The idea of pensiveness is first ascribed to Honore de Balzac in his novella 'Sarrasine' (1830) via Barthe's famous analysis in S/Z (1970). Balzac ends his narrative indeterminately by finally leaving the protagonist 'pensive', with the suggestion of a continuing and undefined thought process that goes beyond the narrative. Ranciere goes on to discuss the incidental micro events described in 'Madame Bovary' (1856) by Gustave Flaubert. The micro events are like silent pictures inserted into, but also above, and beyond the narrative. "The pensiveness of the image is then the latent presence of one regime of expression within another." p.124 Rancière argues that political or critical art had traditionally taken for granted a straightforward relationship between political aims or effects and artistic means or causes with the ambition, which he considers sheer supposition, to raise an apparently passive spectator’s political awareness leading ultimately to her political mobilisation. Political art revealed that commodity and market relations lie behind beautiful appearances and are their truth. It aimed to disabuse the spectator and induce a sense of complicity, guilt and responsibility in her. As archetypal means of achieving those ends, Rancière cites Brecht’s theory and practice, the political montage of German Dada, and the American artist Martha Rosler’s series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful , 1969–1971 that juxtaposes photographs of luxurious petty-bourgeois interiors cut out from House Beautiful magazine with images of the Vietnam War from Life magazine. Rosler’s work, which continues a tradition of twentieth century committed art, reveals to the spectator a hidden reality of imperialist violence behind happy and prosperous domestic interiors. So while the historian will still want to figure out what happened (or probably didn’t) in the darkened Munich porno theater where Export’s Action Pants was supposedly staged, the invisibility—or even unlikeliness—of the event itself does not invalidate its history as a performative. What the recent explosion of live art makes clear is that art’s contemporaneity has always relied on a capacity to mobilize ongoing and subtle performatives: things and thoughts made in the present by audiences confronting something in the past. Any artwork, no matter how fleeting, perforce comes from the past (even Sehgal’s situations have their rehearsals) and must speak to us in the present if they are art at all. Contemporaneity can consist of nothing else, whether we are dealing with the ongoing liveness of Raft of the Medusa or of This Progress. Maria S. H. M. (left) and Abigail Levine reenacting Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, New York, spring 2010. Photo: Scott Rudd. 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

The Emancipated Spectator is intended to improve our comprehension of art and deepen our grasp of the politics of perception ... [it has an] impressive concern with the political analysis of art and the use of imagery”— Times Higher Education 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 The clarity of Sehgal’s practice in regard to collecting and the market needs further research. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was pleased to be the first owner of The Kiss; director Madeleine Grynsztejn now happily admits that they are one of several owners of the piece: “I guess it’s kind of an edition, and we have the artist’s proof” (comment to the author, February 2010). Sehgal’s fondness for oral history and notarized exchange makes this (“artist’s proof”) as valid a nomenclature as any; time will tell whether these “multiples” inform the structure of Sehgal inventories and catalogues raisonnés to come, and whether the oral and body knowledge of the works will be allowed to mutate without intervention by the artist.için öğrenir. Onun bu yolu katetmesine yardım edecek cahil hocanın böyle bir ad almasının sebebi, hiçbir şey bilmemesi değil, "cahilin bilmediğini bilme iddiasını" reddetmesi ve bilgisiyle hocalığını birbirinden ayırmasıdır. Öğrencilerine kendi bildiğini öğretmez; onlardan şeyler ve 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.

Although Ranciere critiques class while rarely mentioning the word, he stops short of any insight into the affective dimension of class, by which I understand as the emotional toll exacted by class oppression. He does not go into that kind of knowledge or the way that trauma can be a barrier to knowledge. Affects that impact on people fundamentally tend to happen at an impressionable age - and the false idea of an inequality of intelligence and status fostered by the school system is one of the most poisonous. I recently heard this described by a middle class woman as a daily pencilling of the lines that separate, until the division was etched into her being.Ranciere points out the Left's dream of a community in harmony, as against the goal of a community of dissensus and struggle, is a utopian one. Dissensus here is the inevitable 'conflict' or 'tension' between the essentially different sensory worlds of two or more individuals. This has been forgotten by 'the modernist dream of a community of emancipated human beings' p.60. The 'intertwining of contradictory relations' can itself produce community. "The paradoxical relationship between the 'apart' and the 'together' is also a paradoxical relationship between the present and the future." p.59 He then describes a contemporary art project 'I and Us' that was made on a working class estate in contemporary Asnieres by the art group Campement Urbain. The need expressed by the inhabitants in this stressed area was for a place of contemplation, a place to be alone. I.e. a break from the stress of being together to be individual, a space for contemplation. 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 I think the twenty-first century will hopefully be more guided by “how” questions—how am I a product or how am I related to these people here? . . . And what is the ethics implied by this? 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.

Seurat evinced both the enigmatic potential of popular bodies that gained access to ‘leisure’ and the neutralisation of that potential.” For him, there is evil in the act of spectating. The spectator is divorced from both the capacity to know and the power to act. Their pleasure is derived from this impotence and ignorance. The spectator should be removed from this position of divorced and detached examination of the spectacle which is being offered on stage. What is missing is the idea that it is the exclusive selection of art that leads to particular constellations being brought to public attention. Any set of interests will be unlikely to present art that allows a critical appraisal of its own core supports to be revealed to the public. The sets of interests that present art most widely and influentially are the state and the larger globalised commercial galleries. It is difficult for most of us to see how these interests are manifest within the particular selections of any show. It is difficult for us to see what has been left out from the totality of the field from which the selection is made. It is often through quite subtle absences which we could never be privy to. The whole skill of the state managers of culture is to hide these formations of upper class patriarchal interest with a smokescreen of good taste and the flair that comes with having money to spend on design and presentation. Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976/2005, two-channel video projection, props, stages, photographs. Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009.

Key artwork

He discusses Alfredo Jaar's 1994 work on the Rwandan genocide 'Real Pictures' and in particular his work called 'The Eyes of Gutete Emerita'. (An image used as the books cover in the edition I read) "The traditional thesis is that the evil of images consists in their very number, their profusion effortlessly invading the spellbound gaze and mushy brain of the multitude of democratic consumers of commodities and images." p.96. What we see on the mainstream media, according to Ranciere, is mainly the faces of rulers, experts and journalists telling us how to interpret images. But even that somewhat dated idea suggests that we do not choose what to watch and he starts to fall foul of his own critique. It is now possible to bypass a lot of this with selective viewing of the personal networks of imagery. "The system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of 'deciphering' the flow of information about anonymous multitudes." p.96. Oldukça düşündürücü ve bazı yerlerde tekrar tekrar okuma isteği uyandıran çok güçlü bir kitap bence..