Dr Peter Alwast
Center for Critical Theory, New York University
Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

In this paper, presented at the International Center for Critical Theory at New York University in January 2020, Dr Peter Alwast surveys recent artistic and theoretical positions that move beyond conventional understandings of aesthetics and politics in contemporary art.

Artworks from Australia and the United States which have capacity to confound conventions of intelligibility associated with identity driven art are presented and although it is impossible to either completely affirm or deny the validity of identity politics in contemporary art, the paper outlines possible alternatives to its usual representational logic. The critical potential of art is viewed through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Jacques Ranciere’s aesthetic philosophy. In both accounts the aesthetic experience of the artwork is treated as a disruption of the so called ‘natural’ or representational correspondence between words, images, sounds, language and human actions. For Nancy, the artwork’s sensory effects have the capacity to dispel with prefigured significations and therefore disrupt what is conventionally deemed intelligible within a given cultural grouping or social context. Similarly, for Ranciere the political potential of the artwork is registered through the unbinding of hierarchical classifications. In both cases the artwork’s aesthetic effect is analogous to a re-ordering that potentially spurs the opening of unexpected and unscripted avenues of meaning, inherent to the ethos of equality in radical democratic politics.