On Writing Fluid Histories of Modern Art with Jacques Rancière

Karolina Rybačiauskaitė

doi:10.14712/24647055.2021.11

Abstract

In this paper it is claimed that the conception of art regimes by Jacques Rancière may be a productive tool for coming across various binary oppositions used while thinking about modern art, such as modernism/social realism, official/non-official, political/apolitical, and let us write more fluid histories of modern art in the post-socialist and post-soviet countries.

Highlights

It is common to think in the discourse of Western history and theory of art that the first glimpses of modernity in the field of art manifested themselves as the abandonment of the mimesis principle and the implementation of the idea of autonomy
In this paper it is claimed that the conception of art regimes by Jacques Rancière may be a productive tool for coming across various binary oppositions used while thinking about modern art, such as modernism/social realism, official/non-official, political/apolitical, and let us write more fluid histories of modern art in the post-socialist and post-soviet countries
It is claimed a certain evolution of art during which figurative art began mutating into abstract art – this way a significant step was taken from realism to modernism

Summary

From Reserved Pictorial Flatness to the Sphere of Common Surface

One of the main reasons that allow us to think that modern art forms are universal par excellence and that its evolution should carry on there where it began, and in other places – it is an idea that in the modern times art as such started to become autonomous and its main mission was to prove so. This material is made up from concrete institutions: places where expositions and performances are held, ways of circulation and reproduction, as well as forms of perceptions and attachments, concepts, narratives, and evaluations that identify and give meaning to those “art” pieces.[9] In his theory of art regimes, Rancière opposes Greenberg and states that a modern switch from realistic to abstract depiction or the “anti-mimetic revolution” never meant the renunciation of resemblance, because mimesis is not based on resemblance, but rather on certain connections between artistic practices and the distribution of their visibility and perception. Sual sphere, and as the creation of typical forms in a common form-symbol surface sphere, and as such being inherently political.[12]

From the Continuity of Authentic Modernism to the Heterogenic Modernities

SUMMARY