Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art

Prologue This essay invites two analogous and complementary readings of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art. The first part seeks to understand the relationship between the ideas of ethics and aesthetics that frame current debates in what is otherwise called political art. The second part is concerned with types of artistic practice that straddle the realm of art and documentary, and the problems they pose to our comprehension of reality in the context of art works, media images and exhibitions of contemporary art. In the first, I shall analyse reasons for the remarkable transformation of the concept of the political in contemporary art, especially as it concerns both the subject and content of such art, that make secondary the formal means of the work. While in the second, the exhibition Documenta 11, provides the exemplary notice as a specific case study for how to read the disfigured tradition of the documentary as it converges with a surprisingly conservative notion of the disinterestedness of art in its relations with social life.