Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 40

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
analysis is confirmed by the widespread media coverage (Kennedy 2016; Rayner 2016)
received by Reyes’ subsequent project: Doomocracy (2016), an immersive installation in
an abandoned terminal that asked viewers to reflect on the state of American politics. Al-
together, this suggests the low-intensity symbolic (and affective) engagement of viewers
with the UN and, conversely, the strong degree of attachment felt by many individuals
vis-à-vis their nation states.
This said, the work of Jacques Rancière reveals that the two interventions have some-
thing else in common. Like Étienne Balibar, he was a student of Louis Althusser; this
is reflected in Rancière’s concern with equality. But while Balibar’s work considers its
fulfilment or lack thereof in light of who is defined as a citizen, Rancière develops an
analogous analysis in aesthetics and pedagogy, among other fields. In this framework,
and as is well known, Rancière’s attempt to identify the fundamental modes of articula-
tion between the political and the aesthetic in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution
of the Sensible (2000) leads him to conceive the distribution of the sensible as both the
organisation of what can be said, seen, thought or heard, and as a distribution of images
and places. In light of this statement, both Reyes’ and Scott’s interventions emerge as
interested in expanding public conversations about the overlaps and disjunctions be-
tween the positions of the visitor of art museums, the citizen, the protester, the artist
and, more broadly, of the politics of representation within the cultural and the political
fields.
But there is another crucial dimension of pUN that is illuminated by Rancière’s work:
the position of the participant in Reyes’ performance, which was aligned with the for-
mer’s understanding of the spectator (evident both in his earlier work, such as in The Ig-
norant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 1987, and in the argument
developed in the well-known essay “The Emancipated Spectator” regarding the position
of the spectator vis-à-vis the actor, 2009). The philosopher writes,
we have not to turn spectators into actors. We have to acknowledge
that any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the ac-
tor also is the spectator of the same kind of story. We have not to turn
the ignorant into learned persons, or, according to a mere scheme of
overturn, make the student or the ignorant the master of his masters.
(2009:279)
That is, the French author is critical of art practices that aim to emancipate their partic-
ipants, which presupposes the ignorance of the latter. Rather, he proposes an aesthetics
that isn’t emancipatory (regarding, for example, the supposed domination of consumer-
ism—an approach that Rancière sees as patronising) but, instead, offers viewers a pos-
sibility for active interpretation. This is why Rancière’s model is characterised by the
blurring of the boundaries between looking and doing (2009:102). Reyes’ decision to
place the participants (without whom there would be no performance) at the centre of
his intervention highlights the similarity between his and Rancière’s views on spectator-
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