The Emancipated Spectator

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This D&D Satellite Event is your chance to have your say, meet theatremakers from Folkestone and East Kent, and air the passions, irritations and grievances you have about your experience and wants for the theatre and the performing arts in our area. The first chapter puts forward the core idea that there has been a myth of peoples passivity generated from the established left which has been a central plank of classism by persuading people of the inequality of intelligence between them and their masters. Ranciere talks about abrutir rather than oppression. The crude idea of the inert masses was disposed of well before John Carey's 'The Intellectual and the Masses: : Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939' came out in 1992. Before that the idea of the myth of the audience as passive victims of the mass media was taken apart by many in Media and Communication studies. See Ien Ang's 1995 summary in which he concludes: "Media audiences are not 'masses' - anonymous and passive aggregates of people without identity. …media audiences are active in the ways they use, interpret, and take pleasure in media products. …We cannot say in advance which meanings and effects media content will have on audiences" (Downing et al. Sage, 1995, p.219). So Ranciere is following a well established media studies trend that he probably contributed to with his earlier writings. Mike Kelley, Mike Kelley: Minor Histories—Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 114–15. See Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” lecture given at the Fifth International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, August 20, 2004; Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum (March 2007): 271–80. Later published as the first chapter in Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2009). Thanks to Rebecca Uchill for this important reference. Ranciere directs this analysis at some of my favourite French theorists from Guy Debord to Pierre Bourdieu. Debord's 1967 'Society of the Spectacle', and its idea of a worId transfixed by consumption, was something I almost revered in my twenties. In spite of the academic groundwork done in the previous 20 years that I was aware of, reading Ranciere's analysis felt like shaking off a long dead leech. Ranciere is perhaps the first higher ranking philosopher to dare confront icons of the Marxist radical left with their, and our, own classism.

Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976/2005, two-channel video projection, props, stages, photographs. Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009. After the diagnosis he gives his prescription: "The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense - that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings." p.102. Well enough but most artists would think they are doing this. In fact even the episode of Dr Who that I watched recently could fit that description. In our ongoing adult learning series, In Focus, we link works from our collection with key art historical, theoretical or philosophical texts. Aimed especially at third-level students, but accessible to all, this series aims to support in-depth engagement with our collection and the selected texts. He proposes three propositions about the seemingly contradictory terms, community and the individual. This is a key Ranciere's theme - exploring the seeming contradiction between the unique sensibilities of each human and our need to be social beings and co-ordinate our actions. ALLOW ME, THEN, TO STAGE AN IMAGE: The performative public of Sehgal’s Guggenheim work forms a chiasmus with the public performative of Abramović’s recent activities. That is, if Sehgal propels the public into speech acts that constitute the work of art (e.g., that are performative), Abramović has often positioned the public as passive witnesses to reperformance. This is not to minimize the sheer ambition of Abramović or to disparage the heuristic value of her projects. In fact, her work serves to illuminate the dependence of reperformance on the artistic documentation that Sehgal so assiduously eschews. Working against museums’ attempts to convert ephemeral performance events into concrete, fungible assets (via authenticated, collected documents that can become scripts for “authorized” reenactments), Abramović’s reconstructions ultimately reveal the impossibility of stable authenticity where performance art is concerned. Her 2005 Guggenheim series set into high relief the modesty and transience of those ’70s events (most staged in galleries, performed for tape in the studio, or enacted on the street—definitely not in museums). And as art historian Mechtild Widrich has shown (building on the work of Amelia Jones and others), those 2005 reperformances were often constructed from staged photographs (as with Export’s work, to take only the most intriguing example), resulting in a mise en abyme of reproduction in which there is never any secure, original “performance” to be restaged.⁸ Instead of the authentic re-creation of “presence,” where we could (re)experience an “original,” what Abramović produced was another link in the chain of performatives—those successive iterations that continuously constitute the audience for “the performance” and produce the palimpsest of memories we call “the work.” By analogy with what Michel Foucault called the author function, we might call these accumulated performatives “the artwork function”: the aggregate that, when successful, builds the collective and experiential substance of the living work of art.

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I've read it and would love to chat (I was sorry to miss the session but I was in my own). My research is all about theatre If we take Rancière’s statement alluding to equality between image and lived reality, this is where we can further assume a theatrical iteration of this painting. We can shift the focus in the painting from us watching people watching a marriage ceremony, and we can dissolve the surface of the canvas and enter the scene. We can even continue this by imagining the scene expanding into the room in which it is is displayed. The Emancipated Spectator, published in 2009, is an influential essay from Jacques Rancière’s book of the same title. This text has contributed significantly to thinking around contemporary theatre and live art. For this week’s In Focus we are trying something a little different! We are going to consider the ideas presented in this text in relation to a work that dates to over 150 years earlier, Daniel Maclise’s The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854). First of all, we must reimagine the painting as a piece of theatre: its scale and content will help us to do this. You, the reader, are a spectator in an expanded field of engagement, which demands creative thinking. For this discussion, let your imagination allow this painting to penetrate its surface into an illusion of a live event. Devoted & Disgruntled is a nationwide conversation about theatre and the performing arts, run by theatre company Improbable.

J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1962). This chapter is the most abstruse and theoretically abstract. It reminds me of Barthes third term of semiotics from Image - Music - Text (1977). [7]. Ranciere writes that an image "contains … a thought that cannot be attributed to the intention of the person who produces it and which has an effect on the person who view it without her linking it to a determinate object." "This indeterminacy problematises the gap that I have tried to signal elsewhere between the two ideas of the image: the common notion of the image as a duplicate of a thing and the images conceived as an artistic operation." p.107 There are three key aspects of the The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife that can support an approach to the painting as a form of theatre: For any critical assessment of Ranciere's theoretical work on the spectacle must allow for bodies and actions, gatherings and audiences that are no longer what they were in Debord's time, with the important theoretical and practical difference being that almost no one today believes that the society of the spectacle can be reversed or used against consumer capitalism. Seyircinin edilgen olma durumunun artık sona ermesini ve yaşayışla iç içe geçen sanat eserlerinin üretiminin desteklenmesini öngörüyor. Müze ve sanat merkezlerine hapsolan üretimlerin artık hareket etmesini, nefes almasını istiyor.Perhaps because he foregrounds the traction of symbolic transformation on material change, Rancière’s work has been most readily absorbed into contemporary art discourse." Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 'From The Cult of the People, to the Cult of Ranciere', Mute vol 3 n.3, 2012 The idea of pensiveness is first ascribed to Honore de Balzac in his novella 'Sarrasine' (1830) via Barthe's famous analysis in S/Z (1970). Balzac ends his narrative indeterminately by finally leaving the protagonist 'pensive', with the suggestion of a continuing and undefined thought process that goes beyond the narrative. Ranciere goes on to discuss the incidental micro events described in 'Madame Bovary' (1856) by Gustave Flaubert. The micro events are like silent pictures inserted into, but also above, and beyond the narrative. "The pensiveness of the image is then the latent presence of one regime of expression within another." p.124 I think the twenty-first century will hopefully be more guided by “how” questions—how am I a product or how am I related to these people here? . . . And what is the ethics implied by this? Recently I saw the 'Seduced by Art' photography and painting show at London's National Gallery. The show opens with Jeff Wall's large 1978 'The Destroyed Room' photograph. Wall is said to use a 'strategy of quotation without direct imitation' and it is implied as a key to reading the whole show. The influence of Delacroix's 1853 painting “The Death of Sardanapalus” is claimed. I'd rather have seen it separate from being told how to look at it. I very much felt that such curatorial guidance was closing off any of my own thought. That is stultification. My own thoughts on seeing this work in reproduction were very different. I did not want to have this framework forced onto my first viewing of the actual print. However I suspect that Wall may have made this claim originally as much as a strategy to have his work shown as Art as something he wished to frame the work with. By Rancière’s time, critical theory had become pervasive in almost every field of study, from the theater to paintings to the social body and the economy itself. According to Rancière, the critical approach attempts to make one aware of the repressed, ugly parts of the system in which they are complicit in.

Let us take a moment to connect these ideas to The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife. The painting can be read as a depiction of a crowd surrounding two individuals, Aoife and Strongbow; however if we accept Rancière’s cohesion between the collective and the individual, we can instead understand all the people in the painting (including Aoife and Strongbow) as a collective or a mosaic of individuals, with an equality given to each of them. This, perhaps, does not correspond with either the artist’s intentions or the real political implications of this event. There is a hierarchy offered by the artist, which you can read about here in this post on the painting’s history, characters, and symbolism.Today, his philosophical contributions in important works such as The Politics of Aesthetics, The Future of the Image and, now, The Emancipated Spectator, are embraced by distinguished literary theorists including Kristin Ross and the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The Emancipated Spectator is intended to improve our comprehension of art and deepen our grasp of the politics of perception. Ranciere directs this analysis at some of my favourite French theorists from Guy Debord to Pierre Bourdieu. Debord's 1967 'Society of the Spectacle', and its idea of a worId transfixed by consumption, was something I almost r