The Emancipated Spectator By Jacques Ranciere

Jacques Ranciere is a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris Saint-Denis. In “The Emancipated Spectator”, the author Jacque Ranciere arguments that creators employ the word spectator has a theatrical idea of “spectacle” to describe several performance that use “bodies in action before an assembled audience” in contemporary culture. Ranciere's perspective is to question on the effort to liberate the spectator that attempts activities from passivity by asking, "if it is not precisely the desire to abolish the distance that creates it".

My personal perspective on Ranciere’s subject in the article “The Emancipated Spectator” is that his critique on the aesthetic has taken a political engagement with the actual practices of collaborative
and relational art. For the moment, my own art practice is vague because I work with a little bit of everything, like drawing, painting, photography and installation. I usually have an idea that change along the making of my project. My art may have engaged some people, but it did not go where my art depended on the audience.

To conclude, the article’s remarks on the critique of the spectacle more or less exhausts the ambitions of political art for Rancière. He conceptual critic on contemporary art develops Marxist and postmodern cultural and critical theory that reminds its reader of the political nature of spectating and aesthetic experience.