Is there not aesthetic potential in social and politically engaged art?

Martin Krenn: Roger Behrens

I would nevertheless like to remain defiant and seek to save the concept of aesthetics in socially and politically engaged art, even if here artists no longer create works in the traditional sense. The aesthetic concepts within the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory are mostly centred on the work, and it is of course naïve to want to simply apply Adorno’s aesthetic theory to today’s art; at the same time though, in The Author as Producer (1934) Walter Benjamin takes up the example of Sergei Tretyakov to develop an understanding of art and aesthetics that detaches itself from the work. And already in the 1930s Tretyakov himself had put forward an idea that today would be called participatory art. He invited readers of a Soviet youth magazine to empty their pockets and write about everything they’ve put on the table, down to the very last crumb. This provides a very different description of the social conditions they live in than what the conventional first-person narrative could achieve. The readers’ stories were to be brought together in a large “participatory” novel. In such a project I see both dialogical and aesthetic potential, a potential that uncouples itself from a classical understanding of aesthetics.