voi CesPainting in the texthowever, before addressing the question posed above, Jacques Rancière’s essay Painting
in the Text (2007) will be drawn on as a framework for thinking about how change
arises in art’s ambition. acknowledging the oft heard complaint about the torrent of
words that accompany painting, Rancière sets out his goal of moving from the ‘polemic
denunciation’ of words, to a ‘theoretical understanding of the articulation between
words and visual forms that defines a regime of art.’
according to Rancière, the very idea of art is contingent on a ‘regime of identification’,
a regime of disjunction that gives visibility and meaning to linguistic and non- linguistic
practices and which determines, for example, what painting is, what it is to paint
and how paintings are seen. however, such a decision requires the establishment of
a ‘regime of equivalence’ between a practice and that which it is not. This, according
to Rancière, accounts for horace’s proclamation ut pictura poësis, (as is painting so
is poetry), which is not the subjugation of one art by another, but the assertion of a
relationship between, ‘the orders of making, seeing, and saying whereby these arts –
and possibly others – were arts’ (2007: 74). Rancière describes this relationship as a
‘bond’, in the first instance between painting and the poetic power of words and fables;
a bond between practices of doing, saying and thinking; a bond that is made, unmade
and remade. ‘What can undo this bond ...’, he argues is the untying of one relationship
and retying of another. hence, the concept of painting, associated with Clement
greenberg, as an art directed toward nothing other than the use of the medium specific
to it, namely paint and a support, ‘is a different type of relationship between what
painting does and what words make visible on its surface’ (2007: 75).^4 The making
of this relationship does not necessitate the abandonment of resemblance. Rather,
resemblances must be detached from the given order of relationships which ties them
to the order of subjects and actions, as in poetry. according to Rancière, a medium is:
a surface of conversion: a surface of equivalence between the different arts’
ways of making: a conceptual space of articulation between these ways of
making and forms of visibility and intelligibility determining the way in which
they can be viewed and conceived.
(Rancière2007: 75f.)The representative regime’s demise is not the discovery of art’s essence. it is the
definition of an, ‘aesthetic regime in the arts that is a different articulation between
practices, forms of visibility and modes of intelligibility’. however, Rancière continues,
this was not the result of a revolution in the practices of painters, but instead a new way
of seeing painting of the past that, commencing in the eighteenth century, resulted in
the re- evaluation of genre painting and the release of pictorial forms from poetry. Yet
this was not painting liberated from words, but a new way of bringing them together;
not as the model to be satisfied as a norm, but the means by which its expressiveness
can appear on its surface; such ‘that words amend the surface by causing another
subject to appear under the representative subject’ (2007: 76).
in summary, Rancière makes the claim that art’s existence relies on the weaving of
relations between practices of making, seeing, saying and thinking. These relations are