transformationaL Pra Cti Cenot established once and for all. They are constructed, dismantled and reconstructed
according to changing ambition, need and interest: painting once was tied to poetry,
then to the spirituality of Kandinsky, then to greenberg’s formalism and so on. Rancière
does not seek to be exhaustive: his examples are employed to illustrate and justify his
argument about the interconnectedness of ways of making and saying, image and text,
and to throw light on what it is for something to be art and for there to be change in art.
each feat of untying and retying specifies an artistic project: to tell stories, to express
the spiritual, to conquer the medium, and so on. each aesthetic regime gives birth to
a space for production and a community of interest driven by the logic of the regime
toward the attainment of a common goal, but as interests change another regime is
born, grows and outgrows its elder sibling. Criticism, born according to Rancière at the
same time as hegel’s aesthetics, is the new bond between forms and words, but not
simply as a discourse that retrospectively adds meaning to forms, but as one that in the
first instance works toward a new visibility, a new way of seeing pictorial forms, which is
achieved through a critical practice of de- figuration in which the figures of one aesthetic
regime are refigured in another space. accordingly, greenberg’s counter- posing of the
idea of the conquest of the surface against Kandinsky’s anti- representative programme
is seen as a labour of de- figuration that makes the same painting, namely of abstract
figures, visible in a different way. To illustrate this claim, Rancière presents and analyses
two extracts from critical texts written in the middle to late nineteenth century, the
first critiquing the work of Jean Baptiste siméon Chardin from the goncourt brothers’,
French eighteenth- century painters, first published in 1864, and the second, dealing with
paul gauguin’s, La Lutte de Jacob avec l’ange, from albert aurier’s, Le Symbolisme en
peinture, published in 1891. The first reveals an act of de- figuration that makes visible
in a new way the materiality of a work of the past, and the second shows that de-
figuration can construct a visibility for painting that goes beyond the material present.
so, in claiming that painting is always an interweaving of practices of making, saying,
seeing and thinking, with one hand Rancière erases the idea of the art of painting as
the realization of the particularity of its medium and with the other he redraws it as
a surface of ‘dissociation and de- figuration’. hence the denial of the representative
regime is the assertion of a new correspondence:
the ‘like’ that linked painting to poetry, visual figures to the order of discourse.
Words no longer prescribe, as story or doctrine, what painting should be. They
make themselves images so as to shift the figures of the painting, to construct
this surface of conversion, this surface of form- signs which is the real medium
of painting [...] a space of conversion where the relationship between words
and visual forms anticipates visual de- figurations still to come [...] The surface
is not wordless, is not without ‘interpretations’ that pictorialize it.
(Rancière 2007: 87–9)seen through Rancière’s lens, art is always in transition; always transforming itself,
even when pushing a given stage of visibility to an end that appears to be the end of
all ends; always unfolding a stage of visibility entwined with other stages of visibility,
each keeping faith with its own logic. in the context of the debate on art and research,
Rancière’s ideas are appealing because, first, they demystify art; second, they demand