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December 1, 2009
At this Undoing the Aesthetic Image conference mentioned in Radical Philosophy Jacques Rancière refers to two recent trends in contemporary photography--the historical tableau of Jeff Wall and the monumental portaits of Rineke Dijk.
He argues that photography is not content to occupy the place of painting Rather it:
presents itself as the rediscovered union between two statuses of the image that the modernist tradition had separated: the image as representation of an individual and as operation of art. How should we think of this new coincidence and tension between the grand pictorial form and simple images of indifferent individuals?
From what I understand, Rancière's aesthetics holds that politics is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order. Aesthetics is bound up in this battle because the battle takes place over the image of society -- what it is permissible to say or to show.
On the other hand, we have a politics of aesthetics, which, in the modernist regime, establishes the autonomy of art, the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself and liberates art from being shackled to any particular noble content that distinguishes it from everyday life. This artistic egalitarianism is analogous to the breaking down of real social and political hierarchies.
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