Aesthetics: Art and Non-Art

© Association of Art Historians 2014 1005

Reviews

Aesthetics: Art and Non-ArtDan Karlholm

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art by Jacques Rancière, trans. Zakir Paul, London and New York: Verso, 2013, 304 pp., £ 20.00

The translation into English of philosopher Jacques

Rancière’s magnum opus on aesthetics, which fi rst

appeared in French in 2011, is a major event. For

more than a decade now, the author has been one of

the key theorists of art, due, in particular I suppose,

to his proposal on historically unfolding ‘regimes of

art’, from an ethic regime in Western antiquity, to a

representational regime predominant throughout the

‘classic age’ (Foucault’s term) to an aesthetic regime of

the arts from around 1800 – continuing uninterrupted

into our times (although the latter extension is not

covered in the present publication).

There have been historical references, names,

quotations and examples attached to Rancière’s

arguments on this reconceptualization of artistic

modernity in his previously published texts, in

particular The Politics of Aesthetics (2000; 2004), but also

The Future of the Image (2003; 2007), and The Emancipated Spectator (2008; 2009). But if these texts have been

primarily demanding, for an art historian or non-

philosopher, on an intellectual level, his latest

book reverses the relation between information

and conceptualization, facts and philosophy. What

comes across as demanding in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art is the plethora of empirical detail,

although the book is elegantly written, and, as far

as I can tell, superbly translated. This amassment of

historical circumstance, contingencies and minutiae is

not to be deplored, as such; only it appears to reverse

the typical procedure, whereby an archival research

phase is followed by a conclusion or summary.

Rancière, however, professed his conclusions years

ago, and what we are offered here is the argument

belatedly fl eshed out through the archival bodies of

modern art and culture.

The text is composed of fourteen case study-like

chapters or successive ‘scenes’ from 1764 to 1941,

or from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to James

Agee and Walker Evans (and Clement Greenberg).


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While each scene is arranged to reveal a version of

the author’s rather familiar argument, the reader

receives new knowledge about both well-known

and obscure details of the last centuries, along with

fresh aspects of the gradually unfolding ‘aesthetic’

theme. Through a clip from a lecture by Ralph

Waldo Emerson entitled The Poet, we are introduced

into the intellectual circles of Boston in 1841, where,

according to the author, before Paris, London or

Moscow, for example, ‘the modernist ideal … in

all its radicalism – the ideal of a new poetry of

new man’, was fi rst put into words (56). The idea

is presented that a Hegelian contemporaneity of

thought and world is what modernity refutes.

Instead, ‘the modern world is characterized by a

gap between temporalities’ (63). This interesting

remark resembles the following from The Politics of Aesthetics: ‘… the temporality specifi c to the aesthetic

regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous

temporalities’,1 which links modernity to the

aesthetic regime, despite the author’s current claim

to offering something like a ‘counter-history of

“artistic modernity”’ (xiii). Whatever it is called,

this book is a most fruitful rereading of artistic

modernity, where the crux of modernism (versus

postmodernism) is put to rest, since no longer

deemed a viable, descriptive concept. I fi nd this

persuasive and well-argued regarding the period

covered here, which comes to a halt before the

Second World War, and thus bypasses the problems

of our supposedly contemporary era.

We are guided, instead, through pantomime as

‘anti-theatre’ (80), serpentine dance as an abstract,

pure display of forms (100), theatre ‘without action’

(113), sculpture as ‘deliberately created bodies lacking

heads and limbs’ (160), ‘a cinema of the fact’ (228),

to name a few of the book’s adventures. One of the

best scenes is devoted to Charlie Chaplin via Viktor

Shklovsky’s critical judgment of 1923. The legendary

fi gure of ‘Charlot’ is ‘entirely assimilated into the

unfolding potentialities of cinematic art’ but also,

according to Rancière, ‘relegated to the margins of

this art, identifi ed with a performance, which cinema

is merely the means of recording’ (192). Chaplin’s

movements on fi lm are no longer expressive or

representative, but ‘a way of inscribing signs on a

white surface’ (193). The coverage of examples thus

ranges from the sphere of fi ne art to popular culture,

from painting and sculpture to photography, fi lm,

dance, theatre, performance, and several cross-

mediations between these. The latter, of course,

form part of the argument, namely that the previous

‘representational’ regime, as well as a stereotypical

defi nition of modernism, had built its historical case

on the autonomy of the individual arts, whereas,

this author argues, a generalized concept of ‘Art’ was

born, along with art history, in the mid-eighteenth

century. While this particular claim is not original,

the corollary is, namely that the development of

modern art was rather the opposite of a purported

purifi cation or separation of the individual arts: ‘the

movement belonging to the aesthetic regime, which

supported the dream of artistic novelty and fusion

between art and life subsumed under the idea of

modernity, tends to erase the specifi cities of the arts

and to blur the boundaries that separate them from

each other and from ordinary experience’ (xii).

This is an important and central clarifi cation,

which indicates, in my reading, a few of the problems

I have with this argument as a whole. Certainly, the

old model of relative specifi city between the arts,

within an established hierarchy of academic art

in the West, gave way to a more relaxed one with

the emergence of the aesthetic regime. But were

boundaries between the arts and the domain of non-

art really both ‘blurred’ as well? The fi rst verb here

– erase – is hard and defi nitive, seemingly pointing

to an irreversible reduction, but the second verb –

blur – is, apart from being a staple of postmodernist

discourse, soft and diffi cult to determine. Are we

to understand that a blurred boundary simply

presents an unfocused view, aesthetically speaking,

or that the boundary has become theoretically

impossible to draw? Did a public staging of a

dance performance, for example, using modernist

backdrops and following an atonal musical score,

blur the boundaries between these arts? I am not

sure it did, but if so, boundaries within the domains

of dance, painting and music, respectively, were

still vital, if also, perhaps, increasingly diffi cult to

see or to draw. If blurring was indeed an aesthetic

interest, this would have required the maintenance

of boundaries. Ever since Romanticism, a tendency

can be detected, for sure, towards intermingling,

cross-mediation, and ‘total works of art’ (Wagner),

but this is also balanced with other trajectories, other

strong tendencies throughout this period. Clement

Greenberg pointed to one important trend within

the confi nes of Western, ‘modernist painting’,2

but the very strength of his well-known critical


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interpretation has paradoxically backfi red and come

to threaten its general validity, and has since been

unduly extended, paraphrased and misrepresented

by so many of those who have wanted to nail down

modernism as monolithic, formal, rigid, ‘over’,

etcetera. Such generalized ‘Modernism’ is, arguably,

literally a postmodern phenomenon, that is: a term

of ‘retrospective’ (xiii) value – as Rancière seems

to imply by picking that word as a determinant

to modernism – used not during the period of

‘modernism’ but from around the event of its

gradual dissolution around the 1960s onwards, with

reference to abstract art and the lessening of mimetic

impulses.3

Now, what about blurring the boundary between

the arts and ‘ordinary experience’? Certainly, the arts

in question during this era many times did their best to

overcome, transgress or deny the boundary between

‘art and life’, but the perpetuation of such blurring

activities, I would say, is essential for avant-gardism as

such. The avant-garde hardly desired to break through

to, and remain on, the other side of art. Borders to blur

must by all means remain. My problem with this part

of the argument, I realize, has to do with the author’s

most general formulation, here and in earlier texts, of

what aesthetics means. These are the opening sentences

of the book:

This book deals with the same topic in fourteen

scenes. This topic is announced by its very

title: Aisthesis. For two centuries in the West,

‘aesthetics’ has been the name for the category

designating the sensible fabric and intelligible

form of what we call ‘Art’. (ix)

He adds that this Greek term denotes ‘the mode of

experience, according to which, for two centuries,

we perceive very diverse things, whether in their

techniques of production or their destination, as all

belonging to art’ (x). Previously, the formulation

was even sharper: ‘the word aesthetics … refers to

the specifi c mode of being of whatever falls within

the domain of art.’4 When he testifi es, furthermore,

to his reliance on Immanuel Kant for his theory of

the aesthetic regime, the identifi cation between

aesthetics and art becomes even more puzzling.

Kant famously subsumes fi ne art to what could be

called an aesthetic universe of form (and relative

formlessness), where it co-habits with fl owers,

birds, sea shells and the like.5 Rancière’s emphasis

on sensible experience explains his preoccupation

with aesthetics, and all of the arts, but it bypasses

completely the fact that aesthetic experience

transgresses, potentially, the realm of art. The

differentiation between ‘ordinary experience’ and

experiences of art may indeed be blurry, aesthetically

speaking, without impacting the ontological

difference of the objects of the equation. It may

be hard to differentiate, for example, the intense

blue of an Yves Klein monochrome from that of

an equally visually striking blue shirt – it may be

equally pleasurable, or the reverse. Characteristic of

art during and after modernism, however, is that the

art coeffi cient, so to speak, cannot be discerned or

identifi ed with an aesthetic point of view only.

The structure of the book is modelled on Erich

Auerbach’s classic text Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953). This explains the

composition, where each chapter begins with a

longer quotation from some archival source, whether

a literary work of art, a review, article, etcetera. The

ensuing essays work to unpack the implications of

the somewhat arbitrary selection from the period

under investigation. I will return to Auerbach in

my conclusion, despite, or rather because of, the

fact that he is not dealt with in the text, although

acknowledged in the Prelude, and referred to

once. But fi rst, I would like to comment on the fi rst

selection: a textual fragment from Winckelmann’s

History of Ancient Art (1764), dealing with the famous

fragmented marble sculpture of Hercules known as

the Belvedere Torso. This part is followed by the section

from G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics (1828) that deals

with beggar boys depicted in Murillo’s seventeenth-

century paintings. These two scenes are odd in the

mix in that they illustrate responses to historical art

as opposed to all of the following examples, which

are devoted to then current artistic achievements in

some shape or form, from Stendhal’s novel Red and Black

(1830) to Agee and Evans’ photo documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The bulk of the examples

in Aisthesis, conforming to materializing the aesthetic

regime of the arts, is thus also dealt with by Auerbach,

who studies the same novel by Stendhal and ends

with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). There

would be opportunities, one would think, to both

acknowledge and take issue with this predecessor in

the text, but the author never argues directly with

named opponents. Whenever he is critical of others,

these are lumped together as nameless ignorants:


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some argue that, others disagree, ‘it is readily said’

(50), etcetera. There are strikingly few references to

current research within the evoked disciplines of art,

cultural history, and aesthetics, by the way, especially

considering the vast terrain covered.

The fi rst scene devoted to a section from

Winckelmann’s history of ancient art would perhaps

have been better off as a kind of prologue, since

this example actually precedes the aesthetic regime

of the arts as previously defi ned, although that is

of course what the author tries to complicate here,

which is fi ne as such. The section mulling over

Winckelmann is largely compelling, especially

regarding the emergence of a theme of inactivity

or passivity that the author argues is constitutive

of the aesthetic regime as opposed to the active

programme of poeisis and mimesis, with its rules, plots,

clear beginnings and ends, characteristic of the

representational regime, and also with respect to

the history of the people, through the history of art,

that Winckelmann helps inaugurate. On the whole,

however, the author reads Winckelmann’s text as if

the latter already belonged to Romanticism, and as if

Winckelmann found the mutilated state of the statue

as such a refi ned form of perfection, in the quasi-

whole form of the fragment.

Here is Winckelmann: ‘Abused and mutilated

to the utmost, and without head, arms, or legs, as

this statue is, it shows itself even now to those who

have the power to look deeply into the secrets of art

with all the splendor of its former beauty’ (1). The

statue is broken, brutally put, but regardless of how

it ‘is … now’, those sensible and knowledgeable

enough today, like the author himself, can still enjoy

the statue as it once was, in its ‘former beauty’. The

antiquarian, whose whole history of art was written

in front of more or less fragmented bits and pieces of

antiquity, manages to see through the present state

of mutilation, although being fully sensible to its

melancholic as well as erotic allure.6 Winckelmann

manages, in his own words, to ‘behold in

imagination’ the body of Hercules as such. He can

detect no veins, but indeed a belly ‘made only to

enjoy’ – not as a marble fragment, needless to say,

but as a well-trained male body part. He sees the

head (that is lacking), the breast and the thighs;

‘the bones appear covered with a fatty skin, and the

muscles are full without superfl uity’ (1–2), he writes,

despite the fact that there are no bones here, no

skin or muscles, only stone. He manages to see the

desirable, perhaps even perfect, body of an athlete,

despite the statue and its deplorable contemporary

state of ruination.

Auerbach is dismissed as too confi ned to an older

model of mimesis as imitation, while this is not how

Rancière defi nes mimesis. In a recent interview, he

clarifi ed his position:

… what constitutes mimesis as an order is

not a norm for the imitation of reality, but

the fact that imitation or representation is

included within a number of rules, within a

whole division between what is artistic and

what is not artistic, between the noble genres

and the non-noble genres, etc. I understand

mimesis as the classical order, a total order that

subjects the representation of reality not only

to a certain number of restrictive norms, but

to a certain hierarchical model. So what I

fi nd important, and what separates me from

Auerbach, is that the question of what is called

‘realism’ is connected to the destruction of

the fundamental model of Aristotle’s poetics,

where the work is defi ned fi rst of all by its

plot, and the plot is defi ned fi rst of all as a

chain of actions.7

But when Auerbach reads Flaubert to fi nd that

‘nothing happens’ to these mundane and ordinary

individuals,8 this short observation, at least, is fully

congruent with Rancière’s own contention, for

example, that ‘[t]o have the power to do everything,

and consequently to do nothing, to head towards

nothing: this is the troubling logic laid bare by this

literature …’ (50).

Considering, fi nally, the divide between art and

non-art, that is supposedly blurred or erased by the

aesthetic regime of the arts, much more needs to

be said about the last seventy years of art making in

the increasingly globalized West than is said here.

The author hints at the possibility of a continuation,

and I hope this is realized eventually. The fact that

Rancière has long proclaimed disinterest in art

from the 1960s onward, despite several fruitful

preoccupations with instances of contemporary

art today, and that this account ends before the

Second World War, saves him from dealing with a

situation where advanced art is more determined

by a generic form of conceptualism, rather than a

sensible aestheticism, no matter how much interest


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in aesthetics is noticeable on the current art scene.

But this very interest testifi es, in my view, to a

widespread dissatisfaction with the conceptual

conditions of possibility, or ‘post-conceptual’

confi nement of contemporary art,9 rather than

mirroring or representing the supposedly aesthetic

regime of the arts today.

Notes1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.

Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York, 2004, 26.

2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist painting’, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, Vol. IV, Chicago, IL, 1993,

85–93.

3 Terry Smith, ‘Modernism’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, Vol. 21,

New York, 1996, 776.

4 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 22.

5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York,

1974, 66 (§ 16).

6 Cf. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven and London, 1994.

7 Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Kim West, ‘Senses of the sensible:

Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Site, 33, 2013, 19.

8 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new

intro. by Edward W. Said, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2003.

9 Cf. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London and New York, 2013.

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Aesthetics: Art and Non-Art