Imperfecting the Illusion: Belief and the Aesthetic Destruction of Reality

Abstract

IntroductionRealism, as an form, has long been indicted for its complicity with ideological conservatism. In this essay, I argue for reconsideration of realism as critical tool in formation of contemporary politics. In developing this claim, I draw upon Jacques Ranciere's insights regarding potential for formations to take on political dimension by introducing into [our sense of community] new subjects and objects, . . . render [ing] visible what had not been, and ... mak[ing] heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals.1 Such shifts in our capacity to envision new realities can change the landscape of by rupturing anticipated correlations between images and their meanings and images and their effects.2An politics, in Ranciere's sense, requires shift from of art to what he calls aesthetic regime.''For Ranciere, this transition must no longerbe understood as simple break with mimetic realism in favor of nonfigurative art. As he puts it, the break with [the representational regime] does not consist in painting white squares rather than . . . warriors.3 Rather than discarding figurative art, this break requires giving up idea that representational form carries what he calls an expressive complement, such at that between a lion and courage.4 More specifically, break from representative to regime involves for Ranciere recognition that an image can no longer be simply understood as expression of thought or feeling.5 Such codified meanings, he argues, reproduce status quo by limiting ability of things to exist in ways that have not yet been thought and thus suppress potential to bring to life possible new ways of being.This essay follows Ranciere in refusing to claim that realist forms of art are inconsistent with political aesthetics. I consider range of art and media examples with aim of teasing out particular relationships between realism and deception that may maximize realism's potential to disrupt given ideological formations. My main contention will be that realism's potential political power lies not in its ability to guide spectator toward previously unseen truths or to see through deception. Rather, its potential emerges by staging deceptions that imperil any recourse to metalanguage that sustains very categories of true and false, thereby undermining possibility of belief and system of authority that secures it. To put this more generally in Rancierian terms, realism's charge in project of politics is to conspire with deception in order to dispute established regime of representation and generate what he calls new of sensible, through which new organizations of perception may emerge.6 In what follows, I consider series of examples that, in increasingly complex ways, address political question of how to create new distribution of sensible by undermining structure of belief and system of authority (the big Other, in Lacanian parlance) that sustain given arrangement.7 I illustrate this politics through sculptural figures created by Ron Mueck, which, I argue, innovatively harness potentially transformative moment when established perceptual framework begins to fray. In particular, Mueck's use of scale to disrupt illusion of reality illuminates ways in which realist forms of art carry political potential to open up opportunities for new ways of seeing, understanding, and being in world. His sculptures do this by inaugurating new twist on conventional trompe l'oeil by reproducing, at level of context, deception that traditionally occurs only at level of form.Belief, Doubt, and Big OtherAt first sight, sculptural figures produced by Australian artist Ron Mueck appear as unimpeachable examples of perfected mimetic form. …