The Impossibility of Art as Such in the decolonial border

Abstract

This article explores the impossible spaces of art in the decolonial border, as potentially poetic spaces. In that process analyses the universalistic and individualistic modern western aesthetic discourse replete of possibilities that are, at the same time, impossibilities in the context of modern art and colonial regime relations. To make visible those contradictions as places of aesthetic potency this study departs from Stephen Wright’s differentiation of Art as Such and decolonization perspectives as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's ch'ixi or stained and Gayatri Spivak's double bind or the coexistence of the contraries, where the spaces of impossibility of art make evident the colonial relations that marked them. Based on those ideas the article observes the vestiges of the so-called art police of Jacques Rancière in the Haitian naive and Australian aboriginal art. The analysis reveal evidence of aesthetic potency in spaces where Art as Such is impossible and at the same time questions the universality of the occidental matrix as a colonial imposition.