Perhaps “presence” today is ontologically related to these public spaces of surveillance? It was possible for this viewer to be moved by Abramović’s own imprisonment in the artwork and to feel empathy. I cried, she cried, and in that limbic sense our mirror neurons were certainly co-present. Earlier this year I went to a conference in Lisbon in which Jacques Rancière and Hans Belting discussed various problematics regarding the image. Despite having unfortunately chosen a seat next to a gentleman who kept falling asleep and loudly snoring, I enjoyed the talk, and was intrigued enough to delve into Jacques Rancière’s work (I was already familiar with Hans Belting’s).

The current scepticism is the result of a surfeit of faith. It was generated by the disappointed belief in a straight line between perception, affection, comprehension and action…" "The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated. p.103 bilgin konumuna geçmek için değil, tercüme sanatını daha iyi uygulayabilmek, tecrübelerini kelimelere dökebilmek ve kelimelerini sınayabilmek; entelektüel maceralarını başkalarının faydalanması için tercüme edebilmek ve onların kendi maceralarını sundukları tercümeleri kendi diline tercüme edebilmek See Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 2009; Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998); Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). On Seven Easy Pieces, see also Johanna Burton, “Repeat Performance,” Artforum (January 2006); 55–56. Apparently, at a performance art workshop, Abramović asked Sehgal openly how he managed this, when her practice requires her to continue selling photographs and videos. He answered that his training began in economics and that through this discipline he learned how exchange could be based on consensus about value rather than about objects. Carol Kino, “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue,” New York Times, March 10, 2010: AR25.Ranciere'nin Cahil Hoca kitabını ne çok sevmiştim. Bu kitabı da Cahil Hoca'yı yazarken aldığı notlardan oluşuyor. I've read it and would love to chat (I was sorry to miss the session but I was in my own). My research is all about theatre

A group of French artists proposed a projected tiled “I and US”, comprising in a space where someone could exist in complete solitude, encapsulating the modern need to be apart, disconnected from the inflow of images and capital, something which is rendered impossible in the ordinary life in the Parisian suburbs. He claims these three propositions define an 'aesthetic community in general', which is a 'community of sense' rather than one of aesthetes. An artistic dissensual community can produce the 'anticipated reality' of a wider community. Representation (or mimesis) requires a 'concordance' between the sensory regime of one person and another - between the artist and the spectator. The radical tradition from Rousseau to Debord has seen a gap at the heart of 'the mimetic community', a gap between stage and audience, between spectacle and consumer. Ranciere's way of neutralising the gap is to hold out that any reader has a unique subject position and so will make a specific interpretation which is all her own. This produces a necessary distance between the intention of the artist and the interpretation of the reader or viewer. There are three key aspects of the The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife that can support an approach to the painting as a form of theatre: What I see in Ranciere is a persistent gnawing away at classism whilst also carefully keeping his place in the dominant stage with neo-classical references and clever word play. When Bourdieu admits that extreme expressions of class disgust had been censored from Distinction he says: "one cannot objectify the intellectual game without putting at stake one's own stake in the game -- a risk which is at once derisory and absolute" (p.163).We live in a time of separation. People are lonelier than ever before, which is unusual given the sheer number of people on Earth: we are numerous but alone. Western societies where advanced capitalism and rugged individualism have free reign produce an epidemic of loneliness and mental illness. Our connections with others have dispersed. The only relations that remain are those perpetuated and mediated by capital, those relations where there’s always self interest involved. Rancière abolishes the distinction between activity and passivity: watching, observing, and spectating are monumental acts, no different to that of coming together in marriage. Through the act of spectating, we are participating. It locates the art object as an autonomous thing, dislodged from the intentions of the artist and available to associations attributed by the viewer at any given moment. Contemplation may appear to be passive, but it is an action that is internal and not explicitly visible. Finally a passage from Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?' (1991) is quoted at length. His summary is that this is about the link between "the solitude of the artwork and human community" p.55. "For the complex of sensations to communicate its vibration, it has to be solidified in the form of a monument. Now the monument in turn assumes the identity of a person who speaks to the 'ear of the future'." p.56 Jacques Rancière, (1999/2008) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

He then goes on to a comment by GWF Hegel in ' Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art' (1835) on a paintings of beggar boys in Seville by B.E. Murillo (c1650). The subject is judged fit for painting and Hegel insists that the important thing is that the beggar boys are doing nothing, and don't seem to care about anything. In this they illustrate the essential virtue of gods, who are made in the image of the ruling class. Is Hegel relating to the aesthetic ideal of detachment and of course the ruling class ideal of doing w.t.f. they like? Or was he simply having a laugh at the expense of the airs and graces assumed by the ruling class? Ranciere comments that his idea of the pensive image is an idea of a sort of inactivity and that Hegel has interpreted the painting for his own uses. It's not every day that the art world decides to adopt a new philosophical leading-light, so judging by the list of international art institutions and universities at which Ranciere has presented previous versions of these essays, its clear that he has become the latest French thinker to make the crossover from the academy to the artworld." JJ Charlesworth Art Review, January, 2010 It would be assumed that the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place. It would be assumed that there is no fatal mechanism transforming reality into image; no monstrous beast absorbing all desires and energies into its belly; no lost community to be restored. What there is are simply scenes of dissensus, capable of surfacing at any place and at any time. p.48. The politicized aesthetic that emerges from this book perhaps precludes a thorough and satisfying engagement with the actual practices of collaborative and relational art; the critique of the spectacle more or less exhausts the ambitions of political art for Rancière. The book’s remarks on the actual political efficacy of political art are significant. Its sustained defence of the spectator amounts to an important critical exploration of the intentions of contemporary artists and develops Marxist and postmodern cultural and critical theory that reminds its reader, in ways reminiscent of Barthesian theories of reading and textuality, of the political nature of spectating and aesthetic experience. Devoted & Disgruntled: What are we doing to make the opera industry truly reflect the diversity of the country, on and off stage?

Success!

He talks about the spectator as “separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act” (Rancière, 2009). To resolve this problem of passivity, theatre-makers Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) attempted to create versions of theatre with active participants as audiences. However, Rancière identifies a myth that the spectator is ever passive, and challenges art that makes a conscious attempt to activate the spectator by experimenting with ways of abolishing the gap between the audience and the performers. According to Rancière, this is simply replicating an authority over audiences by prescribing modes of connection between the spectator and art. Rancière points out that the audience can never be passive. He does not see a structural opposition between collective and individual, image and lived reality, or activity and passivity.