All or anything at all

doaj.org

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

In his joint biography of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, François Dosse tells the story of the meeting between Deleuze and the painter Francis Bacon, about whom Deleuze had recently written with much enthusiasm in his book Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. Bacon had apparently responded to the book with equal admiration: 'It's as if this guy were watching over my shoulder while I was painting.' 'What was supposed to be a great meeting', Dosse recounts, 'turned into a disaster.' Deleuze's editor, Joachim Vital, also a great admirer of Bacon, arranged the meeting. He described it as follows: The meal was awful, as awful as their discussion … They smiled at each other, complimented each other, and smiled again. We were flabbergasted by their platitudes. We tried to salvage the discussion, mentioning Egyptian art, Greek tragedy, Dogen, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Proust, Kafka, Turner, Goya, Manet, Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, Artaud, Beckett. Each one tried to take the ball and run with it alone, ignoring the other one. 1 This often happens when philosophy meets art. When philosophy meets contemporary art, the situation can be even worse. Contemporary art is badly known. To transform our distance from it into that 'unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be', 2 upon which experience of its art character depends, however -to use our ignorance as a spur to knowledge -is more difficult than is suggested by most of the writing that this situation provokes. To make contemporary art the object of some kind of reflective philosophical experience -in an affective engagement with the most fundamental claims made upon us by such art -seems, at times, almost impossible. This is ironic given the well-remarkedupon 'conceptual' character of so much contemporary art. Yet it is precisely this conceptual character that is most often the source of misunderstanding: the idea that such art requires no more than a conceptual interpretation, for example; or that such an understanding is purely or ideally linguistic, in the sense of being reducible to direct propositional expression. 'Straw conceptualism', as this might be called, is one means of sustaining ignorance about contemporary art (which does not mean that there are not some artists whose works are made of such straw). The alternative reduction of art to its aesthetic dimension -pure sensuous particularity -with which the projection of a straw conceptualism is often antithetically associated, is another. The idea that contemporary art is somehow exempt from historical judgement in the present, by virtue of its contemporaneity, is a third. Perhaps the greatest barrier to a critical knowledge of contemporary art, though, is the common-sense belief that the phrase 'contemporary art' has no critically meaningful referent; that it designates no more than the radically heterogeneous empirical totality of history of contemporary art -a genre dominated by second-generation October art historians -remains largely documentary and reconstructive in character. Its professional formation discourages art-critical judgement, although it often involves a documenting and reconstruction of critical positions held by artists and critics at the time: a kind of criticism by historical proxy. Studies in visual culture often appear closer to art-critical discourse than art-historical ones -indeed, they increasingly occupy institutional spaces of criticism -despite their even greater distance from questions of art judgement. However, this appearance covers over and hence helps to sustain the general absence of historically grounded criticism of contemporary art. The situation dates back to the failure of the project of a 'critical postmodernism' in the face of the problem of judgement, in the early 1980s. Hal Foster identified the problem early on, but made little headway with it theoretically. 6 Just how blocked it would become can be seen twenty years later in the October roundtable discussion, 'The Present Conditions of Art Criticism', in which the very idea of critical judgement caused consternation among the discussants, most of whom still associated it, exclusively, with a late Greenbergian notion of 'quality'. 7 Thierry de Duve attempted to break the impasse with his return to Kant after Duchamp, replacing the former's 'This is beautiful' with the latter's 'This is art', while insisting that the latter continue 'to be read as an aesthetic reflexive judgment with a claim to universality in the strictest Kantian sense', despite the accompanying claim that the term 'art' functions in the judgement as a 'proper name '. 8 Ultimately this foundered on philosophical confusions about both Kant and naming alike. Nonetheless it set a standard for the articulation of art-historical, art-critical and post-Kantian philosophical discourses to which little subsequent work has aspired. Meanwhile the general theories of representation, both epistemological and political, which predominate in studies of visual culture -usually, if unwittingly, semiotic culturalist variants of the liberal pluralism of US political science -have shown themselves to be singularly ill-suited to grasping the specific and deeply problematic character of the experience of contemporary art. The character and object-domain of the field remain plural and contested, their relations to art unresolved. But the situation is exacerbated, rather than mitigated, by the covert visual essentialism that has inadvertently but inevitably accompanied the formation of the new proto-discipline, in an ironic reprise of the terms of its original adversary, formalist modernism. 9 For the supplement of 'the visual' restores to cultural analysis an aesthetic idealism of vision at the very historical moment in which art's visuality, however pronounced, is its least distinguishing trait. Moreover, in so far as 'the visual' is the constituting focus of conceptual interest in visual culture, whether as a given or a construct, it is in principle indifferent to, and hence cuts across, the art/non-art distinction, which cannot be reduced to any particular visual regimes -notwithstanding Michael Fried's generalization of his optical reduction of Greenberg's medium-specific conception of modernist painting. 10 Fried's opticalism is currently enjoying a revival on the acknowledgement of inadequacy turned aggressively outwards into a judgement against its cause (namely, the claim of such artworks to the hallowed signifier 'art') and thereby ultimately against contemporaneity itself. Hence Danto's subsequent coinage of the term 'post-historical art'. Schaeffer returns this claim to its philosophical context when he argues that what he calls 'the speculative tradition' (which runs from Jena Romanticism to Heidegger) misunderstood art from the outset. In this respect, for Schaeffer, the legitimation crisis of contemporary art is the delayed effect of art's philosophical sacralization by Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century. However, in so far as it derives from a claim for art's autonomy (by virtue of which it is able to usurp a certain philosophical function from philosophy itself), this sacralization is actually constitutive of 'art' in its modern sense. The aetiology, then, is broadly correct, yet the diagnosis and treatment Schaeffer proposes -a philosophical 'desacralization' of art, or what we might call metaphysical disinvestment -are precisely wrong. For, to the extent that there is a legitimation crisis of contemporary art (and one might be excused for believing it oversold, since the market provides sufficient legitimation of its own: 'creative industry'), it is actually a sign of the continuing, if problematic criticality of contemporary art -a sign of the fact that art's authority and critical function remain problems within contemporary culture, a problem for which art's continuing if uncertain critical and metaphysical dimensions are a conceptual condition. Danto and Schaeffer represent alternative variants of one primarily negative way in which late analytical philosophy has contributed to recent art-critical discourse. Each is a positivist of a different kind: an analytical-Hegelian positivist and a logical positivist, respectively. 18 However, far more significant has been the affirmative turn towards the conceptual resources of the post-Kantian European philosophical tradition, in the wake of the gradual diffusion of an interest in post-structuralism into Anglo-American art criticism. Heideggerian, Merleau-Pontean and a variety of post-phenomenological approachesassociated with Lyotard and Derrida, and more recently, Deleuze, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou -have all enjoyed sustained attention. This has revived interest in the place of art within the German idealist philosophies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Kant, Schiller, Hegel and the Romantics, but also Schelling, to a lesser degree Schopenhauer, and of course, Nietzsche. There is little doubt that this return to the post-Kantian European tradition has been, in part, a culturally conservative phenomenon, despite the radicalism associated with its more recent main French proponents. It is 'against Cultural Studies' (in its initial formation, at least) and against certain kinds of both 'difficult' and 'popular' contemporary art. But it has also performed a crucial critical function by raising theoretical issues associated with the idea of art in its distinction from other cultural forms of representation -issues that are literally dissolved by the semiotic reductionism and sociologism of most culturaltheoretical approaches. Furthermore, in its recent Rancièrean and (on occasion) Deleuzean of the 'aesthetic regime' of art, by which Rancière appears to believe art is still governed. 20 Badiou's 'inaesthetics', on the other hand, while apparently the opposite of aesthetics, is actually just a paradoxical, alternative...

New German Critique, 2015

It might sound somewhat tautological, but contemporary art is experiencing a boom. There is hardly any city that does not boast of having a contemporary art museum. More and more, biennials worldwide are devoted to assessing the current situation and thus are able to attract large international audiences. Professorships and research programs are being established to explain it all. But what does the term contemporary art mean, and above all, to what "contemporaneity"-to what present-does it refer? The first thing to note is that the term contemporary art has largely superseded the term modern art for describing the art of our time. To be "absolutely modern" today, it seems, is no longer quite up-to-date. But how can we understand this displacement of modern art by contemporary art, the art of the present? One first intuition might be to understand it as a distancing from modern art's own programmatic movements of displacement. Modern art was decisively antitraditional and committed to progress. In contrast, the term contemporary art seems to claim to be neutral and thus merely describes the art that exists right now. Such a definition, however, according to which the term would be neutrally applied to art that has just emerged, obviously falls far short. For then all art would once have been contemporary art, and everything produced yesterday would no longer be contemporary art. Aside from the fact that art history is not written as a sequence of unrelated points in time, such a view also leads to confusion over how we understand the present at all. Jacques Derrida

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2012

What is contemporary art and what are the key components of contemporary culture? This review demonstrates where Terry Smith provides important answers to this question. His two books on the subject provide a comprehensive account of how art has changed in recent decades and how a global culture now shapes its parameters. This review does not however concur that Smith provides a convincing case for a complete cultural paradigm shift from the modern to the contemporary. It seeks to explain the pitfalls of the now decades long effort to surpass modernity by assuming a clean cut from its ambitions and critical vocabulary.

Art education, 2008

ARTMargins, 2012

This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art centers established by the Open Society Institute in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The author draws upon distinctions between this new type of art institution and the Union of Artists (the organizations which represented the interests of artists under socialism), highlighting distinct artistic, aesthetic and economic characteristics of each institutional model.

Reading Rancière

In 2009, after attempting to settle upon an organizing principle for an online participatory archive of contemporary art, the editors of e-flux web journal concluded 'that no objective structure or criterion exists with which to organize artistic activity from the past twenty years or so' (Aranda et al. 2009). Recognizing the ubiquity and persistence of the term 'contemporary art' , the editors remark that it is the 'unanswerability' of its 'selfevidence' that gives the horizon for art's production and reception over the period. In the first of two ensuing e-flux journal issues dedicated to the question 'What is Contemporary Art?' a number of well-known historians, artists, curators and critics were asked to respond to this paradox wherein contemporary art is without definition or criteria yet is recognizable. Hal Foster (2010) summarizes the tenor of agreement among the contributors by stating that 'the category of "contemporary art" is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment'. While such a recognition of contemporary art regularly leads to a dismissal of its capacity to engage in effective forms of political critique, it is exactly the condition of 'heterogeneity' more precisely, art's indefiniteness and identifiability-that, in sharp contrast, Jacques Rancière establishes to be art's political specificity. Rancière lucidly identifies the paradox at work here in his notion of 'art in the aesthetic regime'that which 'asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity' (2004b: 23). For Rancière, aesthetics is the condition for art's horizonless dispersion

johnrapko.com, 2023

In this semi-popular piece some recent discussions of contemporary art criticism by the art critics Sean Tatol and Ben Davis are discussed. Canonical pieces by Arnold Isenberg and Monroe Beardsley are introduced as a way of throwing some light on the issues. This originally appeared as a four-part blog post in late Fall of 2023.