Lessons in Futility: Francis Alÿs and the Legacy of ... - Grant Kester

invalidate it as an art practice any more than the fact that Thomas Hirschhorn’s
installations may reinforce, rather than disrupt, the self-perception of art world
viewers. The more relevant question, and the question that can help us grasp the
complex and necessary inter-dependence of the aesthetic and the ethical, is to
what extent the work remains mindful of the violence of community and of
representation itself.
Grant Kester, © 2008
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor,
translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona
Sawhney, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.35.
2 Marcus Steinweg, WORLDPLAY (Integrated text for Thomas Hirschhorn,
Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress), (Boston: Institute
of Contemporary Art, 2005), unpaginated.
3 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall
2004), p.79.
4 Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End: France, May
1968 (London: Verso, 1998), p.99.
5 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, edited and translated by
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), pp.7, 25.
6 Ibid., p.45.
7 Ibid., pp.37, 25.
8 Ibid., p.7.
9 Ibid., p.157.
10 Ibid., p.141.
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