Resisting Art

This text attempts to respond to the question of the relationship between art and resistance, to the possibility of art as resistance — that is, it is an attempt to meditate on the possible relationship between resisting and art. Whilst doing so, it also tries to attend to the notion that art is an encounter — between one and something that is brought forth in the movement from craft to something other than what is created through tekhn. And, if so, it is always also potentially unknown, unknowable, until it happens, perhaps even after it happens. That, even as it might be experienced, felt — an encounter through aisthesis — it is quite possibly a moment beyond cognition; un pas au-delà, as it were. And if so, then perhaps all attempts to know it potentially do nothing other than to frame, to confine, its potentiality.

Thus, perhaps the very thing that one has to do — if one is to attempt to maintain the possibility of resistance in art — is to resist what one thinks art itself is.