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 Jacques Ranciére interview with Yan CiretHistory and the Art SystemIn your new book,
Le partage du sensible
, youradically undermine the concepts of modernity andthe avant-garde. In what way is this structure whichwas conceived in the 19C by Baudelaire and takenup by everyone from Walter Benjamin to theSituationsits and Tel Quel invalid?
 I am not interested in some battle of the ancients andmoderns. My target is the notion of modernity which isused as an explanatory category by both the supportersand the detractors of contemporary art. This introduces aproblematic relation between the course of History and thedevelopment of art. First of all, it tendentiously reducesartistic transformations to one or two exemplary ruptures––for example, pictorial abstraction and the readymade,which are particular forms of a paradigm that is in factmuch more general than that. It then makes these artificialbreaks appear to embody the accomplishment of somepolitical task or historial destiny. To me this way of reasoning implies a general onology in which there is somegreat master signifier capable of governing each age. Thisconcept has ended up drowning art in a patheticmelodrama that mixes the Kantian sublime with the Murderof the Father, the taboo on representation with thetechnology of mechanical reproduction and the death of the gods with the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Iwanted to get away from all this pathos and examine thespecific functioning of art rather than the metaphysicalmoving spirit of the age. 
How do you explain that this modernist pathoscoincided with such an intense burst of energy, andthat the 20
th
century looks set to be remembered as
 
one of the golden ages for the arts, with a starburstof creativity epitomized by people such as Joyce,Stravinsky, De Kooning, Picasso and Eisentstein? 
It wasn’t the pathos of modernism that opened up theseinfinite possibilities for art but the destruction of thecategories and hierarchies of art’s representational system.I have tried to contextualize tjos
aggiornamento
as theeffect of a new regime of art, understood here as the set of relations between seeing, maing and saying. It was thistransformation that made the works you describe possibleand which allows for new, untried combinations as a resultof the opening of frontiers between the different arts orbetween artistic forms and the forms of life, between pureart and applied art, art and non-art, narration anddescription or symbol, etc. We must be careful not to try toshoehorn these new forms of artistic visibility into somegrand global signifier like modernity. 
 Yes, modernism has always been based on rupture,the cult of the new and of progress wither politicalor aesthetic. The primal scene of this modernismwas the parricde and regicide of the FrenchRevolution. Don’t you think that in the currentmelancholy of the avant-gardes we are seeing a lossof contact with that scene? 
I don’t think that the transformations of art should beconceived solely in terms of that foundingregicide/parricide. Ever since Romanticism, aestheticnovelty has always gone hand in hand with thereinterpretation of the old. Ruptures have always beenreprises, reinscriptions, and also a way of bringing into artthings that lay outside it: anthropological objects, popularimages, natural phenomena, etc. The new is not detached
 
from history. We need to move away fom the idea of theend of history. For two centuries now art has been seeing aconstant questioning of the frontiers between what is newand what is old and rearranging images, adding elementsfrom non-artistic categories and recycling clichés. 
So you don’t believe in a “theory of exception” (1)which posites that a radically innovative andsingular piece of art can displace the artistic field,open up an unforeseen breach? 
No, change is the result of a thousand creepingencroachments. Art history is always retrospectivereconstitution centering on big, major ruptures. As if Kandinsky or Malevich, or even a single painting, had beenrevolutions in the history of humanity. In the case of Kandinsky, the colored signs on the canvas are taken nottondicate any known thing out there in the world. But thisde-identification had already been practiced at the end of the 19
th
century by the theoreticians of Symbolism whoread figurative paintings––Gauguin’s, for example ––asabstract combinations of forms and signs. So these“events” need to be reassessed within a broader context,rather than being concentrated in a few majorbreakthroughs. Half the people who write about modern artseem to think that Duchamp’s
Large Glass
cut humanhistory in two. But the large glass need to be seen in thecontext of a whole series of transformations in the ideasand practice of art, and in the relations between pure andapplied art and non-art. It is wrong to squeeze a wholeaesthetic paradigm into a few great figures, endowing witha metaphysical pathos as the agents of destiny. 
The antithesis of the “theory of exceptions” is to befound in your book 
 Aux bords du politique
in the
of 00

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