Arte e Potere. Un'analisi a partire dai dispositivi di validazione

This thesis work starts from the assumption that artistic practice can be understood as a form of political subjectivation and objectification. This premise provides the basis for an analysis aimed at understanding whether art can be read as a practice of resistance towards the constellation of power-relations faced by an artist. In other words, art is here considered as a form of individual politics in post-archist terms. The doctoral work therefore tries to build a set of tools, conceptual and operational, in order to be able to activate the artistic practice as a technique of self-determination. This study is located within an epistemological constructivist frame focusing on the experience as its field of research. This approach does not consider cognitive actions as a passive way of acquiring data. Rather, it reads the action of knowing as a practice where the acquaintance acts on the object of one's knowledge. In this sense, Michel Foucault's study is resumed, with particular reference to the interconnection that he finds in the processes of production of knowledge, power and the subject. By applying Foucauldian tools in my research, art is framed as a discourse governed by specific dynamics influencing the entry, positioning or exclusion of objects within the artistic discourse itself. This process is read through the capillary and relational character of power. Another central element in the research is the concept of bricoleur, taken from the studies of Deleuze and Guattari. This is used in my writing to show the possibility of deconstructing experiential recursion, while supporting the possibility of accessing an informal dimension of experience, which is both chaotic and potential. In other words, the practice of bricolage is used as a tool to access the singularity of the experience through constructive and creative processes. These conceptual tools are grafted onto two ones of more agile application: the performative utterance theorised by John Austin, and Steven Lukes' theory of three-dimensional power. Once, so to speak built, this toolbox is applied to reconstruct a brief genealogy of the concept of contemporary art, which focuses on identifying three points in the discourse produced by institutions: the birth of the modern concept of art, the advent of the ready-made and the functional use of art as a policy in a neoliberal context. Finally, three case studies are analysed. The first is about Jimmie Durham. His artistic practice is taken into consideration in relation to his subjectivation as a Cherokee and the consequent disavowal carried out by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The second concerns Incompiuto, an artistic operation by the Alterazioni Video collective, aimed at re-signifying unfinished buildings subsidised by public money in Italy. The third one is about Luther Blissett as a form of collective asrtistic subjectivation. The conclusions of the research affirm the possibility of using artistic practice as a construction of the self in a creative sense, and consequently, of breaking the status quo, through an artistic practice that is also pre-discursive. Artistic practice is therefore defined as the possibility of activating processes of singularisation.