about Ranciere..via Variant Issue 30.
He wants to argue that criticism, aesthetic discourse or, most basically, words can condition the possibility of painting by reconfiguring and then circumscribing the domain of the visible itself, that ‘texts reconfigure the visibility of what painting does’. Words, even criticism that seemingly abstracts itself from a given concrete medium or set of practices, can always-already function as aesthetic practice in its own right; that is, words can do political work in that they can condition the ‘distribution of the sensible’. ‘Words’, Rancière claims, ‘no longer prescribe, as story or doctrine, what images should be. They make themselves images...
