Escrache and Autonomy

For Jacques Rancière, engaged art violates the necessary separation of the artist from the exigencies of political change, thereby abandoning art’s unique critical potential. This chapter challenges that interpretation, drawing out aesthetic qualities associated with engaged art that are not apparent within the hermeneutic frame that Rancière employs. Readings of several projects identify the ways in which aesthetic and critical experience is mobilized in these works through forms of resistance that operate outside the institutional art world. The chapter also links these practices with a longer tradition of collaborative and activist art production, arguing that the new forms of insight catalyzed by contemporary engaged art are simply the most recent manifestation of a mode of creative production with many precedents in the modernist tradition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the “melting down” of existing forms of aesthetic autonomy in the European avant-garde during the 1920s.