7
As we saw in Chapter 3, the police is a ‘particular form’ of an order that organizes the ‘tangible reality in which bodies are distributed’ (DT 28, M 51). By ‘disagreement’, Rancière means a situation where what it means to speak is in question in such a way as to implicate ‘the very rationality of the speech situation’ (DT xi, M 13), or the ‘very situation of interlocution’ (DT 100, M 141). In dispute is the ‘capacity’ of interlocutors to present an object, so that they ‘both understand and do not understand the same thing by the same words’ (DT xi, M 13). Someone might fail to ‘see the object’ an interlocutor is talking about, while ‘clearly understanding’ (DT xi, M 13) what she is saying, for example. An interlocutor might understand that the conversation is about art, for instance, but fail to see the object under discussion as art. Or she might see the object under discussion as art, but fail to see it as art worthy of being granted entry into a museum. In this latter case, what is in contention is aesthetics, the determination of which has historically coincided with determining the rationality of the speech situation, in judging who is qualified to make aesthetic judgements.
In the light of the issues raised in the previous chapter, perhaps we should ask who permits the entry of certain objects into art galleries, thereby granting them recognition as art. Who is it that values certain objects as art, and what is the relationship between their artistic value and the tangible distribution of bodies from which these art objects and values emanate? To dispute the distribution of bodies that informs whose work is displayed in an art gallery is to contest the aesthetics determining what counts as art. If, typically, the work of only certain artists is admitted into art galleries, to admit the work of other artists is to disrupt the underlying social distribution of bodies. One need not maintain that certain bodies necessarily produce certain types of art; yet if the distribution of artist-bodies favours certain classes, races and genders, then the art they produce will tend to reflect their concerns and set the standard for what counts as art. Since the equality of the part that does not count is rendered invisible by police logic, what counts as art within the sphere of visibility that constitutes the art world will reflect this invisibility. As artists, those whose bodies are typically not well represented in art galleries, on the other hand, are much more likely to be concerned (though will not necessarily be) with making an intervention into the sphere of visibility characteristic of police logic. When they do so, their art is likely to (though will not necessarily) create dissensus by disputing the regimes of visibility available in the police logic of the visible and sayable, including contesting what counts as art.
If politics and aesthetics impinge upon one another, then the realm that gets constructed as the domain of art and aesthetics is shaped in part by the exclusions of politics. It is therefore unsurprising that what passes for art, that is, what is generally recognized as qualifying as art, is closely bound up with systems of privilege. The work of the Guerrilla Girls suggests that informal barriers still play a considerable role in determining which works of art are displayed in museums. It raises the question of how far the lasting legacy of the conventions of the representative regime continues to inform who gets depicted and for what ends. The works by the Guerrilla Girls, Renée Cox and 2Fik discussed below draw attention to and rework the ways in which form and matter are implicated in gendered, raced and heteronormative conventions. If our cultural imaginary is structured by unconscious assumptions about the appropriate ways to depict objects, matter or content, it is also structured by who is allowed to count as an artist. If this is the case, then even the passive unknowing of the Kantian genius will be pervaded by such assumptions. One of the questions in the background of this chapter is how far Rancière’s understanding of dissensus as a disruption of the police order can accommodate the fact that what passes for common sense will vary considerably from one community to another.
At issue in the present discussion is the need to think through the implications of the fact that various communities constitute themselves around particular sets of assumptions, with the result that what might pass as self-evident or obvious to the constituents of a given community will not be seen as a self-evident truth by another community. Consequently, that which constitutes the police order will vary according to what assumptions pass as self-evident, and how particular communities cohere around that which is taken to be self-evident. To compound the difficulty, what is at stake is precisely what constitutes the givenness of community; who is allowed to belong, and who is not, who is recognized as belonging, or granted the legitimacy to belong, and therefore what constitutes a community is in question. While there are many different types of communities, here I will primarily be concerned with those that constitute themselves as loosely affiliated political communities, made up of those who identify as feminist, and/or as antiracist or as demonstrating solidarity with trans communities. Within each such group there will be multiple differential perspectives; there are many sometimes conflicting, ways of understanding feminism, antiracism and transgender. I reflect here, upon how such differences play themselves out with reference to Rancière’s understanding of the operation of dissensus in relation to feminist art.
We have seen that in construing politics as a matter of staging, of making visible, the miscount as a leaving out of account those who have no part, Rancière understands politics in the sense of dissensus, as a conflict of worlds, a conflict about the meaning of the perceptible, indeed about the very availability of that which can be seen and heard. At the same time, it is a conflict about who is legitimated to speak and interpret what there is to be seen and heard, and to have their interpretations count. Dissensus puts into question what passes for common sense, what Rancière calls the ‘police’ order of consensus, and thus provides the possibility of shaping meaning and intelligibility, the seeing of what there is to see, and the hearing of what there is to hear in a new way.1 The very possibilities of seeing or hearing, of perceiving the world, are renewed, such that the transcendental is subjected to a radically contingent, historical process, by which subjects who previously did not count not only insist on being counted, but in doing so change the terms in which subjectivity is thought, and therefore revise the conditions of possibility both of what it means to be a subject and also what it means to think and perceive.2
For Rancière then, it is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of politics as consensual, which claims to speak for all but in fact speaks only for those who govern the terms on which claims are deemed to have or lack intelligibility. It is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of art that takes itself to be representative, but in fact consists of a set of highly specific and exclusive norms that dictate what can and cannot be represented, how it should be represented, and who is entitled to judge it. Expressed positively, it is a question of seeing what happens when politics is reconceived not as consensus but as dissensus, when representation is no longer restricted by rules of appropriateness, where the operative model of art is porous, rather than a model that secures the boundaries of art by preserving its purity from contamination by everything it stipulates as something other than art.
Figure 1 Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? 1989 © Guerrilla Girls and Courtesy guerrillagirls.com
I turn first to a work by the Guerrilla Girls, in order to both think through Rancière’s appeal to dissensus more thoroughly and introduce a qualified challenge to it. We might approach this work in two different ways. At first glance, we could regard it as simply occupying the role of a political slogan or manifesto, which didactically attempts to tell a public what to think. Understood thus, the work would purport to reveal a truth for an audience that stands in need of revelation. This work of art would thus fit seamlessly with the ‘pedagogical’ model, whereby a previously ignorant public is ostensibly enlightened through exposure to a ‘meaningful spectacle’, which elicits ‘awareness’ of the state of the world (PA 62-3). In serving a political purpose the work would mobilize the public, galvanizing its viewers into action, and in the process, it would evacuate its status as art by resolving itself into a political agenda. The work of art would position itself so as to provide ‘forms of awareness or rebellious impulses for politics’ (DPA 149). Art would thus ‘take leave’ of itself in order to become a form of ‘collective political action’ (DPA 149). Just as Rosler’s work denounces the capitalist war machine as hypocritical, so the Guerrilla Girls would decry the art establishment as a sexist institution.3 In as much as we take the point of the work to be self-evident such that its ‘political formula[e]’ is readily ‘identifiable’ (PA 63), its political commentary can be dismissed as largely redundant. If the ‘message’ of the work of art is so readable as to be completely obvious, not only is the artistic status of the work of art in question, so too is its political merit. In fact, since the Guerrilla Girls first produced this work, the number of female artists whose work the art establishment deems worthy of one-person shows, as documented by further works by the Guerrilla Girls, remains consistently low, which suggests that however obvious the message might be, there is still a need to reiterate it.
In question for Rancière is not only, whether in making a political point a work of art becomes too didactic to retain its status as a work of art in any meaningful sense, whether it crosses a definitive line and becomes a political statement. The question is also whether a work of art advocates a form of politics that adheres to a model of consensus, which posits a community to come that would be unified according to a shared ideal in a manner consistent with romanticism (and which, as such, would paper over the miscount), or whether, in view of the ‘aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151) the work of art ‘questions its own limits and powers’, accepts its ‘insufficiency’ and ‘refuses to anticipate its own effects’ in ‘framing a new landscape of the sensible’ (DPA 149).
Rather than assimilating this work by the Guerrilla Girls to the pedagogical logic from which Rancière seeks to distance art as dissensus, or critiquing it for its aspiration to leave its status as art in order to become a political slogan that inspires collective action according to the logic of consensus, let’s consider from an alternative point of view this work, which I will refer to for the sake of argument as a work of art (some might see it as a political poster – it was, after all, commissioned as a billboard). In fact, part of both the complexity and the appeal of Rancière is his insistence upon maintaining the ambiguity of borders between works of art and other objects, political or otherwise. It is of some interest that this particular work concerns itself not only with the art of politics, but also with the politics of art. That is, it offers a commentary on the relationship between the artist and the subject of the work of art. It does so not by asserting a political position, but by posing a question. It asks a rhetorical question and juxtaposes the question with two empirical claims. The question, ‘Do women have to be naked in order to get into the Met museum?’ is juxtaposed with a claim about the gender of artists whose work is on display in the museum, and a claim about the gendering of the subjects represented in the works displayed. If the number of female artists represented in the modern art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum is less than 5 per cent, and 85 per cent of the nudes represented are female, the implicit conclusion is that the vast majority of works representing ‘naked women’ (PA 53) are by male artists. If we read the question that is being posed, not only in the context of the observations specifying the gender of the majority of artists on display and the subjects they represent, but also against the background of the image of a female body that is foregrounded, we understand that what is being asked is not merely whether there is a relation between the gender of the artists represented in art museums, and the subject matter they represent. In question, rather is how women’s bodies are being represented, and what purposes their representation serve. In question is whether the only way that women can be granted access to museums is in the form of representations that present women as passive objects of a male gaze. Women, then, would only enter into museums in the guise of material content for male artists, who impose artistic form on the passive matter to which women’s bodies have been reduced, in representations by men and for a heteronormative masculine symbolic. The active imposition of form on passive matter that is a hallmark of the representative regime for Rancière is here explicitly aligned with male subject-artists representing female object-bodies.
By asking about the gendering of subjects typically displayed in museums, and how they are typically represented, we can understand this work as commenting on some of the defining features of the representative order, the norms that dictate, in Rancière’s words, ‘which subjects and forms of expression were deemed worthy of inclusion’ (AD 10, ME 20), or what artistic conventions are appropriate for which subjects. We can see this work as commenting on the fact that the representative order ‘set those concerned by art apart from those that it did not concern’ (AD 12; ME 23), and as challenging typical assumptions about whose concern art is. Here, the subject is represented as a supine figure reposing in a fashion that specifically cites a p ainterly image, and in doing so also evokes a litany of paintings spawned in the same tradition. Yet, the work does not merely cite this painting or mimic this tradition – though it does this, thereby reminding us that at issue here is not whether female nudes should be on display in museums, but how they are displayed, by whom, for whom, for what purposes, and with what effects. The question posed is whether one of the effects is to preclude women from being taken seriously as artists, or from having art as a serious concern. At the same time, this work by the Guerrilla Girls subverts the tradition it playfully cites, replacing a woman’s head with a gorilla’s head, fusing a female figure with the head of an animal (repeating, with a critical edge, a trope that has been effected so often before – one thinks of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew).
Gorillas are often caged in zoos for a public to view, a reference perhaps to the passivity of the women on display by male artists in museums curated for the pleasure of spectators. The gorilla head points to the habitual association of women with animals, to the reduction of women’s speech to noise, at the same time as it refigures women’s alleged wildness as a refusal to be contained within the frame of animality. To recycle a point made by Catherine Mackinnon in a slightly different manner, we might ask, tongue-in-cheek, what chance does a woman have of having her art or words taken seriously, of being construed as an artist or heard as an art critic, when she is reclining, naked, in a museum within a frame?4 On this occasion, the riposte must be, every chance. Far from quelling the speech of the unidentified collective group that goes by the name of Guerrilla Girls, this particular framing of a supine female body graphically represents their speech within the same frame. Their speech spills out beyond the frame, putting into question a history of well-rehearsed tropes and conventions that define the appropriate depiction of women’s bodies. Yet, if there is an insistence upon being heard, there is also a playful citation to and incorporation of a history of art that reiterates old themes in a new way, transgressing and revising the norms that infuse them in a humorous manner.
The work performs a citation to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, which dates back to 1814.5 The pose of the female body that appears in Ingres, recumbent on a chaise longue, is readily recognizable in the version presented by the Guerrilla Girls, but a gorilla head replaces the female head, and a question is posed by the script written above the figure. The question this work by the Guerrilla Girls is asking us then is, how much has really changed in the years separating us from Ingres? How long will it take for 50 per cent of the artists represented in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or any other major art institution, to be female, and how would this transform not so much which subjects are depicted but how they are depicted, for what ends, and with what effects? The Guerrilla Girls have updated their figures, originally provided for 1989, and updated in 2005 and 2012, when the percentage of female artists to female nudes on display were 3 per cent to 83 per cent and 4 per cent to 76 per cent, respectively. Similarly, in another work, they provide figures for how many women had one-person shows in NYC galleries. In 1985, only one woman had such a show at the Modern. In 2015, one woman had such a show at the Guggenheim, Metropolitan and Whitney, and there were two one-person shows at the Modern.6
There is a robust line of male artists following in the steps of Ingres, whose inspiration is not hard to map, whose work ‘we’ are well accustomed to viewing in art museums, for example, Pablo Picasso’s, La Grande Odalisque d’après Ingres, 1907.7 In a well-documented history of art, Ingres’s influences in his 1862 Le Bain Turc, for instance – which depicts the inner sanctum of a harem, where women relax, enjoying the company of one another – have been traced back to Raphael.8 In turn, his theme has shaped a profusion of female nudes, inspiring a series of further painters, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Edgar Degas.
We might begin to construct an alternative history by referring to Baby Back (2001) by Jamaica-born American artist Renée Cox, a work included in ‘American Family’.9 Like the Guerrilla Girls, Cox also cites Ingres’s Odalisque, imitating the pose of the female nude depicted there, but changing the colour of the skin and thereby challenging white, European, ideals of beauty. The work is a self-portrait, in which the artist wears red high, spiky heels, dangles a phallic whip from her hand, and reclines on a chaise longue, her back to the viewer, her buttocks prominent, calling up other works by Cox, in which she implicitly imitates the cartoon caricature images to which Saartjie Baartman was subjected, when she was paraded in Europe as a freak, her remains having been returned by the Museé de l’homme to their rightful country of origin only in 2002, although her death was in 1815.10
If Cox plays with the question of race, other works refigure gender and class.11 A long series of works have responded to Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque. In The Great Maiden by Moroccan artist 2Fik, a bearded figure reposes in a fashion that again echoes Ingres’s Odalisque, in which the female nude turns her head coyly over her sho ulder, acknowledging the gaze of the viewer, and dangles a feather fan from her right hand.12 The fan, which is also suggestive of autoeroticism, a phallic appendage, becomes a whip in Cox’s rendering, a reference to slavery, perhaps, but one that reverses the power relationship of white domination, since here it is a black woman who wields authority over the whip.13 In 2Fik’s rendering, the fan becomes a feather duster, held by a hand clad in a bright pink rubber glove, accompanied by a plastic spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the left foreground of the picture, and a vacuum cleaner in the right background. In this context, the headscarf worn by the figure, citing Ingres’s turban, is reminiscent of a bandana that might be worn by a cleaning woman – worn here, however, by a trans figure. 2fik’s reclining body is on display, while the paraphernalia of housework codes her in a way that both indicates and departs from the subservient, feminized service roles to which cleaners and housewives, usually employed for poor wages or unpaid, are typically consigned. Often consigned to invisibility, the task of cleaning takes on a highly visible role here in the shape of a trans figure, challenging conventional gender configurations, and mimicking, even while departing from, the class privilege of the reclining females depicted by Ingres in works such as Odalisque and Le Bain Turc, women attended by, in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s words, their ‘generally pritty’ slaves ‘braiding their hair in several pritty manners’.14
In Rancière’s terms, the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik can be understood to pave the way for the redefinition of ‘the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been’ (AD 25; ME 38), staging an implicit challenge to the standard ideals of beauty represented by Ingres and the tradition of white, female nudes in which his paintings are inscribed. Like Cox, the Guerrilla Girls and 2Fik, by incorporating a recognizable reference to a female figure who has her back turned to us – but referring in this case to Ingres’s The Turkish Bath – rather than La Grande Odalisque, and by devoting the rest of the framed work to a mirrored surface, the Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto also pays homage to Ingres. Il Bagno Turc in a playful yet critical way, puts into question the conventions of spectatorship assumed in Ingres’s work.15 In Ingres’s Le Bain Turc the gazes of the female subjects are averted from the viewer. The female nudes are passively observed. They do not return the gaze. In Pistoletto’s 1971 piece, the figure still has her back to the viewer, but, as we look at the piece, we see ourselves looking; our own image is mirrored back to us by the reflective stainless-steel surface of the work, so that the spectator’s gaze is returned from within the frame of the work. If we stand in a certain position, we find ourselves positioned as if we were the reflection of the woman, whose face we do not see (as if her face remains veiled), as if – were she looking into a mirror – she might see not her own reflection, but us, the spectators, looking at her, so that her image is refracted through our ideas of her. In Pistoletto, whatever assumptions or frameworks we bring to the work of art (whether they are objectifying, Orientalist, heteronormative or of some other character) we are asked to take responsibility for our looking, for our construction of the work. Just as Ingres superimposes his Eurocentric vision of women on those he depicts in the inner sanctum of the Turkish Bath, so Pistoletto might be understood to draw out the superimposition of Ingres’s masculinist/Orientalist gaze, rendering the ownership of every spectator’s gaze explicit, and thereby problematizing the authority that underpins the latent, unconscious racism of an Orientalist gaze that takes itself to be neutral.
If the Guerrilla Girls focus attention upon the relative scarcity of female artists represented in public art museums in relation to the relative plethora of female nudes depicted, Cox brings into focus the invisible standard of whiteness informing both the museum culture and the feminist challenge the Guerrilla Girls pose to it, while 2Fik draws attention to the heteronormativity and gender stereotypes of museum culture, which are reflective of culture in general. In doing so, Cox and 2Fik interrogate assumptions that pervade communities that constitute themselves as feminist, which are capable of constituting their own versions of the police order. Considered in this context, Pistoletto, in turn, might be said to draw attention to the continual refraction of that police order. Every time a different spectator views his work, the work itself reflects an image of the viewer, and is thus continually reconstituted by the series of museum visitors who find themselves framed within the work.
The emergence of the museum plays a significant strategic role for Rancière, in that it marks a period of transition from the representative regime – in which works of art ostensibly celebrated the dignity of those who commissioned them, or served the role of religious illustration – to the aesthetic regime, when the addressee or spectator becomes ‘undifferentiated’ (AD 9; ME 18). Henceforth, says Rancière, ‘artworks relate to the genius of peoples and present themselves, at least in principle, to the gaze of anyone at all’ (AD 13; ME 24). Let me pause here for a moment, to mark the words, ‘at least in principle’ [en droit au moins] – for herein lies the difficulty on which my concerns focus, which Rancière thereby signals, albeit obliquely and in passing. The works of art by the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik indicate that the museum spectator is not as undifferentiated, as Rancière might assume. Rather, museums, the exhibits they display, and the audiences they target are themselves implicated in nationalist, colonialist, racist and cisgender agendas, which the works by the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik render visible and put into question. Whether the political messages of these works of art will be obvious to a particular viewer will depend to some extent upon the communities within which they live, and what assumptions are taken for granted.
Central to Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime is Kant’s free play, which, for Rancière, heralds an ‘unprecedented equality’ (AD 13; ME 24), promising an overcoming of Voltaire’s division between men of taste and those of coarse sensibility, a division that consists of conceiving of two humanities as ‘separate classes’ that ‘have distinct senses’ (AD 13; ME 23). There is, says Rancière, ‘no longer a hierarchy of active intelligence and sensible passivity’ (AD 13; ME 24). So too the hierarchy of subjects and publics is blurred. Yet the question raised by the Guerrilla Girls, and by works such as that by Cox and 2Fik, is whether this hiera rchy is not still very much intact, when it comes to the race, gender and heteronormativity, not only of representation, but of artists. They point to the ways in which the gendering and racing of art works will be read differently according to context. Precisely in raising these questions, the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik also challenge the implicit framing of audiences to which they point. If this is indeed the case, then I am suggesting that in some contexts the Guerrilla Girls might be understood to intervene in ‘reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible’ (AD 25; ME 38) as Rancière puts it, since their art work distributes ‘spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular’ (AD 25; ME 39) in new ways.
In raising the question of whether women are still considered largely objects in the context of museums still dominated by male artists, and by inscribing women’s positionality as subjects who interrogate this state of affairs, the Guerrilla Girls are precisely opening up the arena for addressing the political question of who constitutes the community in Kant’s sensus communis. In foregrounding the question of race, Cox is issuing a challenge, one that might suggest that the intervention of at least this particular work of the Guerrilla Girls itself needs to be complicated. In fact, some historical and theoretical excavation suggests that Cox’s implicit challenge to the Guerrilla Girls taps into the Orientalism that can be stipulated in relation to Ingres, which the Guerrilla Girls – although they address the racism of the institution of art elsewhere – leave unaddressed in their transfiguration of Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque.16
As an art collective, the Guerrilla Girls offer an opportunity to interrogate the individualist assumptions that inform Rancière’s appeal to Kant’s understanding of the genius. We might ask whether Rancière tends to preserve the individualism of Kant’s theory of genius, even as he decries the view that equates Kant’s theory with that of the unique (see AD 10; ME 19). The Guerrilla Girls refuse the canons of the individual artist, identifying the origin of their work only with a group that remain unnamed and anonymous, in a deliberate ploy to undermine the importance of identity and the cult of the individual artist, thus implicitly challenging the idea of the solitary genius. The work emanates from a political movement, a collective movement, a wider feminist movement, to which its collective authorship might be understood to allude, precisely to the extent that the Guerrilla Girls, with their underground tactics, refuse to go by their own names, preferring to adopt the names of past female artists, thereby blurring the boundary between past and present, calling up a history of women artists. The work also blurs the boundary between high art and low art, calling up a tradition of high art in a graphically comic manner, and crossing genres, inhabiting a space that is indeterminate: Is this a poster, a political billboard, or is it a work of art that belongs in the Met? And what would be the difference?
Figure 2 Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? 1989 © Guerrilla Girls and Courtesy guerrillagirls.com
Not only is the question of authorship and linear temporality muddied by the collective anonymity of a group consisting of a constantly changing membership, and of individuals who represent themselves by taking on the names of historical female artists, so too in this particular case, the work destabilizes itself, rewriting its own history. Another piece appears in 2014, which the Guerrilla Girls refer to as a ‘remix’, updating the original work, in which a second female nude, a still from Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, is superimposed on the figure that cites Ingres’s female nude, and the words referring to the number of female nudes in the Met are replaced so that the text now reads, ‘Do women have to be naked to get into music videos? While 99% of the guys are dressed!’. In another citational work referring us back to the figures quoted by the Guerrilla Girls within the context of the United States, no image at all appears, simply the words: ‘It’s even worse in Europe.’17
This series of works present us with the question of whether or how Rancière’s reflections can accommodate feminist critique. At the same time, it brings to Rancière’s work a history of feminist critique, a body of scholarship, thinking and activism that makes it possible to formulate Rancière’s understanding of political and artistic dissensus in terms of feminist concerns. The Guerrilla Girls transform the passive female figure represented by Ingres into an active speaker. Cox draws attention to, and intervenes in, the construction of the female figure (again, in the particular works on which I focus here) as white. 2Fik disrupts gender norms that typically align certain body parts with feminized scripts, and certain service roles with women. Such artists are capable of shifting the terms of discourse, sight, and the perceptual field, in such a way as to alter the landscape of the visible.
The history of feminist critique is itself contested ground, in which conceptual and political battles have been fought and continue to play themselves out over the claims of intersectionality. Queer theory has contested the heteronormativity of feminist theory, the transgender movement has contested the normativity of both, questions have been raised about the relevance of class to an invisibly middle-class feminist theory, and race theorists have contested the implicit ownership of feminist theory by white feminists. A history then that might itself be understood in terms of a series of clashes between the police order of feminism as usual, and moments of political dissensus that stage the imperative to redraw the map of feminism so as to render it capable of structural challenge and transformation. As sites of invisibility are rendered visible, so too the claims of those who have assumed the right to dictate the terms on which feminism is meaningful, the right to define the logos of feminist theory or activism, are put in question.
Rancière acknowledges that the way in which the police order is defined, and therefore what will qualify as political dissensus, is dependent upon context when he suggests that, ‘The politics of works of art plays itself out to a larger extent – in a global and diffuse manner – in the reconfiguration of worlds of experience based on which police consensus or political dissensus are defined’ (PA 65). This suggests that whether a work of art amounts to a political slogan or not will depend on how the comm unity that receives it constitutes itself, on what counts as common sense for a given community.
A writer cannot control how her words might be received any more than an artist can control the meaning of her work of art (see PA 62). Yet, it is worth speculating that were a spectator to identify themselves under the sign of feminism, the chances are that the significance of the work of the Guerrilla Girls is likely to have acquired a level of self-evidence that it will lack in other contexts. The same might be said in reference to Cox’s Baby Back, depending upon how its viewers understand themselves as configured with regard to race, or with reference to 2Fik in relation to trans concerns. In this sense, whether a redistribution of the sensible takes place or not is dependent on what constitutes common sense for a given community. Depending on how a given community constitutes itself, what counts as common and what does not, certain questions will not merely be salient, but all too familiar; or else they will not appear at all: they will remain invisible, unintelligible, incoherent, irrelevant, meaningless, beside the point, or perhaps outlandish, threatening and abrasive. It is precisely around such divisions that dissensus takes shape.
By taking a work produced by the Guerrilla Girls feminist collective, by Cox, by 2Fik or by Pistoletto and suggesting ways in which these works challenge one another as well as some of Rancière’s assumptions, my effort has been to explore the relationship between particular political movements and Rancière’s understanding of how political art functions as dissensus in the aesthetic regime. By emphasizing the contextual character of the relationship between the police order of consensus that orchestrates prevailing perceptions and the dissensual fracturing of common sense, my effort is directed towards refining the sense in which Rancière’s conception of politics might be understood to operate.
On the one hand, Rancière provides a vocabulary that can shed light on feminist interventions, precisely in the manner that intersectional approaches to feminist theory require. That is, as certain exclusions that were previously invisible and unintelligible, even to progressive politics, are rendered salient and meaningful, what constituted common sense proves itself open to revision, through an ongoing process of challenges. On the other hand, feminist philosophy, politics and aesthetics can illuminate Rancière’s understanding of the operation of dissensus, which appeals to a state of affairs that a given community takes as self-evident, a self-evidence that the operation of dissensus brings into question. We need to take seriously and think through the fact that communities are differentially constituted with regard to what passes for self-evident. Rancière’s own understanding of what is self-evident is liable to be constituted in such a way as to emphasize certain factors as salient, while ignoring, disregarding, or failing to see others as salient. My discussion here is offered as a way of explicitly opening up Rancière’s aesthetic considerations to a feminist sensibility – a gesture I assume he would not oppose, but would rather welcome, given his sensitivity to feminist concerns elsewhere in his work – thereby illustrating that his aesthetics are amenable to being opened up in this way.
There is a sense in which the narrative arc of this chapter might be said to replicate the problem it tries to address, by moving from the Guerrilla Girls to Cox to 2Fik. Perhaps it will be said, with some justification, I should have begun with 2Fik, or Cox, since by foregrounding the Guerrilla Girls, I continue to tell the story of feminism by centring the experience and reflections of white women, and only acknowledging as an afterthought African American feminist and trans challenges to what is thereby assumed to be white, heterosexual and cisgender ownership of feminist thought. After consideration, I have chosen to take this risk both to respect the sequential appearance and citational references of these works of art, which can be read as playing off one another, and to illustrate how feminism both participates in establishing new versions of the police order, and is capable of conflict, fracture and dissensus. How well feminism can accommodate dissensus varies from one context to another; its success in doing so might be taken as an index of its vitality and continued importance as a movement. The necessary tensions of the feminist movement continue to play themselves out.
The artworks discussed above will tend to elicit divergent responses from communities that have become more or less attuned to implicit heteronormativity, sexism or racism of social norms, and the ways they are embodied in art institutions. Such overlapping communities will be more or less sensitive to the concerns of one another. The degree of sensitivity to the dynamics of race, gender, or heteronormative presumption, is not reducible to how one identifies in relation to these categories; neither is it insensitive to it. It is a question of how much thinking, reading, reflecting and challenging one has done in order to appreciate the degree to which our ways of seeing, perceiving and thinking are inevitably caught up in normative orders of which it is difficult to become aware; even when we are aware of them, the normativity is difficult to combat. It is a matter of acknowledging the fact that an optics of unconscious dictates what we see and what we do not see, how we orchestrate and react to the world, how we schematize and react to people as raced, classed and gendered and so on, and to interrogating such optics. Art can distil such schematizations and as such can render them available for interrogation. It can also participate in and help to produce new schematizations. In question of how we perceive the world and how the world can be brought under contestation, how it can become another world, how we can perceive it differently in fundamental ways, how the structuring of race, gender or heteronormativity, for example, can arrange what there is to see or hear or understand. Art can bring into conflict two different worlds, producing dissensus. It can also draw attention to the multiplicity of worlds, and police logics. The very conditions of possibility for understanding can undergo revision.
Notes
1 See the interview with Rancière, ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière with Gabriel Rockhill’, in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 65. Hereafter cited as PA.
2 See PA 50. See also DT 138, 186.
3 In fact, the Guerrilla Girls also attack aspects of capitalism, including a work that lampoons art collectors, the text of which reads: ‘Art is sooo expensive … we completely understand why you can’t pay your employees a living wage!’ See http://guerrillagirls.squarespace.com/projects/
4 See Catherine Mackinnon “Francis Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 193. My reference to Mackinnon is tongue-in-cheek, and does not endorse her views on pornography. To be absolutely clear, I am certainly not condemning the representation of female nudes (or any other nudes) in art galleries or elsewhere.
5 See http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/une-odalisque
6 Works by the Guerilla Girls can be found on their website. See note 3 above.
7 https://theartstack.com/artist/pablo-picasso/la-grande-odalisque-d-ap
8 http://www.louvre.fr/mediaimages/le-bain-turc
9 http://www.reneecox.org/american-family
10 See S. Osha, “Venus and White Desire,” Transition, 99 (2008): 80–93.
11 See http://search.it.online.fr/covers/?p=45
12 See: montrealgazette.com/tag/the-great-maiden
13 Thanks to Simon-Morgan Wortham for helping me think about this point.
14 See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters 1708-1720, vol. I, edited by Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 314.
15 https://mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/Michelangelo-Pistoletto-Il-Bagno-Turco-The-Turkish-Bath-1971
16 The text of one of their works, for example, reads ‘Only 4 Commercial galleries in N.Y. show black women. Only 1 shows more than one’. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-no-title-p78806 (accessed 26 June 2015).
17 www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerilla-girls-its-even-worse-in-europe-p78801