Vertical, color photo. Book cover of MODERN TIMES: ART, TIME, POLITICS, by Jacques Rancière
"Modern Times: Art, Time, Politics" by Jacques Rancière, published in 2021 by N-1 editions. Photo: reproduction

Vertical, color photo. Book cover of MODERN TIMES: ART, TIME, POLITICS, by Jacques Rancière
“Modern times: art, time, politics”, by Jacques Rancière, published in 2021 by N-1 editions. Photo: reproduction

Sand there is a place where inclusion, decolonialism and anti-racist debate are very present in the contemporary art scene. Therefore, it is still strange that Jacques Rancière's new book, Modern times – art, time, politics, dedicate himself to a kind of revision of modernism only with references from male, white and European or American authors.

After all, your book The sharing of the sensible – aesthetics and politics, published in Brazil in 2005, is an important reference on the understanding that a work of art must always be seen within the “fabric of experience”, as Rancière himself conceptualises it, therefore within a context.

It is true that the publication that comes out, now in 2021, by the publisher N-1, brings together four texts already somewhat dated, most of them from 2015. Yes, six years at the moment, post #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, is a sufficiently long period, because it changed cultural and academic paradigms, which no longer tolerate certain outdated practices.

In Brazil, this issue becomes even more relevant, as reflections have already begun on the 100th anniversary of the 1922 Modern Art Week, and many seminars and events sought to review the event from a more inclusive perspective and from authors and authors. with different representations.

Experience regime

Despite all this, the Marxist Rancière continues to seek to create concepts that can look at forms of emancipation, such as by problematizing the notion of the modern as “building a new common sense, a new sensitive fabric in which prosaic activities receive the poetic value that makes of them the elements of a common world”.

This “sensitive tissue” is also seen as a “regime of experience” and becomes part of the focus of this research: to point out that the notion of linear time of modernity must be rethought, because “time is not simply the line that stretches between a past and a future. It is also, and above all, an environment in which to live”. Of the four texts in the publication, with a somewhat obvious homage to the Charlie Chaplin film, Modern times, two of them are dedicated to specific languages ​​of art: dance and cinema.

About dance, he points out the libertarian and free character, especially from the 1920s and 1930s, approaching choreographers and dancers from a wide spectrum: from the German expressionist Mary Wigman (1886-1973), precursor of dance-theater, to the North American Lucinda Childs .

In the essay on cinema, Rancière deals with specific scenes from three films: A man with a camera (1929), by Dziga Vertov, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), by John Ford, and Juventude em Marcha (2006), by the Portuguese Pedro Costa. At least there, Costa represents a certain marginality in the author's very Eurocentric thinking.


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