The Politics of Aesthetics

AIMING FOR THE ‘GREEN’: (Post)Colonial and Aesthetic Politics in the Design of a Purified Gated Environment

“…The deliberate aesthetic and architectural decisions to enclose the golf course with high‐rise towers, to design narrow towers to ensure each unit is inward (not outward) facing, and create floorplans so the majority of rooms in each apartment have unobstructed golf views, limit the boundaries of what is see‐able, in a Racièrian sense, in the Golf Gardens. Rancière (2004) defines aesthetics through the concept of the distribution of the sensible . The sensible is what defines ever changing boundaries of what can be seen, what is considered to be ‘in common’ to a community, and how individuals are (un)able to stake their claims to spaces or representation.…”

“…I show that architectural and design decisions aim to explicitly produce varying (in)visibilities on two different axes—horizontally from the inside out, and vertically from the top down. Based on these findings, I argue that the architectural decisions reproduce the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2004) through deliberate design attempts to delimit what can be seen, who can be seen, and who has the power to see. I will also show how those who work in and around the Golf Gardens contribute to the making of this space, the ways in which different groups are able (or unable) to stake a claim to this community, and how these design choices reflect broader violent urban planning developments that seek to erase the ‘other’ from view.…”

“…In this context, I am focused on how design and architectural decisions are employed by developers and architects to deliberately invite a particular form of audience uptake and facilitate the reception of sensory information. To do so, I utilize Rancière's (2004) theorizations of aesthetic politics and the distribution of the sensible. Aesthetics, for Rancière, is a political system that establishes certain boundaries around what is presented to society to experience, what can be legitimately seen and what is considered valuable, and what gets pushed to the background.…”

What Artists Want, What Artists Need: A Critical History of the Feral Art School, Hull, UK 2018 – Present

“…More polemically, the report argues that the arts are an essential force for inculcating engaged citizenship and civic agency. Citing continental theorists like Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) and Jacques Rancière (2004), whose work has in different ways defined the politics of aesthetics, alongside case studies of public art such as Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland (2004–12), the report argues the case for arts as a precondition for political engagement (Crossick & Kaszynska 2016, 58). Here, their concerns overlap precisely with those of the political theorist Brown (2015, 39–42), who argues that the most severe consequence of economisation is the absolute depoliticisation of the social body.…”

‘Those who laugh as a body today, will march as a body tomorrow’: Critical comedy and the politics of community

“…Such an inquiry is especially relevant at a time that critique is widely believed to have ‘run out of steam’ (Latour, 2004). As philosophers and social scientists have observed, critical strategies traditionally belonging to left-wing critics have been accommodated by corporate capitalism and adopted by conservative voices such as climate-change deniers (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Latour, 2004; Rancière, 2007). Comedians have also increasingly questioned the critical potential and progressive nature of humour.…”