Here I go again...

This morning I was listening to a talk about Identity in Portraiture by Lara Perry from the University of Brighton. She was talking about Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills pictures (1978) and how Sherman herself had denied that they were “formulated as a feminist project to examine the representation of women in Hollywood cinema.” But, Lara goes on to say that “the fact they were produced at a time when this was the focus of feminist visual analysis. They were produced simultaneously with Laura Mulvey’s famous essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema. That conjunction, context has allowed us to read them as interrogations of the enactment, the performance, and the representation of gender of women in cinema.”

Then, something went off in my head about the Ranciere reading. So, I pulled my first posting regarding Ranciere because I have been rethinking about what he is meaning by “politics” and I don’t think it was what I was first thinking. I am wondering when he is talking about the ‘politics” of art, it has to do more with convoluted world of art as alluded to in his four types of contemporary exhibitions. Kind of like the politics of a department or office you might work in and the power plays that go on there. An artist, like Sherman, may state quite simply what her art isn’t about, but the rest of the art world can alter that meaning and presentation of the work and glean from it something else.

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My earlier post I pulled...
Ranciere’s essay excerpt seems to addressing the terms the “art of politics and the politics of art” and the amalgamation of art and politics in our commodity based world. Also, possibly the role politics play in the aesthetics of art created under certain political climates, any barriers possibly encountered, how it might be perceived and shown.

This led me to think of past essay excerpts and discussions in class of what role the museum’s play in the fabric of the presentation of art given the political climate of our current history being created.

Ranciere gives examples of collage artists in this excerpt mixing the ideas of art, politics and the aesthetic. Polish artist Zbigniew Libera seems to be an example to me of a contemporary artist whose art creates a dialog between art and the politics of art while making a comment on consumerism and popular culture in his LEGO Concentration Camp series as well as creating controversy in some areas.
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/absence/artists/zLibera/