The Politics of Shibboleth

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    The Politics of Shibboleth

    Ruben Yepes

    VCS- December 2012

    Doris Salcedo is Colombias most outstanding contemporary artist. Part of Salcedos

    international resonance has to do with the appraisal of her work as the prototype of

    contemporary political art. Her celebrated installation Shibboleth (October 2007-April

    2008), in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern Gallery in London had already meant her

    international consecration. However, despite the international praise that Salcedo

    received for this piece well deserved from the point of view of the formal and

    conceptual rigor of her work, I want to critically assess its political scope. Thus, in this

    paper, I will examine Shibboleths political dimension, that is, its relevance as a form of

    political intervention.

    Shibboleth was a 167 metre- long crack that trailed the floor of most of the Tate

    Moderns Turbine Hall. Thecrack was initially no more than a hairline, but it gradually

    widened as it ran down the hall, eventually turning into a 40 cm wide ditch with some

    two metres in depth that branched in two towards its end. I visited the Tate Modern in

    December 2007; surely, the installation provided an impressive experience, although it

    is significant to mention that what struck me about the piece was not so much its

    conceptor its politics, but the technical prowess that slashing a huge cut in a concrete

    floor represented. What was most impressive was the fact that the surrounding concrete

    remained unscathed. Even though I have artistic training, it took me quite a while to

    understand how it was made: close inspection eventually revealed that the original

    concrete blocks were removed while new blocks, each with a section of the crack cast

    into it, were fit into the spaces left by the originals.

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    Even though Shibboleth is a piece of conceptual art and that, as such, it

    primordially appeals to the intellecti, it also managed to produce an affective response.

    Above all, there was a sense of solemnity in the hall, a feeling of being before

    something that required a grave approach and serious consideration. Such a feeling did

    not merely result from the crack in the floor, but from the entire spatial character of the

    installation: the fact that the Turbine Hall which is five storeys tall with 3,400 square

    metres of floorspacewas in itself essentially empty, the crack being more a negative

    than a positive presence. This emptiness had the paradoxical effect of making the

    negativity of the crack more present, as if it were some sort of sacrilegious profanation

    of a space meant for a spiritual experience. I must say, however, that I am referring

    these affects from personal experience; other spectators did not seem to be having the

    same encounter with the work.

    Fascinated by the installation, I spent quite some time thinking about my

    experience of it, about its technical prowess and then about its meaning and what it

    signified in the context of Salcedos work. Eventually, I began to observe other

    spectators reactions to it. There were indeed a lot of people present; many of them

    exhibited the allured naivet that accompanies the faces of tourists when visiting a

    museum. I observed and heard how, just like myself, many of the visitors took their

    time to speculate about how the piece was made. Most of them would have their

    photograph taken at some point, either with the crack in front or behind them. I also

    witnessed how somewhat more endeavoring visitors would introduce their hands and

    feet into the crack to get their picture taken, as proof, I assume, that it was not merely a

    well-achieved illusion, a sort of trompe-o-leil. Snapshots taken and the enigma solved,

    most visitors continued their way to the see the gallerys collections.

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    Shibboleth (2007-2008). Tate Modern Art Gallery, London. The artist. Photograph: Stephen

    White. Courtesy White Cube.

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    Framing Shibboleth

    How may we understand the term frame? If anything, the different uses that have been

    given to it demonstrate that this is a broad and loose term.iii

    I am interested in an

    ontological definition, one that will allow me to conceptually describe Salcedos

    Shibboleth as an aesthetic event. Throughout this paper, I will use the term frame in

    two different manners. One of them is perhaps related to notions of discourse and

    context. I will, however, emphasize Martin Heideggers use of the term. Heidegger

    (1971) proposes the term enframing(Ge-Stell) ro refer, on one hand, to technology as

    a form of relation to nature that compels man to conceive of the prior as reserve and, on

    the other, to art as a particular techne, one that produces a placing and setting itself into

    being of the artwork, that is, a mode of relation by which the work of art occurs and

    opens a particular place.

    I will relate Heideggers conceptto the way that Jacques Rancire uses the term

    to refer to the relation between art and politics. According to Rancire, the political

    potential of art derives, not from the relation between form and content, but from the

    frame of the autonomous aesthetic experience that subtends and encompasses both the

    artwork and the artists endeavors. In Rancires view, the autonomy of the aesthetic

    experience frames the politics of art, in such a way that it is the very condition of

    possibility of any form of political art. I will highlight this in relation to Shibboleth in

    the final section of this paper.

    If art is an event, then we may say that political art produces a political event.

    That is, political art serves as a catalyst that precipitates a bringing into relation in such

    a way that it may produce a singularity amidst the habitual coordinates of the world.

    Correspondingly, I offer the following general definition of frameas is used in this

    paper: a spatial and temporal bonding of a set of discourses, practices and affectsiv

    .

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    Through this definition, I want to emphasize the mobile, processual and relational

    character, not merely of the frame, but of art as enframing, the fact that the frame is not

    a fixed or given delimitation or structure, but a relation that, as such, is always in the

    process of happening. By this definition, the political in art is not a given, but an event

    that is always in the process of occurring.

    Under the umbrella of this broad definition, I will explore different framing

    devices and discourses in relation to Salcedos Shibboleth, with the intention of

    analytically relating them as to assess the installations political scope. It is important to

    note that, if frames are mobile and relational, it means that the political dimension of

    Salcedos piece if it indeed has a political dimension in any relevant senseis not fixed

    and consistent; on the contraryand just as in any art-event of a political character, the

    nature of the installation is such that it produces a space, an opening, in which different

    discourses and affects may be brought into relation in such a way that they may trigger

    a shift in the spectator-subject, a modification, not only in the habitual conceptions of

    her/himself, but also, in the way that the spectator-subject positions her/himself in the

    world she/he inhabits.

    Political Shibboleth

    Even though Salcedo hardly ever uses the word politics in her discourse, it is quite

    clear from her declarations in interviews and conferences that she considers her

    installation and her art in general to be political. Indeed, her recurring themes

    Colombia`s political violence, the displaced and disappeared, the memory of the

    conflicts victims are rendered through her work with a sense of denouncement,

    remembrance and intervention. I will take a close look at Salcedos declarations about

    Shibboleth later; for now, it is sufficient to say that Salcedos installation is intended as

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    political art. But, in this context, what may we understand by the term politics?

    Clearly, we are not talking about partisanship or ideological allegiance to a political

    project. Nor are we talking about participation through political institutions. If the

    notion of politics may be applicable to Salcedos installation in a way that distinguishes

    it from any propagandistic use of art, it must establish a fundamental link between art

    and politics, one that will go beyond the model of form and content.

    I consider that such a concept is to be found in Rancire, who has, over the last

    decade or so, developed a very profitable theory of politics and its relation to aesthetics.

    Rancire reconceptualizes the habitual sense of the term politics, in order to avoid an

    understanding of it that may be used to refer to the practices through which a

    metropolis or a nations order is produced and procured. Instead of politics, Rancire

    (2004) uses the term police to refer to these discourses and practices. The police

    participates in the creation, legitimization and sustainment of the premises of individual

    and collective experience and positions within the social corpus; in this sense, it is an

    aesthetic regime.

    Rancire calls this regime the distribution of the sensible, that is, the system of

    self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of

    something in common and the delimitations that define the receptive parts and positions

    within it (2009:12).The distribution of the sensible is a system that configures habitual

    ways of seeing, of saying, of feeling and doing in one word, habitual ways of being

    that determine individuals possibilities for political participation and, in consequence,

    the position that they occupy within the community.

    The concept of policeallows us to reserve the word politics to refer to the

    heterogeneous processes that oppose the consensus concerning the ways of

    participating, doing, perceiving, feeling and relating to others that appear as

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    unquestionable, which the habitual conception of politics obscures. In Rancires words,

    politics names a well- determined activity, antagonic of the first (the police): that

    which breaks with the sensible configuration through which the parts and its parts or

    their absence, by a premise that by definition has no place within it: that of a part of

    those who do not have a part (1999: 29-30). Politics in this sense emerges as the

    dimension of dissensus and disagreement; it is the interruption or the redistribution of

    the sensible. In this view, the emergence of the heterogeneous must not be seen as a

    constant or a finality: the nature of politics is that of the event, in the sense of an

    irruption that alters the forms and practices of domination.v

    This definition of politics has the enormous advantage of steering the relation

    between politics and aesthetics away from the model of form and content by relating the

    two concepts on a fundamental level: insofar as the interruption in the distribution of the

    sensible reconfigures possible experience, it is a fundamentally aesthetic operation.

    Therefore, if Shibboleth may be seen as political in a fundamental sense, it is because,

    in one way or another, it configured an event that produced a hiatus in the space of

    consensus, a disagreement with the habitual distribution of parts and positions, an

    autonomous experience; indeed, this is what both Salcedos discourse and her artistic

    themes suggest.

    Given these two general conceptual frameworks, let us now take a look at the

    different frames at work in Salcedos installation. The analytical operation I will

    perform involves taking a preliminary set of elements that, in relation to art, have come

    to be understood as frame by contemporary art theorythe artworks title, gallery notes,

    the artists discourses, the curatorial discourses, the museum and the discourses

    embedded in it, the spectators frame of mind and rendering them anew as

    constitutive elements of the artwork as enframing. It is important to note that, while in

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    the first case, the notion of frame relies on an objectual notion of art, as enframing, the

    artwork is understood as work-of-art, that is, the techne that art is, the process of

    fashioning, of wroughting, that brings into relation diverse elements.

    A Framing Name

    The most obvious frameto start with is that of the installationstitle. Salcedo took the

    title from a homonymous poem by Paul Celan. The word shibboleth, as we know,

    refers to a particularity in pronunciation or behavior that gives away a foreigner. The

    word landed in English via the Hebrew language, in which the term originated. In the

    Bible, there is a passage in which the members of the Tribe of Ephraim use a particular

    phoneme to distinguish themselves from the Gileadites, who did not use that sound in

    their dialect. The sense of the word is that of a sort of password, one that allows one

    group to be distinguished from another.

    In Celans poem, the poet pronounces the word while imprisoned by the Nazis.

    Far away from his beloved Rumania, the word stands for a conjuring sound, one that

    invokes his motherland, the lost sense of security and bearing. The word is for the poet

    the symbol of a personal benefit: it is the symbol of an original sound, a token of

    identity, a beacon that signals home, thus countering the effacing violence and

    savageness of his Nazi captors. In the context of Celans striking poem, a shibboleth is

    not only a code and a password; it becomes a signal of hope, a depository of an

    inalienable humanity.

    It is clear that, in choosing this word for the title, there is a very explicit

    intention on behalf of the artist. If we were to say, in the usual sense, that the title

    frames the artwork by placing it in a particular perspective, then we might say that it is

    the key that the artist hands us in order to interpret her installation. In this sense, we

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    here is, of course, that these ideas and representations may come into play with the

    materiality of the installation, as well as with the other affects and discourses that are

    brought into relation by it, in order to produce an event of a political nature, an

    interruption in the distribution of the sensible by which the spectator becomes a political

    subject. While the reference to Celans poem dependson the spectators knowledge and

    associative cunningness, the reference to the biblical story came prompt to hand for

    most visitors, for it was mentioned in the exhibition leaflet.

    Leaflet Frames

    As in many contemporary art exhibitions, the visitor who entered the Turbine Hall was

    not left to their own devices. Watchful invigilators diligently approached visitors with

    leaflets containing two things: first, a warning to watch your step and to keep

    accompanying children under supervision (indeed, a warning not without purpose:

    reportedly, several people suffered minor injuries, and four reports to the Health and

    Safety Executive were filed).vii

    More importantly, the leaflet featured an introductory

    text by curator Martin Herbert, who gently led the reader through a somewhat

    schematized explanation of the installation. Three topics are briefly presented in the

    text: the already mentioned reference to the biblical origins of the installations title, the

    reference to the past of the Tate Moderns building as a powerplant and the more

    general reference to Modernity as represented by the Tate Gallerys collection of

    modern art, seen as a civilizational project that has the production of separation and

    difference at its core. Let us take a look at the latter two of these discursive frames.

    The Tate Modern is housed in a former power station, the Turbine Hall being the

    setting of the main generator turbine. In a brief paragraph, Herbert informs that the

    Banskside Power Station was commissioned in 1947 to assist the reconstruction of

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    London after the Second World War. It was also a moment, he continues, of increasing

    multiculturalism resulting from migration from the former British colonies of people

    with different backgrounds who arrived to London seeking work. Herbert insists that

    these events were occurring at the hinge between the twilight of the British Empire and

    the start of the schisms and exclusions of postcolonialism. Employing many foreign

    workers, the building housed such a multicultural blend until it was decommissioned in

    1981. It sat derelict until 2000, when it reopened as an art gallery.

    Herbert then asserts that digging beneath the surface, Salcedo reconnects the

    building to these colonial and postcolonial histories, to the operations of power and the

    ideological creation of artificial notions of difference and otherness. This assertion is in

    tone with his previous insistence on the divisions played out by colonialism and its

    aftermaths. A connection that any mildly cunning spectator would deduce from the fact

    that a crack is always a crack in something is thus laid out plainly by the curator.

    Indeed, the crack integrates with the Turbine Halls floor in such a way that omitting a

    consideration of the building as part of the artwork would be nave. However, this is

    precisely the condition in which Herberts introductory text places the spectator: like a

    child, they must, not only be protected from tripping on a crack in the floor, but also, be

    given all the information necessary in order to make the very effort of interpretation

    unnecessary.

    Modernity is implicated as well, albeit in a reductionist fashion. The powerful

    critique and deconstruction of Modernity undertaken by postcolonial studies is rendered

    as a simplified diatribe in which the complex production of spatial and temporal

    distance at the heart of Modernitys civilizational project is converted into a stereotyped

    notion of separation and difference. The indication quickly turns into a diffuse

    denunciation of Modern Art, which comes across as a depository of beauty and ideal

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    form that, due to its very restrictedness, excludes non-Europeans from its ideal. While,

    of course, the exclusions of modern art are readily evident to our postcolonial frame of

    mind, unquestionably holding on to concepts of beauty, frame ideal form and

    rationalityis to simplify the complex cultural and historical logics at play in it, in such

    a way that the European reader can always excuse the excesses of Modernity by the

    perfectness of the artworks it has fashioned.

    These references to colonialism, postcolonialism and to the dividing operations

    of power were underpinned in the leaflet by quotes from the artist herselfindeed, these

    quotes occupy a large portion of the leaflet text, to the point that one might say that

    Herberts informative passages merely frame the artists discourse. Salcedo

    declared, for instance, that the history of racism runs parallel to the history of

    modernity, and is its untold dark side. These words sound almost like a slogan. In

    using them the artist is, of course, playing into well-known critiques of modernity,

    albeit in a reductive and almost nave manner: the history of racism has in fact been

    told; the darker side of modernity (an expression first used by the Argentinian

    decolonial semiologist Walter Mignolo, now somewhat hackneyed) refers to coloniality,

    the complex tripartite cultural domination created and enforced by the production of

    juridical, epistemological and subjective difference between Europe and its colonial

    territories.

    In any case, the discourses deposited in the leaflet framed the spectators

    experience, in a way that, given the exhibition invigilators eagerness to promptly

    provide the leaflet, was far from subtle. While it would be difficult to assert that

    Salcedos intention was touse the leaflet as one of her plastic materials (even though,

    on the other hand, it is easy to imagine that the artist was at the very least consulted by

    gallery officials on the pertinence of the leaflet), it is clear from the leaflets text that the

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    Tate Gallerys officials syntonized with Salcedos political discourse: not only did

    Herbert take his cue from the artists words, but also, the gallery agreed to avidly

    distribute the leaflet amongst the enthusiastic visitors.

    A notion of art as event allows us to see that the exhibition indeed brought into

    relation the discourses the leaflet carried with the other semantic and affective elements

    related by the installation, and that such a bringing into relation worked to shape the

    spectators experience. To what extent does this bringing into relation of discourses

    related to the divisions provoked by modernity create a political event in the sense we

    have construed following Rancire? That is, do the discourses in the leaflet, placed in

    relation to the installations materiality, its title and the affects it produces, contribute to

    the creation of a hiatus in the police, an interruption in the distribution of the sensible? I

    will refer to these questions towards the end of this paper.

    A TouristsFrame of Mind

    I have already mentioned that, during the time I spent observing and listening to

    peoples attitudes and expressions in the Turbine Hall, I had the feeling that most of

    them were tourists. Which makes perfect sense: after all, it was December in London,

    and any tourist would have a visit to one of the most famous art galleries in the world

    on their itinerary; I, for one, certainly did. We live in a time in which culturehas been

    rendered an attraction, a spectacle and a product to be consumed. However, by saying

    here that the visitors were tourists, I am not merely referring to the modern practice of

    travel for leisure or recreation; rather, I wish to use the term to refer to a particular

    frame of mind, one in which, on one hand, spatial trajectory is associated to

    disinterested contemplation while, on the other, an activity in which one is invested in

    accruing cultural capital.

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    the transit through an art gallery is one of heightened receptivity and sensitive

    awareness.

    Of course, there are further investments involved in spectatorship. In their

    compelling study of the public of European art museums, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain

    Darbel (1997) examine the practices of spectatorship, sustaining that our inclination to

    visiting such museums is mediated by social factors concerning cultural and social

    capital. Borudieu and Darbel hold that visiting museums and having a taste for Western

    art are not natural dispositions. Neither are they typically acquired and fixed through

    regular education; on the contrary, they are trades by which certain groups distinguish

    themselves through their love of art from others who do not belong to the social groups

    in which such a taste and disposition is cultivated and encouraged. In other words, our

    love of art mediates a form of identity.

    In this sense, at least part of the ritual of visiting a gallery such as the Tate

    Modern is the reaffirming a particular social identity; in other words, the transit through

    the gallery is a reaffirmation of a subjectivity through which one sees oneself as an

    educated, sensitive modern individual. This investment in social identity is certainly the

    reason why, as Bourdieu (1996)points out, expressions such as what is this about? or

    why is this important? are all but proscribed. Perhaps itis also the reason why, for a

    tourist, taking a picture of the featured artworks is of high importance: it is the evidence

    that the person was there, that she/he did undertake the ritual and has therefore met the

    social expectation.

    Both as flneur and as a reaffirming ritual of cultural and social capital, what is

    clear is that the spectator approaches art from a particular subject position, one that has

    been encoded long before their encounter with the artwork. Here, we are no longer

    talking about a frame in Heideggers and Kalas sense; no longer are we referring to

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    enframing, to the structuring of diverse materials that the artist wrights and fashions and

    that is always in the process of being actualized. Even though it is plausible to argue

    that a contemporary art shows visitors approach it with a different frame of mind

    compared to those visiting the treasures of the great European museums, it is

    nevertheless possible to sustain that those visiting the Turbine Hall are invested in

    attitudes and interests concerning both flnerie and cultural capital, for the main

    attractions continue to be the Tate Moderns classical and modern art collections.

    Does this dual frame of mind enhance the political scope of Salcedos

    installation, or does it hinder it instead? Insofar as the political operates a suspension in

    the police, it indeed appears that the frame of mind produced by the practice of cultural

    tourism obstructs the emergence of an experience of otherness, of dissensus, since the

    subject position that the cultural tourist embodies is a typical product of late capitalism

    and its hegemonic social order. In this sense, approaching Shibboleth as a tourist means

    complying to an activity that is a product of the very Modernity whose divisions and

    separations Salcedo purports to criticize. At the same time, however, the attitude of

    flnerie with which one approached the installation allows for a heightened sensitivity

    and a transformed experience of space and time, one that seems to invite rather than

    hinder the political event. A tourists frame of mind is the product of a tension, in which

    the activity of transiting is simultaneously shaped and conditioned by social expectation

    and an expectation of the unexpected; the political event, therefore, depends on how this

    tension is resolved.

    This tourist is a subject invested in accruing cultural and symbolic capital, for

    whom, nevertheless, the experience of flnerie allows for an opening; thus, the

    artworks transformative potential remains as possibility. Indeed, the production of a

    radical otherness, of a sense of estrangement, is part of the opening of a world that

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    Heidegger attributes to the work of art as enframing. Following Heidegger, we may say

    that art suspends the habitual relations that constitute the world of common experience,

    in order to install a new relation that configures a new world. This is what Gianni

    Vattimo (2010), commenting on Heidegger, calls the Stoss (shock)viii

    of the work of art:

    the clearing of a space amidst the habitual world in order for the work of art to occur,

    the opening of a hiatus, the reconfiguration of parts and positions within the social

    distribution of hierarchies, agency and power. In this sense, the political event of the

    work of art would involve an abandoning of the subjective position that the tourist

    embodies, and this abandonment, together with the subsequent opening of the subject,

    would in itself be a political event. Does such an event occur in the case of Shibboleth?

    Before answering this question, let us look at one last frame, one which we may call

    Shibboleths structural condition of possibility.

    Unilever: The Structural Frame

    Since 2001, Unilever has been commissioning contemporary art installations for the

    Turbine Hall, at a rate of one per year. The commissions are given to outstanding

    contemporary artists, and they signify the artists consecration.Salcedo received nearly

    300,000 for to make her piece. Colombian artist and scholar Carlos Salazar (2008) has

    strongly criticized the association between Salcedos political art and the Unilever

    corporation, arguing that the nature of the artists work is incompatible with the fact that

    Unilever has pending matters in several parts of the world regarding issues such as child

    labor, contract infringement, unjustified release of workers, collaboration with

    oppressive regimes, massive environment polluting and monopoly, amongst others.

    Unilever has a lot to answer for; it is not for granted that a visitor to their

    webpage will find that the corporations environmental, sanitary and humanitarian

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    campaigns are given greater display than their products and share values. The

    corporation needs to wash its face to public opinion. One of the ways in which Unilever

    does this, Salazar purports, is by commissioning contemporary art; if it is of the political

    kind, all the better. Bad press affects business, while standing on the side of the victims

    helps it. While Salazar emphasizes the ethical aspect of Salcedos acceptance of the

    Unilever commission, I want to purport that this episode is merely symptomatic of the

    more general dynamics that give high-end contemporary art its condition of possibility.

    We may always give Salcedo the benefit of the doubt: perhaps she really does

    think that arts healing effects are greater than Unilevers efforts at cooptation and that

    the corporations offer was well worth taking advantage of. Perhaps Salcedo deems it

    fair to take the corporationsmoney in order to denounce the wrongs of the world, in a

    sort of quid pro quo; or perhaps, more simply, she was not aware of the corporations

    human rights and environmental issues. Whatever the case is, Salcedos ethical

    ponderings are ultimately irrelevant here, for what we have is a demonstration of how

    art that purports to be political has turned into a merchandise, but also, of how

    contemporary production as embodied by Unilever knows very well that, not only

    does this type of art (and cultural resistance in general) not affect its interests, but it

    actually benefits it. Cultural tourists and museum goers may have marveled at the

    technical prowess of an installation such as Shibboleth; they may have engaged in the

    conceptual puzzle it proposed, had their mock pictures taken and even taken part in the

    flashmob that danced over it,ix

    but it is unlikely that the installation spurred them into

    political agency. After its function as a tourist attraction and a form of cultural

    entertainment had been fulfilled, the crack in the Tate floor was diligently filled with

    concrete, and it now remains as a scar of an event that, in this sense, died wanting.

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    sensitive approach that invites rather than hinders the political event. Neither was it

    hindered by the structural frame represented by Unilever: the analysis of this frame may

    lead to a critical assessment of the politics of art in general, one that reveals its

    structurally flawed nature, but it does not prohibit the possibility for a (modest) political

    experience.

    Ultimately, the political event was hindered by the fact that the spectator was

    never autonomous. It was hindered by the leaflet frame. That aesthetic experience is

    autonomous means, amongst other things, that it cannot be forced upon the spectator; as

    in the detached involvement of the flneur, the autonomous aesthetic experience must

    come about through an unintended process of discovering. The Stoss of the work of art

    cannot be prescribed; it can merely be staged, for the opening of a world is also the

    opening of the spectator-subject. As Heidegger asserts, this opening is a becoming, not

    a final result; it is not about what is produced, it is about what is procured into

    occurrence. It is about the event, not its outcome.

    In this sense, the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is also the autonomy of

    the spectator-subject; however, with Shibboleth, the spectators attention was so

    diligently directed that the subject recoiled back into the type of cultural consumerism

    that an institution such as the Tate Modern sets up, with its connotations of leisure and

    entertainment. Confronted with violence, the subject recoils into its habitual forms. The

    flneur is thereby cut short. In the extent to which the spectators experience was

    heavily prescribed by the text in the leaflet, Shibboleth remained an unoccupied stage,

    having the performance become hackneyed even before it began. In loading the artwork

    with prescriptive frames, its operation of enframing has receded, leading the subject to

    suture its affective opening, thereby recoiling into the habitual forms of the police.

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    Notes

    iI refer to the piece in present tense because, in a sense, it still exists: the crack was filled-in

    with cement after the end of the exhibition, remaining as a mark that scars the Turbine Halls

    floor.iiSee: Bal (2007; 2010); Brea (2010); Riao (2010).

    iiiThe amount of academic writing that resorts to the term is staggering, and its uses across

    fields and disciplines such as socialogy, anthropology, art history, psychology and philosophy

    range from the merely synonymic and metaphorical to the ontological.

    ivI am taking my cue from Gregory Bateson, who in his 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

    wrote that a frame is "a spatial and temporal bonding of a set of interactive messages."

    vAgainst those to whom this somewhat unexpected definition of politics as transformative

    action might seem whimsical, we must note that Rancire derives it from a rigorousetymological genealogy that goes back to Aristotles Politica.

    viWriting about poetry in the English Renaissance, Ralna Kalas has bequeathed us with a useful

    interpretation of Heideggers concept of enframing. Kalas provides several examples frompoetry and literary theory of the English Renaissance in which the word frame is used to referthe making or molding of something. Words, in this sense, are not mere conveyors of fixed

    meaning but the poets material, available to be wrought and tempered into the shape that thepoet needs. Kalas stresses that the fact that Heideggers concept Ges-Tell is typicallytranslated to English as enframing (be it accurate or not) restitutes the ontological linkbetween technology and poetry that, in Heideggers discourse, is blocked by the overpoweringcompelling of modern technology that turns the Earth into mere reserve. To restitute this link is

    to insist that techne is an enframing because it is a poiesis, that is, because it is the founding of aworld. In other words, that which is related through enframing does not constitute an external

    frame; rather it is part of the materials that the poet, or the artist, works with.

    viiSee: Crowds are suffering for their art at the Tate Modern, The Times, 26 November 2007.

    Retrieved October 13 2012.

    https://acs.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Farts%2F

    visualarts%2F

    viiiVattimo (2010) attributes the term stoss (shock) to Heidggersessay, although the German

    philosopher does not in fact use it. In any case, it is evident that what Vattimo is getting at is

    Heideggers notion of the radical originality of the art work. Indeed, for Heidegger, what theartist does is remove [the work] from all relations to something other than itself, in order to letit stand on its own for itself alone (40). The work is the suspension of all relations, which arehereby replaced with the relations it produces; insofar as these relations effectively constitute

    the world, it is indeed legitimate for Vattimo to say that a shock is exerted through the

    experience of the work of art.

    ixSee: Flashmob en la Tate. October 21, 2007. [esferapblica]. Available at:

    http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=1047. Retrieved: October 20, 2012.

    https://acs.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Farts%2Fvisualarts%2Fhttps://acs.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Farts%2Fvisualarts%2Fhttps://acs.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Farts%2Fvisualarts%2Fhttp://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=1047http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=1047http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=1047https://acs.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Farts%2Fvisualarts%2Fhttps://acs.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Farts%2Fvisualarts%2F
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