The Aesthetic Exception - by Tony Fisher (Paperback)

About the Book

The aesthetic exception critically re-evaluates the relation between art and politics by challenging longstanding assumptions surrounding political 'effect' in art and the problem of art's autonomous status. Drawing on examples from visual art and theatre, it offers a new approach based on a conjunctural understanding of how art becomes political.

Book Synopsis

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator.

From the Back Cover

The question of whether art produces politically transformative effects has been intensely debated within the critical discourses of art, literature, and performance practices. The aesthetic exception reopens the fundamental questions that underpin these debates and the entrenchments they produce within critical circles.

Offering a wide-ranging perspective that encompasses the historical avant-garde, political activist street theatre in India, contemporary critical art practices, and post-dramatic performance, this book tracks three structural impasses that continue to benight debates on art's relation to the political: the problem of aesthetic autonomy which separates art from the social world; how art can communicate political effects while remaining 'art'; and the problem of how art relates to the terrain of real political struggle. It develops a new approach while emphatically embracing the idea that art can make meaningful interventions in the social world that enrich our political life without collapsing into well-known contradictions.

Drawing on the classical debates of Adorno, Lukács, and Sartre; the more recent interventions of Habermas and Rancière; and the political theory of Gramsci, Althusser, and Hall, The aesthetic exception proposes a 'conjunctural' way of understanding the aesthetic possibilities that underpin political art practices. It invites readers to consider the stakes for political art in an age plagued by widening inequalities, and the saturation of the world by expropriative logics under globalisation. The book calls for rethinking political art at the level of the planetary conjuncture.

Review Quotes

'Fisher is meticulous in discussing and describing the categories that
constitute political art in the twentieth century: state, government, revolution,
and power.'
The European Journal of Theatre and Performance

'Starting with a seemingly simple question 'Can art be political?', this book opens a Pandora's box that reveals the paradoxical nature of the relationship between art and life, the impossibility of taxonomy of political theatre, on the one hand, and its potential as a hermeneutical tool, on the other, and when it comes to postdramatic theatre and theory - nothing is anymore as it seemed before ... The depth of analysis is impressive, whenever we feel we have reached a conceptual stable ground, Fisher probes further and invites us to question deeper!'
Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick

'Fisher is a joy to read! He writes with clarity and urgency but without oversimplification and gratuitous polemic. He draws on the whole toolkit of interdisciplinary thought and covers a vast terrain in contemporary theatre, but he never relies on jargon and avoids any form of superficiality ... with cautious optimism, [he] takes the lead of key artists and heads out towards new horizons of possibility, en route, he has revitalized our understanding of both politics and aesthetics.'
Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne

About the Author

Tony Fisher is Reader in Theatre and Philosophy at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London