MATERIALISM AND CONTEMPORARY ART'S PAROLE

AAANZ Annual Conference, 2024

To elaborate his argument concerning the ‘Formalesque’, Smith provides a list of those art historians whose work he considers having impacted art’s history and his own ideas. The result is an almost exclusively masculine account of the history of art; Smith does not credit any female art historians with influencing the discipline. Despite Smith’s frequently stated belief in the impossibility of defining a moment while inhabiting it, theorists have attempted to reign in the particularity, openness and diversity of the current moment to render it contained and, therefore, meaningful. Such attempts, found for example in texts by Terry Smith or Peter Osborne, are frequently confounded by a sense of current art as necessarily diverse and undefinable. An inability to define current art is thought to render a sense of ‘the end of art’, and the end of art history as a discipline. Rather than evade art history’s end, we can consider art’s development through the modern as, conversely, an embrace of this end. This paper traces a definition of current art considering this view through the lens of conceptual artist’s ideals as described by Lucy Lippard, in a sense of such art as ‘post conceptual’. Lending agency to artists, this account of contemporary art strives toward a speculative, potentially feminist definition of contemporary art, to allow for the openness, diversity and escape from the institution for which modern artists strove. Rather than view conceptual artists’ perceived inability to fully escape the museum as a failure, it will here be framed as a means by which to understand and ‘define’ that which is known as contemporary art.

The idea of the end of art underpins and defines modern art’s development towards the contemporary moment. Hegel’s statement concerning this end was made at modernism’s outset, and while the idea links art with philosophy throughout modern art’s history, it has lost favour in recent attempts to theorise the art of the contemporary moment. The most recent significant application of the idea was made by philosopher Arthur C. Danto in the decades between the 1960s and 1980s, at the outset of the contemporary period. Danto theorised contemporary art as the end of art as a visual concern, wherein the modernist project of self-definition and critique of form via form culminates in the availability to art of all form, rendering contemporary practice finally and necessarily non-visual and therefore, to Danto, of primarily philosophical concern – a sense reflected in the ephemeral, idea-based work of the conceptual movement. The abject, ugly and anti-aesthetic tendencies of radical modern movements visually heralded, or embodied, a sense of art’s ending – a sense no doubt evident in initial encounters with Malevich’s The Black Square, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, or Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. In contrast, the contemporary moment’s lack of a singular aesthetic renders the sense of an ‘anti’-aesthetic obsolete, meaning degenerate or abject forms or objects represent the institutional nature of the concept ‘art’ rather than its critique. The impossibility of any truly negative or ‘anti-art’ form represents the end of art’s critical project and reflects Baudrillard’s description of contemporary art as a ‘conspiracy’, wherein the liberation of all form renders form itself inert, unable to stand outside art or critique it. The cheerful face and freely multiple formats of contemporary art’s conspiracy mask an underlying sense of art’s decay post its end. Where the impossibility of a self-critical or radical practice in the contemporary moment represents the true end of art, as a practitioner I find it necessary to reflect this sense via the entirety of my practice. Rather than withdraw or give up art (an action undertaken by Danto and other conceptual artists), I aim instead to maintain my practice – as affirmation of the fact of art’s continuation beyond its end – while speaking negatively of this end via theory. This paper explores the necessity of the negative framework engendered by speaking of art’s end in rendering contemporary practice possible; a framework less concerned with art as ‘affect’ than an attempt to realign practice with philosophy in the post conceptual moment.

A natural connection exists between the term ‘art’ and a sense of revolution: modernist European art, precursor to the contemporary, may be viewed historically as a series of progressive or revolutionary movements, where each new movement challenged and destroyed the boundaries and definitions of the art that preceded it. This revolutionary view of art relies on a sense of the meta-narrative, based on ideas of progress and a linear view of history. Current attempts to define contemporary art frequently position it as a challenge to the modern, an ahistorical, untimely or ‘post’-modern era that embraces multiple and diverse narratives from local, regional and particular sources over a central, patriarchal or Eurocentric view or practice. Paradoxically, these theories tend ultimately to replicate the idealism or utopianism of the modern, betrayed by their yearning to inhabit a new era and overthrow the outdated boundaries or practices of the previous. From the late 1960s until his death in 2013, philosopher Arthur Danto outlined an alternative theory for contemporary art, which he described as the ‘end of art’. As an idea, the end of art embraces the reality of the artwork’s contemporary conditions: its ultimate freedom of form, its visual resemblance to and disappearance within the everyday, its lack of a central narrative and absence of progress. It also accounts for the fact of the contemporary’s origins within the modern, in relation to a view of its end as having driven the entire modern project. This paper explores the idea of the end of art in relation contemporary art practice as post-conceptual practice. It examines the potential of this idea to challenge the institution of art altogether in line with conceptual ideals of art’s dematerialisation and its attempts to revolutionise the concept of creativity within the everyday and real-world practices.

2014

This enquiry seeks to explore what philosopher and critic Peter Osborne identifies as the philosophical character of contemporary art. The purpose of this enquiry is not to resolve the ambiguous relationship between art and philosophy that he observes in contemporary art, but to address the complex engagement between them in a focused manner by examining how philosophy comes into play in my post-conceptual practice. This enquiry emerges from and is orientated by an ongoing post-conceptual practice. The central questions of the enquiry ask: What is the relationship between art and philosophy in my post-conceptual practice? How might my artworks raise philosophical ideas and thought? What is the nature of this thought? The primary component of the research project consists of three specific event-based art works: Gatherings (Transitory Encounters) (2008), Mystical Anarchism (2009-2012) and Metaphysical Longings (2006-). Through the development, enactment and critical reflection on these works I explore how my practice provides a domain to engage with philosophy and how the artworks that unfold out of this might implicate philosophical ideas and engender thought. These works seek to enact an other space. I use the term other space to articulate a temporary, experiential and/or symbolic space that differs from the quotidian. I develop my understanding of the philosophical character of art by exploring how philosophical ideas might be implicated in these works in an experiential manner by considering how these works invite thought. Through the research project I assert the proposition that the thinking raised by art is essentially affective. Alain Badiou's inaesthetics provides a theoretical guide. Although inaesthetics defines a reciprocal engagement between artistic practice and philosophical enquiry, the correlation of these disciplines is described from the vantage point of the philosopher and no examples from the area of contemporary art are provided within his thesis. Rather than repeating the procedures associated with traditional modalities of aesthetics that privilege the critic/philosopher, this research project provides a paradigm within artistic practice to explore how philosophical meaning is implicated through the development and enactment of artworks.

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2016

abstract Departing from a critical assessment of the most widespread and initiated definitions of Contemporary Art from the last decade and a half, sustaining a world-wide discourse on contemporary art and contemporaneity, this article will deal with two aspects of an immodest proposal captured by the keywords actualization and anachrony. While current discussions on contemporary art are arguably reproducing modernist assumptions on the primacy of innovation, bolstered by a veiled avant-garde logic, the proposal to regard contemporary art as actualized art upsets not only ideas on what art after postmodernism might mean, but the whole edifice of historicist historiography. An anachronic perspective, a bi- or polychronic situatedness of the work of art, could be used to liberate art from being defined according to its unique descent, and to embrace, instead, a chronologic open to art’s continuous “life” through its successive aesthetic accessions and actualizations in time. keywords Contemporary art, Conceptualism, Postmodern, Actualization, Anachrony

This is a renamed version of Chapter 1 of my book Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology As Iconology, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019. In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Contingent Objects, Permanent Eclecticism’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book . This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.

The International Journal of Arts Theory and History, 2018

This article is a discussion about how the conceptualization of art affected the idea of art, especially artworks following Duchamp's footsteps, aided by the concept of end of art evoked by several authors. An overview about the writings on the end of art through history will be made considering Hegel's, Adorno's, Greenberg's, and Danto's points of view on the matter. Following the first part of the article, Duchamp's contribution to contemporary art with his innovations and new ideas will be discussed. This contribution mostly consists of philosophically questioning Art's limits and, while doing so, transforming art into something of the mind rather than just its physical aspect. Duchamp influenced many artists who followed, and who were able to explore new territories and materials, no longer limited by rules of how art, as prescribed by Greenberg, "should be." This will help us understand the transition between modernism and contemporary art and its importance to how art is viewed today.

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...

AAANZ Annual Conference , 2022

In 1917, Duchamp submitted Fountain to the ‘jury-free exhibition of contemporary art’ held by the Society of Independent Artists. By rejecting the work, the Society assisted Duchamp in demonstrating a flaw within its ‘jury-free’ declaration, revealing that boundaries – a sense of judgement – did in fact exist in relation to the objects they would consider ‘art’. In 1969, artist Joseph Kosuth identified Duchamp’s ‘unassisted readymades’ as significant to the genesis of conceptual art, stating that: ‘all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature ) because art only exists conceptually’. In order to consider, or define, art as a concept – to separate it from other concepts – it is necessary to identify that which is ‘not’ art. The period of conceptual art may be seen as a series of attempts to demonstrate that which is ‘not’ art. The current moment, ‘post’ conceptual art, is frequently defined as open, as embodying a state of absolute freedom, similar to the claim made by the Society a century ago. But is this the case? How do artists demonstrate the limits or boundaries of the concept ‘art’ when boundaries are not perceived to exist? This paper considers the possibilities available to contemporary artists to demonstrate art’s limits.