QUOTING RANCIèRE he writes better then me

Art and politics are not two terms that would be linked through some form of representation. They are constituted as such in the same knot of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable, in the same framing of a common space where some practices appear to be named "arts" and some matters to be viewed of as "political".

Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it carries on the state of social and political issues. It is not political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with regard to those functions. It is political as it frames a specific space-time sensorium, as it redefines on this stage the power of speech or the coordinates of perception, shifts the places of the actor and the spectator, etc.

The first point to understand is as follows: there is art, in general, to the extent that there is a specific regime of identification. I call a regime of identification of art an articulation between three things: modes of production of objects or of interrelation of actions; forms of visibility of these manners of making and doing ; and manners of conceptualizing these practices and these modes of visibility. These modes of conceptualization are not simply added interpretations. They are conditions of possibility of what artistic practices can produce and what aesthetic gazes can see.

Art is "political", in the aesthetic regime of art, insofar as it is identified within an autonomous form of experience. This regime sets the relationship between the forms of identification of art and the forms of the political community in a way that dismisses in advance any opposition between an autonomous and a heteronomous art, art for art’s sake and art committed to politics, art in the museum and art in the street. Because the "aesthetic autonomy" is not, as the "modernist" paradigm has it, the autonomy of the work of art as such. It is the autonomy of a form of experience. And this autonomous form of experience appears as the principle of the self-formation of a new humanity.

"Sanella ist Backen - Backen ist Liebe" - "Sanella is Baking - Baking is Love"

Another nice example for abusive use of meaning is the advertising campaign of the German margarine company "Sanella": "Baking is Love - Sanella is Baking" (www.sanella.de), very interesting because it uses the structure of a classical syllogism in philosophy (the conclusio would be that Sanella is Love, though, obviously, the premises are wrong; or, as Stalin eqauls Peace, Stalin equals everything that is Peace). 

Political Tomato

But that's what I mean - I just replaced "political" by "tomato soup", I coulsd have replaced, "art" by "tomato soup". If everything is called political, you have to eat it, if you like it or not. So you can not have a shit whithout being political. The word loses meaning because it has no definition. Political becomes the overwhelming everything and you can not act politically anymore, it becomes an art market fancy (therefore I found the "overidentification" discussion quite interesting). I repeat, every word changes meaning in its history, but allround use is loss of meaning. I join an image to illustrate abusive use of words (if Stalin is peace, what is peace? If bombs on Iraq are freedom and democracy, what are freedom and democracy?) . I think it is a danger to fall in the trap of authoritarian political discourse by not reflecting words - though the authoritarian discourse does it on purpose.

For me, "political" continues to mean a strategy to defend or regulate a group's or individual's interests inside a given society - whitout any evaluation on the first level -, it means purpose, interest, pragmatics; doing things for political reasons means not doing them for their own sake (political sex could be "make children for the Führer", not for the pleasure of love making, though an also political "love in" is maybe the adequat form of protest against moral restriction).

I also mention that one the most influent artists of the 20th century, Joseph Beuys, did not consider art as political ("Political art is illustration"),  though he was kicked off the academy for a political action. He, on the other hand, brought up the the very idealistic "erweiterter Kunstbegriff" - "the enlarged conception of art", which should have been considered in the discussion (what doesn't mean that I would subscribe that) - and which kind of caused the abusive use of the word "art". One should beware of misunderstanding his mostly wrong quotated "every human is an artist" by omitting "of the social sculpture".

REPLY TO THE TOMATO

Hopefully not everything is so easy to define. What a wonderful world when words can save us from confusion. I think this a very an interesting question though. But so if there is no possible game between words and possibilities what would we discuss about and challenge? The tomato soup will be there no matter what, whether one likes it or not, one eats it. Isn't it better to consider it? Or is it just enough to state it?

Artist plans takeover of BP

Maybe this is some political art? If you want to know more, you can look at:

http://www.take-over-bp.com/

Or see a wonderful exhibition with many, many artists in "Voorkamer" in Lier (www.voorkamer.be), H. Geeststraat 7 (open Fr- Sun, 2-6 pm)