with the embodiment of new conceptions of the human. At a certain level, objects of art are bodies, and aesthetics is the science. | o Volume 2. No. 1 Summer 2008 A Journal of Ideas Contexts and Methods ISSN 1752-6388 Aesthetic Separation Aesthetic Community Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art1 Jacques Rancière I shall bring up my subject by a short analysis of three propositions on community and separation. I take the word proposition in its widest sense a proposition means a statement it means a proposal or an offer it also means an artistic dispositif which lends itself to some form of response or interaction. Georges Seurat Bathers at Asnières 1884 oil on canvas 791 8 x 118-1 8 detail Reproduced by kind permission of the National Gallery Urban Encampment Je Nou video still Reproduced by kind permission of Urban Encampment. The first proposition I shall comment upon is the shortest one. It is a poetic statement in four words four French words Séparés on est ensemble that I will translate as follows Apart we are together . This statement is quoted from a prose-poem by Mallarmé The White Water lily . I will remind you what the poem is about. The poet makes a small boat trip on the river in order to see a lady who is supposed to stay somewhere along the river in the neighbourhood as he gets close to the place where he believes that she stays he hears a light noise of footsteps that might be the sign of the presence of the invisible lady after having enjoyed that proximity the poet decides to keep the mystery of the lady and the secret of their being-together unviolated by silently moving back without seeing her and being seen by her. The poem was first published in a magazine entitled Art and Fashion. So it is easy to blame the paradox of the being together apart on the sophisticated attitude of the poet in search of both metaphysical purity and refined sensations. That easy attitude has to ignore two things first the solitude of the being together was put at the same time on two large canvasses that were to pass on as paradigms of modern painting I mean Seurat s Grande Jatte and Bathing in