I

Edgar Arceneaux's inquiries into the nature of knowledge make his practice epistemological. He looks at the language mechanisms that underlie the way knowledge is constructed, and acts upon them in two ways: one, he develops from these mechanisms an aesthetic language for the interpretation of images (meaning becomes a function of aesthetic judgments); and two, he uses these judgments to produce the textual geography for the expression of his politics.

This relationship paves the way for his own unique contribution to the idea, explored by theorists like Adorno and Althusser, that aesthetics and politics are inseparable. Arceneaux may be closer to Althusser in his thinking. According to Althusser, art is constitutively ideological and political, but its aesthetic faculty visualises the ideology it contains, and in this way performs the task of estranging ideology from itself. As Michael Sprinker states:

Althusser insists that the ideological (and therefore the political)
effectiveness of artworks derives from their aesthetic power, namely, from
their production of an 'internal distance' in relation to the ideology that
they present. The presentation of ideology in art, as it were, estranges
ideology from itself, creating the possibility for, not only identification
with or interpellation by the ideology presented, but a knowledge of it, a
knowledge that the audience can then put to use in transforming the conditions
that produced the ideology in the first place.¹

Arceneaux comments on the acquisition of knowledge and the political/social ideas that the mechanisms of acquisition form through his aesthetic decisions; he does this by constructing relationships between separate things that may be circumstantially related but empirically unrelated.

An example can be seen in his 1997 work Spock, Tuvac, Tupac (the