Departures from postmodern doctrine in Jacques Rancière’s account of the politics of artistic modernity

Abstract

This essay examines how Jacques Rancière’s thinking of the politics of artistic modernity intersects with, but also departs from postmodernism as a critical and historical paradigm of art. The focus of my remarks will be on the influential account of postmodernism developed by writers Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp and others associated with the journal October in the early nineteen eighties. Two aspects of this branch of postmodernist theory will be discussed in relation to Rancièrian formulations. The first privileges hybridised forms of art practice, and the second discounts the contemporary relevance of aesthetic philosophies taken to underpin modernism. It will be proposed that Rancière’s conception of the politics of modern aesthetics overlaps with the first of these premises, while disputing the second. This comparative approach seeks to clarify the critical value of Rancière’s insistence that ideas of aesthetic autonomy and the avant-garde enlistment of art to transform collective life need to be thought as contending but interrelated tendencies of artistic modernity. The application of this argument to the interpretation of a contemporary artwork concludes the essay. Here a video work by artist Steve McQueen titled, Gravesend (2007) is shown to sustain a tension between the twofold politics of aesthetic modernity identified by Rancière.