the relation art / politics - two ways of making fiction

Ethics of Non-Finitude -

the precarious politics of art (Nicolas Bourriaud)

The social body as it appears in contemporary art production does not constitute an organic whole that needs to be changed from bottom up. (...) for the 20th century artists, the social body is divided into lobbies, quotas and communities. (...) In short what we call reality is in fact a simple montage. On the basis of that conclusion, the aesthetic challenge of contemporary art resides in recomposing that montage: art is an editing computer that enables us to realize alternatives, temporary versions of reality with the same material (everyday life). Thus, contemporary art presents itself as an editing console that manipulates social forms, reorganizes them in original scenarios, deconstructing the script on which their illusory legitimacy was grounded. The artist de-programmes in order to re-programme, suggesting that there are other possible usages for techniques, tools and spaces at our disposition. The cultural and social structures in which we live are nothing more for art than items of clothing that we should slip into. (...) It is a question of post-producing social reality, or in other words, of confirming, in a negative form, its ontological precarious nature .

taken from OPEN 2009. no 17. A Precarious Existence