Ranciere: From the Politics of Aesthetics

I call the distribution of the sensible he system of self-evident acts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes, one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. (p.12)

Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. (p.12)

(about the Distribution of the Sensible)

It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (p.13)

There is no criterion for establishing an appropriate correlation between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. (p.62)

From what I understand, the specific politics of every historical moment influence and determine how the politics or apolitics of a work of art can be interpreted.

Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll (1970)




The work MoMA Poll by Hans Haacke asked viewers to answer the question “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not voting for him in November?” Viewers could vote and the results were visually represented in transparent boxes. The artwork served as a form of political engagement in two ways. Not only did it function as a political poll (testing the unpopularity of Vietnam) but it also served as a form of institutional critique, as the Governor also served as a trustee of the Museum.

The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, 1999

The website www.alzado.net enabled any Internet user to design light sculptures over the city’s historic centre, with eighteen searchlights positioned around the square.



Antony Muntadas

The Boardroom," 1987

In "The Boardroom" (1987), tables and chairs became the charged accoutrements and signs of a quintessential corporate entity: in this case, organized religion. Fulfilling the convention were thirteen portrait photographs of television evangelists, like Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts and spiritual leaders like Pope John II and Ayatollah Khomeni. Tiny video monitors mounted in the thirteen portraits where the mouths of these leaders would be, delivered public messages of symbolic and commercial appeal from the walls of the private, privileged room (The Works of Antony Muntadas)

"Words: The Press Conference Room," 1991



Before the Ethical regime of images and then the poetic regime of art, art identification occurred via a division within the ways of "doing and making".

The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doung and making affiliated with art from other ways of doingnad making... (p.23)

About the aesthetic regime of the arts:

The aesthetic regime of the arts did not begin with decisions to initiate an artistic rupture. It began with decisions to reinterpret what makes art or what art makes. (p.25)

Malevich, Black Square, 1915



Wassily Kandinsky. Untitled (first abstract watercolor), 1910



Fountain de Marcel Duchamp, 1917

Documentary film, film devoted to the 'real', is in this sense capable of greater fictional invention than 'fiction' film, readily devoted to a certain stereotypes and characters.

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought

Julio