Social consciousness is discontinuous within a given social system.

Interviewee: Grant Kester

I often talk in my work about the significance of duration and temporality over a concept of aesthetic experience defined by simultaneity. I would link this to the odd displacement that occurs as avant-garde art artists begin to appropriate the violent or aggressive rhetoric of political vanguards, so that the relationship between the artist and viewer is treated as a surrogate for, or instantiation of, the broader antagonistic relationship of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Of course the artist, in this mise en scene, takes up the position of the aggrieved agent of the proletariat, expressing anger or rage on their behalf against the viewer, who is cast as the embodiment of bourgeois indifference and privilege. This is why art critics and theorists are so uncomfortable with projects that seek to break down the boundaries between the artist or the intellectual and the world around them. The “artist,” in this respect, is the last redoubt of possessive individualism and Cartesian self-identity. How would your ideas about art change if you didn’t assume that everyone around you, excepting yourself of course, was in thrall to some form of hegemonic control or unthinking habituation? What if human consciousness is more complex and more discontinuous within a given social system than this model allows?

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