From the perspective of the theory, history and critique of art, the social relevance of contemporary art is not only based on the urgent issues it raises: climate change, racism, human rights, etc., but also on how these issues are raised and made public through an artistic generation of meaning. In contrast to a certain classical understanding of the avant-garde, I do not see the aesthetic as becoming political through an art that lets itself dissolve into everyday life. As Grant H. Kester remarks, “works that have, ostensibly, ‘collapsed’ aesthetic experience into the political always retain a mediated relationship to praxis or action.”^[1]1Grant H. Kester, The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2023), 216 The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organization of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organization — which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition of decisive importance.^[2]2See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), and Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst — zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2013); Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012); and Juliane Rebentisch,The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence [2011], trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). My notion of reflexive transformation is heavily influenced by Rebentisch’s work.

Thus, the notion of reflexive transformation was central to the conceptualisation of the research project Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions seeking to explore and qualify what makes contemporary artistic practices artistic. Nelson Goodman famously rephrased the question “what is art?” into “when is art?” and looked for symptoms of art to decide when something qualifies to that designation.^[3]3Goodman focuses on symbolization and lists five symptoms of art: syntactic density, semantic density, relative repleteness, exemplification, and multiple and complex reference. Nelson Goodman, “When is Art?" in Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 57-70. Departing from Goodman's relatively object-oriented focus on symbolization I claim that in contemporary practices a salient symptom of art is their reflexive transformation of sociopolitical and ecosystemic realities (see reality and exhibition).

The practice of Forensic Architecture, for example, understood as an “expanded epistemic community” and an investigative aesthetics, is highly compelling and urgently needed.^[4]4See Eyal Weizman, “Open Verification”, 11, and Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2021). However, its orientation toward truth production and the investigation and presentation of evidence is not what makes it artistic nor aesthetic more broadly. What makes it artistic and aesthetic is the openness of the processes of sense-making and signification, that is, what takes place before truth is arrived at (see autonomy and aesthetic/artistic practice). As Juliane Rebentisch states, in relation to artistic practice, “[a]rt does not produce knowledge in any strict sense […] – it interrupts the accumulation of knowledge as well as social relations. Art unfolds its cognitive dimension within the mode of what Kant called thinking (as opposed to knowledge), in a process that establishes a reflexive distance toward social knowledge production.”^[5]5Juliane Rebentisch, in conversation with Tristan Garcia and Vincent Normand, “Theatricality, Autonomy, Negativity”, in Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, eds. Tristan Garcia and Vincent Normand (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 57–67: 65.

I think that aesthetics and analyses of contemporary artistic practices – in the age of the decolonisation of modern Western provincial universalism, rationality and knowledge forms – could be about exploring doubt and modes of doubting, what it means to maintain oneself – who- or whatever that is – in doubt, in wonderful uncertainty, before transitioning to rational thought, judgment, conceptualisation, truth, matters of fact. We could see the subject-matter of aesthetics as situated, sense-based reflections on conceptions of, and assumptions about the world, our sociopolitical and ecosystemic realities, and how they are experienced.