Jacques Rancière on Creative Emancipation

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. For Artforum’s March 2007 issue, artists John Kelsey and Fulvia Carnevale interviewed philosopher Jacques Rancière, tracking the thinker’s development from early research on nineteenth century workers’ struggles to a late-career fixation on contemporary art. The sprawling conversation formed the core of a cluster of essays dedicated to Rancière, including texts from artists and critics such as Kristin Ross, Paul Chan, Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Bettina Funcke detailing the myriad ways the Frenchman informed the art world’s conceptions of emancipation, equality, and aesthetics in the early twenty-first century. Rancière’s responses work to expand rather than limn the “precinct of art,” emphasizing the necessity of working in unbounded interdisciplinary roles to best explore the conditions of a world marked by seemingly infinite access to media and diminishing interest in art and literature. These concerns of attention and interest are further complicated by continual increases in financial inequality, which have produced a world “divided between those who can and those who cannot afford the luxury of playing with words and images.” To best “emancipate” themselves under such circumstances, Rancière suggests that artists and writers constantly remind themselves that “there are always several spaces in a space, several ways of occupying it, and each time the trick is knowing what sort of capacities one is setting in motion, what sort of world one is constructing.” Whether in discussions of the art market, the aesthetic and political potential of subculture, or the impact of geopolitical conflict on art, Rancière maintains the importance of subverting “consensus,” or the “inscription within given roles, possibilities, and competences.” Drawing from nearly three centuries of research in labor relations and the arts, Rancière asserts that space and time for thinking and creating freely is always worth fighting for, and always available to those who seize it for themselves. Read “Art of the Possible” from the March 2007 issue of Artforum. And explore more essays on Jacques Rancière in the March 2007 issue of Artforum. . . Regime Change: Jacques Rancière and Contemporary Art