You Can't Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancire in Conversation with Chto Delat

摘要

Jacques Rancire and members of the group Chto Delat (St. Petersburg/Moscow)—Artemy Magun, Dmitry Vilensky, and Alexandr Skidan—discuss the pertinence of the concept of the avant-garde to the history of art and the present day. Chto Delat members defend the thesis of an essential link between art's political message and its formal features, such as a general “negativity” in relation to the classical canon. They also suggest a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde based on differences in the relation of art to life. Rancire argues against this thesis, returning in detail to the history of art in the twentieth century. He suggests that avant-gardism was a specific, strategic understanding of art that aimed to transform life. The art of the twentieth century was much broader than the avant-garde movement, including a more abstract, minimalist movement as well as an attempt to be faithful to the new forms of modern life. Generally, Rancire insists on his aesthetic theory, according to which the political role of art consists in providing an open and autonomous sensorium for all members of society, allowing them to transform their ways of feeling and acting; it dates not from avant-gardism but from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The directly political understanding of art, for him, comes too close to the outdated “ethical regime of art.”