There existed diversified, confused and incompatible viewpoints on revealing the history of Taiwan while different studies and researches were conducted. The consequence was diverse explanations upon this important period of Taiwan, from year 1949 to year 2000. A novel concept was developed to interpret and identify the discourses of Taiwanese nationalism through fine arts. This is a brand new approach in studying Taiwan¡¦s history and in correlating aesthetics to politics as well. This dissertation tried to demonstrate the relationship between political text and fine art text in order to identify history of Taiwan based on the discourse of nationalism. According to different periods of leadership and their discourses of nationalism, four stages were identified between 1949 and 2000. They were: Stage I (CKS ruling period, 1949-1975):¡¦ Overlap¡¦ and¡¦ backlash¡¦ between Anti-communism esthetics with Modernism Aesthetics ; Stage II (CJG ruling period, 1975-1988):¡¦Transition¡¦ and ¡¥conversion¡¦ between Modernism Aesthetics with Provincialism Aesthetics; Stage III (Early LTH ruling period, 1988-1996): ¡¥Delitescence¡¦ and ¡¥variation¡¦ between Provincialism Aesthetics with Localism Aesthetics; Stage IV (Late LTH ruling period, 1996-2000):¡¦Reconstruction¡¦ and ¡¥deepness¡¦ between Localism Aesthetics with Subjectivity Aesthetics. This research tried to bring back the hidden and/or forgotten memory by re-discovering and tracking down alternative pathways of text. History was re-described and rebuilt in order to establish the new identity of Taiwan. The contemporary core of Taiwan¡¦s politics lies in the discourse of nationalism, and the challenge of relating aesthetics to it through self-examination of history is huge. This research also provides a new approach to verify the difference between the political reality and what¡¦s in people¡¦s mindset. Employing aesthetics as an emotional or symbolic entity to express political issue is a strong statement of cultural hegemonies. The development of Taiwanese aesthetics started from a passive acceptation of post-colonialism to an active transformation of subjective new culture.

The aim of this thesis is to conduct a post-relational reading of the programme of relational art and its influence upon current aesthetics. ‘Post’ is not used in the indicative sense here: it does not simply denote the passing of the high water mark of relational art’s critical reception. Rather, it seeks to identify what remains symptomatically unresolved in relational art through a reading of its texts together with its critique. Amongst these unresolved problems certain questions endure. The question of this art’s claim to autonomy and its problematic mode of appearance and materialism remain at large. Ironically it shares the same fate as the avant-garde it sought to distance itself from; the failure to unite art with the everyday. But it has nevertheless redefined the parameters of artistic production: this is its success. I argue that this is because relational art was internally riven from its outset by a contradiction between its micropolitical structures and the need to find a mode of representation that did not transgress its self-imposed taboo upon visual representation. I identify a number of strategies that relational art has used to address this problem: for example its transitive ethics and its separation of ‘the visual’ from formal representations of public space and of a liminal counter-public sphere. Above all, I argue that its principle of the productive mimesis and translation of social relations through art is the guarantor of this art’s autonomy. My thesis is premised upon the notion that one can learn much about new forms of critical art from the precepts and suppositions that informed relational aesthetics and its critical reception. Relational aesthetics, in fact, establishes the terms of engagement that inform new critical art. Above all, this is because the question of the ‘relation of non-relation’ is bigger than relational aesthetics. The ‘relation of non-relation’ does not denote the impossibility of relation between subjects. Rather, it is a category that identifies non-relation as the very source of productive relations. This can be applied to those liminal points of separation that 6 delineate the territory of critical art prior to relational aesthetics. For example, these instances of ‘non-relation’ appear in the separation of art from non-art; of representation from micropolitics and of the anti-relational opposition of the philosophical categories of the general and the particular. Overall, I seek to reclaim Bourriaud as instrumental to the re-thinking of these categories and as essential to a reading of current critical art discourse. I identify a number of misreadings of relational aesthetics that result from a misrecognition or unwillingness to engage with Nicolas Bourriaud’s direct influences: Serge Daney, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser are often overlooked in this respect. I argue that Bourriaud’s critics tend to bring their own agendas to bear on his work, often seeking to remediate what is problematic. These critiques introduce existing aesthetic and political paradigms into his work in order to claim him as their own. So for example we encounter antagonistic relational aesthetics as the reinstatement of the avant-garde. Also, relational aesthetics as an immanent critique of the commodity form within a selective reading of Theodor Adorno. Also, we encounter dissensual relational aesthetics as ‘communities of sense’ that adopt site-specific methodologies whose mode of inhabitation of the socius is a reaction to relational aesthetics and is premised upon separatism. This diversification of relational art’s critique does not address, however, its fundamental problems of autonomy and representation. Rather, in different ways, they sidestep these issues and duplicate their non-relationality in the form of an impasse. My reading seeks to read the relational programme as a whole and to reclaim that which is symptomatically post-relational within it. I think that this is important because the critique of Bourriaud is presently unduly weighted towards the analysis of Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods, (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002)), thus important developments within Postproduction (2002) and The Radicant(2009) have gone overlooked. Specifically, Bourriaud’s increased emphasis upon a topology of forms and an Althusserian ‘aleatory materialism’ demand that we ask whether relationality in art is ontological or epistemological in form. It also demands that we re-consider its claims to materialism and critical realism on its own terms. Bourriaud’s later works are important not simply because they set out how relational art might inhabit networks of electronic communication but because they begin to develop a more coherent thinking of new modes of relational representation. Bourriaud begins to address the aporia of micropolitics and representation in his later works. His notion of representation becomes increasingly a matter of spatio-temporal relation and the representational act becomes increasingly identified with the motility of the relational act as a performative presentation. In the light of these developments, I argue that the thinking of relation that has thus far dictated the philosophical analysis of relationality and political aesthetics results in an acute anti-relationality or a ‘relational anarchism’. This is why the philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou respectively, are inadequate to the demands of current aesthetics. In fact they hinder its development. On this basis I turn to Rodolphe Gashé’s re-thinking of relation. His thinking grants relation a minimal ontology that in fact excludes it from philosophy, but at the same time, plays a key role in the construction of singularities as new epistemological categories. Gashé suggests a unique epistemological value for relations and recognizes what is evental within them. These singularities find their modes of appearance within various forms of the encounter. Gashé’s thought is helpful in that it identifies the non-relational of relation with its event. Also, I argue that a theory of post-relational representation is necessary to address the ‘weak manifestations of relational art’, although not in a transgressive or messianistic form; also, that this thinking of representation, when combined with aleatory materialism, produces a 8 broad constituency of representational forms with which to construct a more robust critical art. This includes the documentary form. In order to address the objections of micropolitics I therefore advance Philip Auslander’s notion of the performativity of the document as essential to relational aesthetics because it is an art form that in fact requires mediation by the visual. My argument is premised upon the ineliminability of representation from the aesthetic and moreover, that the artwork is constituted within a broad nexus of operations and acts of signification. This fragmentary construction is the source of the objectivity or critical realism of these practices. I argue that ‘visual’ documentation functions as a tool for presencing and connecting relations of exchange but is merely one of the forms of representation available to visual artists.

Les interventions artistiques dans le monde des entreprises soulèvent la question de leur capacité critique, et de leur posture politique. L’artiste peut-il contribuer par son intervention à humaniser l’organisation, et diminuer l’exercice de l’autorité arbitraire qui s’y exerce ? Mes propres expériences au moyen d’un dispositif de discussion particulier, basé sur le principe « on choisit qui on écoute, on ne choisit pas à qui on parle », tentent d’instaurer un partage de la parole plus égalitaire sur les scènes ordinaires de la vie organisationnelle. En m’appuyant sur les théories de Jacques Rancière au sujet d’une esthétique politique, j’analyse deux cas où l’introduction de mon dispositif, destiné à ouvrir plus de possibilités d’écoute égalitaire, a résulté en conflits et en renforcement de l’autorité et de la confiscation de la parole. La description des logiques internes à l’expérience sensible des acteurs mène à penser une forme de dialogisme fondé non pas tant sur l’opposition entre autorité et dissensus, mais sur la prise en compte de l’autoritarisme de l’écoute elle-même. La critique de mon dispositif et de la manière dont sont activées les dimensions contradictoires du sensible de la parole, telles que les perçoivent les acteurs, ouvre sur l’art comme éducation esthétique à une forme d’écoute « dissensuelle », qui sache discerner les voix dans le bruissant de la scène de parole, tout en sachant que tout discernement est arbitraire. J’en déduis le type de responsabilité éthique que doit assumer mon approche des organisations par l’art, pour que l’esthétique au sens de Rancière rejoigne le politique en pratique. / Artistic interventions within organizations meet the issue of their political stance and their critical ability. Can the art intervention foster a humanization of the organization and lower the arbitrary and authoritarian regime? My own experiments through the mean of a discussion device and a protocol based on the rule: “you choose who you listen to, you cannot choose who you talk to”, strive at opening a more egalitarian sharing of the speech on the organizational stage. Drawing on Rancière’s aesthetic and politic theories, I investigate two cases where my intervention resulted in an increased enforcement of power and a restriction of the freedom to speak. By describing the internal logics underlying the actors’ experience of the sensible, I outline a conception of a dialogism not so much concerned with the right to speak and the claim for acknowledgement, as with the inevitable authoritarian quality of listening. The critique of my intervention and my art device and the consideration of the manners in which the actors perceive the heterogeneous dimensions of speech delineate an art form of intervention as an aesthetic education. Training a dissensual listening would mean knowing how to discern any voice among the rustling others, and knowing how discernment is arbitrary. I conclude by circumscribing which ethic responsibility I need to assume in order for my art approach towards organizations to qualify as a true political aesthetics in the sense of Rancière.

Exploring both political aesthetics and the politics of aesthetics to outline an environmental ruralism for art in public spaces, this practice lead research project postulates a “complemental practice”, outlining its methodology and contexts for operation, the rural, spaces of leisure and the public realm. It is a response to threats to spatial and environmental commons from heritage, place-making and nostalgia, psychological inhibition such as a sense of global contingency and widespread economic exploitation. Responses by artists to this situation can be characterised as a binary of dialogism (Kester, 2004) and relational antagonism (Bishop, 2004), i.e. consensual/collaborative or antagonistic/autonomous practices. Informing both is the work of Jacques Rancière who theorises an ethical and social turn in the arts. Through both commissioned and self-initiated projects this thesis offers an interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s conception of dissensus (Rancière, 2010) modulated through an application of the work of philosopher Slajov Žižek on environmental politics and complementarity - the inscription of the universal within the particular (Žižek, 2011). The thesis’ originality lies in this theoretical synthesis which sets out a complemental practice based on dissensus and the undecidability of subject and context, but which dismisses any inflexible schema of either aesthetic autonomy or ethico-political egalitarianism. In addition it suggests an approach to practice in this field and a situation for this - a dissensual infrastructure for the common public realm which is socially relational and evolutionary over time.