Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

notes to pages 23– 9
that our responsibility as world citizens does not leave off where our
careers begin.’ (Dan Cameron, ‘Into Africa’, Afterall, pilot issue, 1998– 9,
p. 65.)
41 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Benjamin, Understanding
Brecht, London: Verso, 1998, p. 98.
42 Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12.
43 Ibid., p. 24.
44 Ibid., p. 150.
45 Peter Dews, ‘Uncategorical Imperatives: Adorno, Badiou and the Ethical
Turn’, Radical Philosophy, 111, January–February 2002, p. 33.
46 See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London:
Verso, 2001; Slavoj Žižek, ‘Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism’, New Left Review, September–October 1997,
and ‘Against Human Rights’, New Left Review, July–August 2005;
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, London: Verso, 2006.
47 See Gillian Rose, ‘Social Utopianism – Architectural Illusion’, in The
Broken Middle, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 306.
48 Art has a ‘relatively autonomous position, which provides a sanctuary
where new things can emerge’, writes Jeanne van Heeswijk (‘Fleeting
Images of Community’, available at www.jeanneworks.net); ‘the world
of culture is the only space left for me to do what I can do, there’s nothing
else’, says the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar (interview with the author, 9
May 2005). A recent discussion with fi ve socially engaged artists at Tania
Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International (New York, 23 April
2011) foregrounded the artists’ lack of accountability: community activists
and organisers persistently questioned the artists about the need to
take their gestures to the next level by pressing for policy change.
49 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments
of Autonomy and Heteronomy’, New Left Review, March–April
2002, p. 137, and The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2004.
50 For Rancière, dissensus is the core of politics: ‘a dispute over what is
given and about the frame within which we sense something is given’.
Consensus, by contrast, is understood to foreclose the fi eld of debate and
reduce politics to the authoritarian actions of the ‘police’. See Jacques
Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London: Continuum,
2010, p. 69.
51 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Artforum, March 2007,
pp. 271– 80.
52 Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris: Editions Galilée, 2004,
p. 145, my translation.
53 Ibid., p. 159, my translation.
54 Rancière, ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’, available at http:/ / theater.kein.
org.
55 Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, p. 66, my translation.
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