Dissensus as Social Contract in the Art of Ken Lum

Ken Lum’s socially motivated art spans more than three decades and arises from both the personal and the empirical. A prominent member of the Vancouver School, an internationally known artist and curator, and director of the undergraduate program at the School of Art and Design, University of Pennsylvania, this artist’s work presents a theatrical paradigm of political enactment between art and audience. Jacques Rancière defines this kind of engagement with the social as “the politics of aesthetics,” with its assumption of “equality between any and every speaking being.”1 1  - Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 16.

For Rancière, the aesthetic regime will lead to “the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come.”² 2 -  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 29.  This utopic vision, though, stems from dissensus, described by Rancière as “the demonstration of a certain impropriety,” or resistance.³ 3 - Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 2. Lum’s Language Paintings of the 1980s visualized the alienation of being unable to understand a language or semiotic system, a universal frustration. Certainly, a whiff of anarchy is deeply seated in the artist’s Furniture Sculptures (1983­­ – 86). Not losing this sense of resistance, his Portrait/Repeated Text Works (mainly from the 1990s) often personify the indignation and rebellion of the poor and the disempowered.