Footnotes to Rancière
In Plato’s conception of a perfect state there would be no poet or visual artist. For him, visual art is mimesis – making flawed copies of a flawed world – a source of the corruption of morality and reason. Let our guardians not feed on poisonous pastures he says. Democracy is similarly despised by Plato because of the variegated and usually insufficient capability of the demos to rule. Plato mistakes democracy to be somewhat populist, but more sophisticated arrangements of democracy are not without their failings. Social stratification, migration and globalisation create schisms more than unity between groups, and the deliberative process towards the Common Good of republicanism usually observes violent impasses. On the other hand, the kind of liberalism premised on individual rights and interests atomises and breaks traditional forms of political agency. It ends up ceding its progressivist edge to technocrats, corporates and big data of lifestyle manipulation. Not to mention the irony of democracies built on stolen land that enshrine private property in their constitutions.
This is not to say democracy is a farce. Equating it with flawed states misunderstands its conceptual potential. Jacques Rancière thinks democracy is more than the question of ‘who should rule’. The French intellectual tradition has a keen interest in structures. Rancière calls the oppressive structure of power the police. [1] He is certainly not referring to the social order inscribed and prescribed to us as laws and the accompanying coercive machine of law enforcement. Rather the idea is descriptive of a social reality that determines who can speak and who is visible. Democracy is therefore the sensuous groundswell that seeks to disrupt and to redistribute the sensible. Rancière illustrates the process not with the genealogy of democracy but with art itself. He outlines three regimes of art and shows how the conceptions of art differ according to the changing visibility of artist labour.
Plato distrusted poets and visual artists because they practised mimesis and claimed authority over truth and beauty. He believed they should humbly submit to the ethos of the community. This is what Rancière calls the ethical regime of art where artist labour is recognised and evaluated in the same way a blacksmith’s work is valued by the community. An image is prized for its origin and destinations and how well it truthfully fulfills the moral and pedagogical function required by the community. Art that falls under this category is reduced to and policed as deliberate moral messages of the intellectual/ethical/political body who has the power to speak. The artist’s labour is invisible and unheard.
Aristotle, however, is more relaxed about the pedagogic harm that poetry and visual arts can potentially do. For him, poetry and visual arts can be the embodiment of knowledge. Rancière calls this the representative (or poetic) regime of art. The art is judged on its subject matter and associated knowledge – the genre and the genre-specific conventions of the art, both of which assume places in some hierarchy: tragedy for the educated nobles and comedy for the poor. Tropes, decorum and narratives are assigned as appropriate styles for each genre, and the adherence to these rules according to the hierarchy is the measure of a certain artwork’s rigour. Classical paintings fall under this category: religious painting, history painting, portraiture, genre painting of everyday lives and still-life painting, in descending order. Poets and visual artists in this regime gain partial autonomy and their labour is recognised in a special way only if they reproduce hierarchies. This also led to the bourgeoisification of the artist class.
Inchoate in such partial autonomy is art’s anarchist urge to assume its own voice to speak against hierarchical coercion, and to see and to be seen for art’s own sake. The first step is to reject the hierarchy of high-and-low. Ranciére sees novelists such as Balzac and Hugo as championing this subversive movement. With their appropriation of lowly subject matter to archive the lofty goal of the arts they not only catalysed social revolutions but also spun the arts into the new aesthetic regime. It is in this regime that visual art frees itself from prescribed subject matter and stylistic or technical restrictions. The beginning of this regime is what is usually called modernism, the progression of which eventually led to the aestheticism of art for Art’s sake. In such refusal to speak for anything other than the sensuous power of visual art itself, Rothko’s colour-field paintings reject interpretation but command presence. Much of the modernist arts seek to explore the ungoverned expressive power of shapes, colours or forms on the flat surface of art: the clearing reserved for art’s singularity presumes no hierarchy. The ground is prepared for the arts to thrive and participate in life as an autonomous voice. Yet this autonomy is fragile. While the aesthetic regime breaks hierarchies of genre and subject matter, it is also susceptible to being re-policed by institutions that commodify novelty and retreat into formalism. This is what is usually called the tradition of the new. [2]
Under a new kind of duress, artists need to put something new on the table as proof of their unique artistic personality and art’s autonomy. Students in art school are taught to research the existing body of artistic expression to find any frontier where they can gain a ticket into the higher echelon of the avant-garde. The art market with its well-known logic of commodification also constantly seeks freshness and variety to furnish its catalogue. The liberated institution also sometimes reacts to its historical trauma of being submissive to a wordy authority, so much so that clear messages are prohibited except when they are meta-commentaries on art’s prohibition on clear intelligibility. This creates a constellation of unintelligible works and for artists a culture of hesitation to explain their works. This is a common complaint from viewers. The irony is clear: the autonomy celebrated in modernist art can become a new form of policing – where the gallery, critic and market determine visibility and intelligibility. Autonomy, in this case, is not emancipation but a carefully managed illusion.
Before we move on to discuss what the freedom of visual art should really look like, the ossification of artistic autonomy has taught us a very important political lesson. When the word democracy is invoked as an idea, in many cases, it means something as empty as the lofty ideal of artistic autonomy. The expansion of suffrage in the last 200 years in the West embodied the maturation of political institutions. Just like the modernist exploration in art which culminated in art’s pure and formal potential and promised an autonomous art culture, universal suffrage gave a democratic promise of equality. In the name of a formal notion of equality, some politicians (in Aotearoa and other places) manipulate voters by declaring each day a fresh start, erasing historical injustice and stalling real change. Autonomy, if merely institutionalised to save face, does not guarantee egalitarian potential.
Lessons from Contemporary Visual Arts
Can art teach us more constructive lessons? To exert newfound agency, artists have to look back with a different vision. Vico’s Discovery of True Homer was taken by Rancière to indicate an artist’s power to reinterpret and recreate the poetics of the past as a declaration of artistic freedom. In the visual arts, it’s not uncommon to see artists use traditional genres to scaffold their original artistic expression.
Kehinde Wiley’s highly decorated vibrant portraits depict Black individuals in a style reminiscent of Old Master paintings. His Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson), Officer of the Hussars and Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps shake and remake visions that are so heavily baked into our artistic memories. Ali Banisadr merges Persian miniature painting with abstract expressionism to create chaotic, narrative-rich canvases. The artist’s personal history with war is not made into the art as representation but materialised as a synesthetic expression of trauma and distorted memory.
Another example is in the formal features of Julia Mehretu’s work which probably spurs the audience to think of the symphony of formalism inspired by Kandinsky or Malevich. However, her works are usually methodically produced by tracing the landscapes of historical sites, the historical decaying and redevelopment of cities, the movement of people, traffic and commerce. Architectural forms, flow of time, changes in the city’s political milieu are transformed into an idiosyncratic mapping by lines, shapes, colours and erasures. Layers and layers of meaning, and ways of capturing the materiality and historicity of the urban reality, are decoded and recoded. But this is not a plea for recognition of visual arts sociological rigour but a resolution to present a complex visual alternative to the authoritative social discourses of our time.
Visual artists keep changing our perception of the past: an immutable past and its relation to history as the openness of the past to re-interpretation. And through building on a field of vision unshackled from previous regimes of art, new sensations keep art alive as living disruptions. This is the first level where we could make a parallel commentary on democracy: policing for the phantasmagoric notion of democracy or equality is like tossing a clean canvas over a messy reality to declare victory. Real, effectual democracy on the other hand calls for the recognition of eternal inequality and the ensuing struggle for visibility by the powerless. We should ask: what kind of vision, armament, tactical manoeuvre and solidarity lies in the history of democracy and how we can make anew the traditional in a contemporary context?
The second ingenuity of contemporary art lies in the artist appropriation of the institution as the medium of art itself. By appropriation I mean not the boring egoistic tantrum of certain artists to ‘break with the institution’ and declare such going-rogue as their art. Creative appropriation transforms the institution and the artist into platforms for visibility.
In 2015, during a visit to her hometown in Sichuan, artist Yinping Hu noticed that her mother was making crocheted items for extra cash. Colourful beanies, socks and sweaters – many women in Hu’s hometown put so much time into making these products only for meagre reward. Valuing her mother’s time and labour, Hu wanted to leverage the potential artistic value in the odd job. Hu’s friend in Beijing posed as a European buyer under the pseudonym ‘Xiaofang’, offering generous commissions for 100 hats. Hu’s mother outdid the expectation in a swoosh: she was so excited that she could finally exercise her creativity and put herself on a quest to make ‘100 hats there have never been’. Hats shaped like chilli peppers, animals and hat-that-is-also-a-scarf blew Hu away as they showed up one by one via courier in Beijing. Her mother’s luck soon attracted the attention of her friends in the village. Aunties worked together to finish various individual and creative projects. They crocheted items from daily life such as pickles, meat and vegetables, anti-theft doors and traditional lion statues that ward off evils. They also envisioned their ideal lives through their craft: some made beautiful houses, some made office cubicles, and some made bikinis even though they had never been to a beach in their lives.
The story of Xiaofang and the aunties keeps unfolding. The team has got bigger, involving aunties from many rural areas in China and the crocheted vision has travelled to Beijing, Shanghai, France, Ireland and the US.
What is so artistic about this and is ‘Xiaofang’ just a persona? The crocheted artworks are visually striking; the story is thought provoking and moving; or we can comment on the creative potential of daily, menial labour and arts as the liberating force against alienation. One aspect that is often overlooked is that the community is only as intentional as it can be practical: Xiaofang had to experiment with different supply chains, structures of production, mechanisms of monetary incentives, modes of leadership and division of labour among the aunties. By leveraging privileges of the art institution and applying their knowledge of the art world, Xiaofang and friends create artistic synapses that continue to sparkle and connect. Unlike art that performs autonomy within institutional boundaries, Xiaofang’s project democratises creativity by grounding it in daily labour and community. It doesn’t reject the institution outright but reorients it toward material empowerment. This should also prompt us to criticise the institutionalised performatives of democracy and to leverage democratic institutions for effectual distribution.
However, the symbiosis between Xiaofang’s community and the art institution is rare. It is powerless compared with the material flow that gravitates towards the ghostly aura of ‘high art’. If we think twice, Rancière has not offered a clear idea of what ‘art’ is and why it should be treated as a singularity. Much of what we see as the concrete institution of art looks like an ossified scar, a traumatic response to the oppression contingent to a very particularly western history of art. Naturally, the final level of critique proceeds as the postcolonial critique of art’s singularity itself.
Out of the Colonial Castles
The presupposed unity of art is seen from the vantage point of a contemporary institution: the autonomous group of professional artists, critics, curators and academics carefully retrace art’s lineage framed as progression towards its autonomy. It is precisely this unity from a vantage point of power that we should contest.
I lack the literacy required to interpret and speak for indigenous artworks, so I want to illustrate some further points with a provoking story embodied in a historical artwork. I once read a story about Richard Aldworth Oliver’s lithograph named Half castes at Pomare's Pah, Bay of Islands. The lithograph is based on a scene at Kokorāreka during a feast. It depicts two women sitting in front of a tent shelter. One of them is ‘Maria’ breastfeeding an infant, the other ‘Jane’ who was ‘famous for her personal attraction’. In front of them a naked toddler playing, behind them two men standing having a conversation. Further to the side is an old lady in a blanket facing away: ‘the old lady on the right is Nahuia, Pomare's wife, who placed herself in that “becoming” attitude to avoid having her picture taken’. Philosopher Krushil Watene takes the Māori grandma’s defiance as encouragement for her descendants to self-determine:
There are several ways to interpret the image, her behaviour, and its depiction. But at least one way is to say that, in refusing to have her portrait taken, she writes herself into the story in her own way. Taking this interpretation, we might say that the gift she leaves her descendants is a reminder to story ourselves in our own way too. More than this, that doing so will sometimes require defiance, and the courage (when necessary) to ‘turn away’ from what other people expect us to do. [3]
The history of art is usually painted with similar principles to those of the visual arts: it remains a progression of pictures that represents the highest quality of human creativity. The logic of representation demands high-fidelity pictures. Who and what do we see when we look into the canvas or photograph? How does the image of a prime minister in hijab or a president after an attempted assassination affect our reality? Why are we so obsessed with important people’s faces?
Representation has always implied distance. Great efforts have been made to transpose mythology, people or events distant in time and space onto canvas to look as if they were copies of reality. The mode of appreciation in modern art focuses less on the vivid depiction of reality. Its proof of quality shifted onto the authenticity and uniqueness of the expression of the artist. Everyone’s experience, emotion, ideas are as real as those of others, but art is judged by how well it represents some equally authentic experiences. In other words, the aura of the visual arts is about a sense of realness, at a distance. You look and you are frozen in the act of looking.
Representative democracy, or at least the performatives of it, follows the same logic. While democracy is for all, politicians are required to be at the heart of democracy embodying political agency so that democracy is visible. The technique of manufacturing a sense of higher realness or importance makes it feel like things always happen at a distance. And when things happen at a distance, we need the sense of realness more than ever. Grandma Nahuia’s turning away is perhaps a defiance against this mode of capture and disempowerment. In her hidden visage, life is protected in its immediate potency. The colonial effort to capture – to manufacture visibility – is faced with silent rejection and a void that indicates a greater realm of possibility. She invites us to overcome the distance.
The point I am getting at is not that we should set up some alternative history of art. Quite the contrary, we should challenge the assumption that we need to find some pure art as a refined product of an ever-progressive history. In tracing the history of visual arts through Rancière’s regimes, we uncover not just a story of increasing autonomy, but one of shifting exclusions. While the aesthetic regime promises equality, its institutional capture often reinstates old hierarchies under the guise of novelty and neutrality. Contemporary projects like Xiaofang reveal the latent power of sensuous visibility when reclaimed outside of dominant structures. And from a postcolonial perspective, the notion of artistic unity must be questioned, as it too can perpetuate distance and domination. If democracy and art are to fulfill their radical potential, they must resist being frozen into ideals and instead remain open forums—dynamic, messy and insistently shared. It remains an act of self-determination for everyone to reflect on their relationship with institutions and to form their practices with consequent understanding.
This might have appeared to be an anarchist refusal towards artistic and political institutions, and it is unclear how we should proceed with the intertwining of art and politics. There is certain danger involved in speaking and prescribing in a voice of philosophical neutrality. Many permanent regimes are set up in the first place as some unbiased theories. For this reason, critiques should refrain from giving out their weapons as building tools. People should think for themselves with their community and find entries to a better reality from their own perspectives. This is the first step to challenge the distance lying between us and the high ideals of arts and politics. I suggest here only some angles, examples and avenues of change. I chose Rancière’s theory as an introduction precisely because he frames art’s accession to autonomy as a struggle against words: the visual arts refuse to be mere mute signs for the ethos of a community or a ruling hierarchy. But it would be a tragic end if art only speaks to itself. I remember reading Paul Tapsell’s article on the Māori idea of taonga where he compares kōrero to a cloak that ‘shrouds the ancestral item in a “warmth of knowledge”’. [4] In a similar spirit, let’s hope that a more robust forum for people is on its way to enrich our artistic and political life.
Footnotes
[1] Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p 28.
[2] The phrase is first used by Rosenberg to capture the paradoxical phenomenon that the compulsion to break with tradition is still a tradition. Rancière similarly discusses the shortcomings of the notion of modernity by playing on the phrase to reveal ‘newness of the tradition’ which ‘began with decision to reinterprets what makes art or what art makes’. For concepts related to the phrase, see Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of The New. Boston, Da Capo Press, 1994. For Rancière’s analysis of artistic regimes mentioned before and related comments, see Jacques Rancière, Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill, New York, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, pp 20–31.
[3] Krushil Watene, ‘Pūrākau as Philosophy: Indigenous Philosophies as Pluralizing the Purpose and Practice of Philosophy’, Pluralizing Political Philosophy: Economic and Ecological Inequalities in Global Perspective, edited by Ingrid Robeyns, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp 82–106.
[4] In ‘The Flight of Pareraututu’, Tapsell explains concepts and shows ways of life related to taonga. It is an article charged with emotional force and conceptual clarity, anyone who is interested in the idea of taonga should not miss this important text. While I refrain here from drawing any implication in relation to the idea of Māori art, the material culture of taonga that is highly integrated in all aspects of life should intrigue us enough to contemplate our relationship with what we call art. See Paul Tapsell, ‘The Flight of the Pareraututu: An Investigation of Taonga from a Tribal Perspective’ in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Auckland, The Polynesian Society, 1997, pp 323– 74.