ANYWHERE OR NOT AT ALL Philosophy ofContemporary Art PETER OSBORNE VERSO London • New York For First published by Verso 2013 © Peter Osborne 2013 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 13579108642 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-094-0 (PBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-113-8 (HBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Osborne, Peter, 1958- Anywhere or not at all : philosophy of contemporary art / Peter Osborne. - First edition, paperback. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78168-094-0 (pbk. : a1k. paper) - ISBN 978-1-78168-113-8 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Art, Modern-20th century-Philosophy. 2. Art, Modern-21st century-Philosophy. L Title. N6490.07332013 709.05'101-dc23 2013003012 Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK, Edinburgh Printed and bound by cpr Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY Contents Introduction The fiction ofthe contemporary 15 Together in time? three periodizations of contemporary art - idea, problem, fiction, task - the global transnational, or, the contemporary today - Joseph Bitar - fictionalization of artistic authority / collectivization of artistic fictions: a First Transnational 2 Art beyond aesthetics 37 Art versus aesthetics (Jena Romanticism contra Kant) - perio­ dization as historical ontology: postconceptual art - a speculative proposition - an image of romanticism (Benjamin, Schlegel, Lewitt) fragment and sentence - information and series - process and project , Modernisms and mediations 71 The double heritage of the modern in art - artistic modernisms: aesthetic, specific, generic - mediations after mediums: nomi­ nalism and genre, isms and series everything, everywhere? Po Ike and Richter 4 Transcategoriality: postconceptual art 99 Smithson and medium (or, against 'sculpture') - the 'intermina- ble avalanche of categories' - ontology of materializations: non-site - conceptual abstraction and 'pure perception' 5 Photographic ontology, infinite exchange 117 Distributive unity - the photograph: metonymic model of an imagined unity - digitalization, art and the real (or, anxiety about abstraction) - the visible, the invisible and the multiplica­ tion of visualizations v 33 7 Art time 175 Attention and distraction: boredom as possibility - distracted reception (duration and rhythm) - memory or history? - testi­ monies: three works - expectation as a historical category (critique of Koselleck) - expecting the unexpected: puncturing the horizon Acknowledgements 213 Notes 215 Bibliography 255 Image credits 271 Index 273 Introduction In his joint biography of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Frans:ois 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', DOise 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 tFagedy, 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 Irt is badly known. To transform our distance from it into that 'unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be? upon which experi­ ence of its art character depends, however - to use our ignorance as a .pur 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 affec­ tive engagement with the most fundamental claims made upon us by luch art - seems, at times, almost impossible. This is ironic given the well-remarked-upon 'conceptual' character of so much contemporary Irt. Yet it is precisely this conceptual character that is most often the ANYWHERE OR NOT AT ALL one means art (which 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 judge­ ment 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 artworks produced within the duration of a particular present (our present); that it is, thus, not a proper part of a critical vocabulary at all. Certainly the expression is often used in that way. However, both the conceptual grammar of the phrase - its dependence upon a difference from an art that is not contem­ porary - and the affirmative inflection of this difference in current usage (contemporary art is more living, more actual, and thus to be valued more highly than other art with which it, paradoxically, shares time) mitigate against such an indifferent empiricism. So what kind of discourse is required to render the idea of contemporary art critically intelligible? That is the question addressed in this book, in part experimentally, by trying to produce such a discourse. This is a discourse, first, that is neither merely empirical nor temporally inclusive. Not all art that is recently produced, or would call itself or be called by others' contem­ porary', can be understood to be contemporary in an art-critically significant sense. 'Contemporary' is, at base, a critical and therefore a selective concept: it promotes and it excludes. To claim something is contemporary is to make a claim for its significance in participating in the actuality of the present - a claim over and against that of other things, some of which themselves may make a similar claim on contem­ poraneity. So, second, we need a discourse that is responsible to the general critical concept of the contemporary - that is, which engages with the philosophy of time. The notion of the present at stake in art's contemporaneity is not a simple one. Nor does it stand outside of history. This means, third, that such a discourse must be reflexively grounded in the semantic history of 'the contemporary' as a critical category, and attend to the peculiarly privileged role within it of its applications to art. Fourth, such a discourse, though reflexively histor­ ically derived, must nonetheless impose certain critical demands upon 2 INTRODUCT ON art a of generically artistic practices, has posed new of criti- judgement to which the concept of the contemporary represents an increasingly powerful response. However, this concept must be constructed rather than merely discovered. Finally, in recognition of both the individuality and the contingent historical character of art, a critical discourse of contemporary art can only develop through the interpretative confrontation with individual works. It must participate in the on-going critical history of art, as well as in the revival of a philosophical art criticism. Such, broadly speaking, is the kind of discourse about contemporary art that this book attempts to inhabit and to produce. Its outcome may be polemically condensed into a single and simple, speculative proposition: contemporary art is postcon­ ceptual art. For reasons of dialectical method, the book as a whole is required to get a sense of precisely what this proposition means in practice and how it functions interpretatively. I shall use the remainder of this introduction to expand upon the intellectual context, method and structure of the book. Criticism, History, Philosophy In 1965, as part of his response to a series of 'Charges to the Art Critic' the directors of a seminar on art education at Pennsylvania State University, and in studied contrast to the growing formalism of the dominant-but-declining modernist criticism of his rival, Clement reenberg, Harold Rosenberg declared: 'Art criticism today is art history, though not necessarily the art history of the art historian.'3 This {issertion appears remarkable today, nearly fifty years later, and not just of its insistence upon the historical dimension of a practice that become ever more preoccupied with synchronic relations - in particular, between art and other cultural forms. It is remarkable because, in asserting the independence of the historical dimension of tdticism from the discipline of art history, it raises the fundamental but discussed question of precisely what kind of art history art criti­ is (or should be), and what its relations to the art history