Assemblies in Art and Politics: An interview with Jacques Rancière

Abstract

This interview was conducted on 8 October 2011 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It was held during a symposium that reflected on the work of Rancière and was a part of a broader engagement with the concept of autonomy and its relation to art organized by an umbrella group of universities and arts organizations under the name of ‘The Autonomy Project’. A number of the symposium’s participants – Peter Osborne, Gerald Raunig, Isabell Lorey, Ruth Sondregger, Kim Mereiene and Adrian Martin – contributed questions that formed the basis of this interview. The interview took place at a time when the longer-term possibilities of the Arab Spring and Occupy/Indignados movements were under general scrutiny. It was also a moment when the Van Abbemuseum itself was compelled to reflect on its own position of political autonomy in relation to neoliberal state directives, political populism at the local level and its own critique of aesthetic autonomy. Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics has been as much appreciated as a clearance strategy against prevailing visual prejudices as it has served as a platform for rethinking the emancipatory potential of creative practice.

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“…Indeed, this freedom is arguably what, in our era, makes art recognizable as such, since the ‘aesthetic experience’ has been constituted around an embodiment of such freedom. It is a freedom that, in approaching Art, we encounter but ‘we cannot possess’ (Rancière, in Papastergiadis and Esche, 2014: 30). By definition, artists are able to choose what and how to put things in relation.…”

“…As Rancière has argued, such work purposely underdetermines how the collection of things will make meaning in relation to each other, presenting the viewer with a kind of enigma. While the spectator of artworks has always had their own kind of freedom – whether to be interested or not, of course, but also beyond this, how to ‘use’ or ‘behave’ when confronted with these unexpected or unpredictable assemblages that neither describe or explain an event (Rancière, in Papastergiadis and Esche, 2014: 39) – these works explicitly intensify the spectator position as the one to whom that enigma is posed. Indeed, as in her celebrated film Los Rubios , part of Carri’s message seems to insist that interpretations are contingently gathered from many elements, becoming indistinguishable from fictional creations, especially where issues to do with human recall and human desire are in the mix.…”