Original scientific paper
Emancipation, Memory, and the Revolutionary Subject of Art
Bojana Matejić
Abstract
The aim of this text is to examine the notion of Art as an emancipatory practice, as it has emerged recently in the light of artistic activities to which this attribute in the local, glocal, and global state of affairs has been prescribed. Following Badiou’s theory of art, one may mark this state of affairs as an aesthetics of non-difference. This essay seeks to propose a possible classification of such art practices – practices that oppose the modernist mode of thinking the term “artwork”, focusing on the issue of the emancipatory potency of (the art of) memory. First we intend to propose a general overview of the problem of the contemporary constellation of engaged art, then proceed to a critique of the sum of dominating cultural and artistic concepts that appear under various, yet affiliated terms: the art of memory, the culture of remembrance, the art of particularity that affirms the ideal of communication and the micro-politics of otherness, by juxtaposing the terms of Art as an emancipatory practice on the one hand, and the art of memory on the other, and by affirming the proposition of the possible, new revolutionary subject of Art. The hypothesis is here that the emancipatory practice of Art always produces an aestheticopolitical distance with regard to the existing situation. The aesthetico-political distance is nothing other than a reminder which constitutes the drive of the ethical subject.
Keywords
emancipation; the subject of Art; memory; remembrance; aestheticopolitical distance
Hrčak ID:
185577
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2014.
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