Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art

The introduction outlines the general goals of the book and the ways in which the concept of aesthetic autonomy has evolved over the course of the modern period, drawing particular attention to its complex linkage with concepts of political transformation. It focuses in particular on the specific evolution of the aesthetic in art criticism and theory over the past thirty years in relationship to the parallel emergence of new forms of socially engaged art practice, which challenge many of the founding assumptions of conventional aesthetic autonomy. The introduction also includes summaries of each chapter, along with an overview of the broader historical argument that is presented in The Sovereign Self, a companion volume to Beyond the Sovereign Self.

Introduction

2023

The Incommensurability of Socially Engaged Art

2023

This chapter introduces some of the key themes that will be explored in the remainder of the book as they have been elaborated in recent art criticism. This will entail an examination of the specific ways in which theorists identified with the avant-garde tradition sought to critique socially engaged art practices. It focuses primarily on the work of Jacques Rancière, with a shorter discussion of Chantal Mouffe. These theorists were deployed to justify the claim that socially engaged art possess no legitimate “aesthetic” value. As such, they can play an important diagnostic role in the book’s broader analysis. Through a closer examination of these critiques, one can develop a more precise understanding of the ways in which the aesthetic has been mobilized as an evaluative category in contemporary art theory and a clearer sense of how engaged art practices challenge this set of beliefs.

Escrache and Autonomy

2023

For Jacques Rancière, engaged art violates the necessary separation of the artist from the exigencies of political change, thereby abandoning art’s unique critical potential. This chapter challenges that interpretation, drawing out aesthetic qualities associated with engaged art that are not apparent within the hermeneutic frame that Rancière employs. Readings of several projects identify the ways in which aesthetic and critical experience is mobilized in these works through forms of resistance that operate outside the institutional art world. The chapter also links these practices with a longer tradition of collaborative and activist art production, arguing that the new forms of insight catalyzed by contemporary engaged art are simply the most recent manifestation of a mode of creative production with many precedents in the modernist tradition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the “melting down” of existing forms of aesthetic autonomy in the European avant-garde during the 1920s.