The Logics of Deflation: Autonomy, Negation and the Avant-Garde JOHN ROBERTS BA Hons A thesis submitted in fulfilment ofthe requirements of the University of W olverhampton for the degree of Doctor ofPhilosophy May 2005 This work or any part thereof has not previously been presented in any form to the University or to any other body whether for the purposes of assessment, publication or for any other purpose (unless othenl'ise indicated). Sa1'e for (lny express acknowledgments, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, 1 confirm that the intellectual content ofthe work is the result of my own efJhrts and of no other person. The right ofJohn Roberts to be identified as author of this work is asserted in accordance with ss. 77 and 78 ofthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. At this date copyright is owned by the author. .,,' Signature .. ./. .. ~.~. ~ :-:-: ... r;:;1.,,:-: ': .. ~.~ ............. Date ... ...... '}/ .f/!P.I.. ................ 1 Abstract This thesis by publication, The Logics of Deflation: Autonomy, Negation and the Avant-Garde, collects essays recently published in various journals (Radical Philosophy, Historical Materialism, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text) and in museum publications. The publications address a number of key issues affecting the production and interpretation of contemporary art and the' everyday', art's institutionalization and art's autonomy, the role of the avant-garde after postmodernism, the meaning of conceptual art, performativity and authorship, art's relationship to popular culture, and the crisis of the' politics of representation' . The central argument of the thesis is that when art abandons the possibility of the 'new' art falls back into heteronomy and the academic. As such, there can be no renewal of art without it resisting, negating, reworking, what has become tradition. But this link between the' new' and value should not be confused with conventional modernist notions of formal' advance' or supersession in art. Rather, the' new' here, I argue, is the restless, ever vigilant positioning of art's critical relationship to its own traditions of intellectual and cultural administration. The mistake postmodernism and contemporary critics of the avant-garde make, therefore, is that they identify art's claims to autonomy not with art's necessary reflection on its own conditions of possi bility, but with simplistic notions of elitism and formalism. As a consequence autonomy is treated undialectically. Following Adorno's notion of autonomy in art as a social relation between art's production and reception, I insist, that for art to continue to define itself as modern it is inescapably bound up with the negation of the institutional arrangements and traditions in which it finds itself. Indeed, there can be no critical future for art without this temporal experience of art as being' out of joint' with the traditions and institutions which have brought it into being. The content of art continues to be implicated in the mediation of the critique of the 2 category of art. Looking at conceptual art as a defining moment of this logic I defend the changing anti-art strategies of modern and contemporary art practice - in particular British and American art of the 1990s - as the means by which art has recently pursued this double process of negation and self-negation. In this way it is the continuous redefinition of the boundaries of anti-art which forms the basis by which art negates what has been previously designated autonomous in order to constitute autonomy in art anew. In conclusion the thesis links this process of negation and self-negation to the idea of the avant-garde as a kind of placeholder for art's autonomy. In other words, I claim that the avant-garde is another name for the possibility of art's continuing self-realization under the instrumentalizing force of the commodity­ form. Bridging philosophy, art history and art theory, this thesis repoliticizes the issue of autonomy and the avant-garde. 3 Contents Intro: Art and Its Negations Part 1: Autonomy and the Avant-Garde Chapter 1: After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique Chapter 2: The Labour of Subjectivityffhe Subjectivity of Labour: Reflections on Contemporary Political Theory and the remaking of the Avant-Garde Chapter 3: Conceptual Art and Imageless Truth Chapter 4: Art, Autonomy and Virtualization Part 2: Photography and form Chapter 5: Photography, Iconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual Art Chapter 6: The Logics of Deflation: the Avant-garde, Lomography and the Fate of the Photographic Snapshot Chapter 7: Two Models of Labour: Figurality and Non-Figurality in Recent Photography Chapter 8: Photography and the Social Production of Space Chapter 9: Trauma, Ostension and the Photographic Document Part 3: Deflation and the Popular Chapter 10: Domestic Squabbles: Modes of scepticism and forms of popular culture in 1990s British and US art 4 Chapter 11: Trickster: Performativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson's 'Crop Circles' Chapter 12: The Practice of Failure 5 Publication Sources Intro Part 1 Chapter 1: After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique (Historical Materialism, No 7, Winter 2000) Chapter 2: The Labour of Subjectivity/the Subjectivity of Labour: contemporary political theory and the remaking of the avant-garde (published as 'The Labour of Subjectivity/the Subjectivity of Labour: reflections on contemporary political theory and culture', Third Text, special issue' Art, Politics & Resistance?', Volume 16, No 4, 2002) Chapter 3: Conceptual Art and Imageless Truth (Conceptual Art: The Invisible College, ed., Michael Corris, Cambridge University Press, 2004) Chapter 4: Art, Autonomy and Virtualization (part published as 'On Autonomy and the Avant-Garde', Radical Philosophy No 103 September/October 2000 Part 2 Chapter 5: Photography, Iconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual Art (The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976. 6 ed., John Roberts, Camerawords, 1997) Chapter 6: The Logics of Deflation: the Avant-garde, Lomography and the Fate of the Photographic Snapshot (Arken Bulletin, (Denmark) Volume 1, 2002) Chapter 7: Two Models of Labour: Figurality and Non-Figurality in Recent Photography (Passagens, Lisbaophoto, (Lisbon) 2003 ) Chapter 8: Photography and the Social Production of Space (Imago 2001: Encuentros de Fotografia y Video, Salamanca, 2002) Chapter 9: Trauma, Ostension and the Photographic Document (presented as a paper at 'Photography and the Limits of the Document' Conference, Tate 2003, and at Conference for the Society of European Philosophy, University of Essex 2003) Part 3 Chapter 10: Domestic Squabbles: Modes of scepticism and forms of popular culture in 1990s British and US art ( published as 'Domestic Squabbles' in Who's Afraid of Red, White & Blue?: attitudes to popular & mass culture, celebrity, alternative & critical practice & identity politics in recent British art, ed., David Burrows, ARTicle Press, 1998) 7 Chapter 11: Trickster: Performativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson's 'Crop Circles' (published as 'Trickster' in Oxford Art Journal, Volume 22. Number 1, 1999) Chapter 12: The Practice of Failure (Cabinet Magazine, New York, Issue 5 Winter 2001) 8 Introduction: Art and Its Negations Prologue In August 1993 I visited a massive installation at the Battlebridge Centre in King's Cross, the site of a former bus depot. I had been encouraged to go there having met one of the artists involved. He had written to me asking for a letter of support in order that he and the other artists in the group he was part of could raise money and gain access to the site. As I walked through the entrance, what was immediately entrancing about the installation was its ingenuity and sheer scale: it stretched almost to the length of a football pitch, and invited a mazy walk through its geometric interior. At the entrance it was impossible to see the installation's furthermost point. The artists had built, out of hundreds of cardboard packing boxes, a crude approximation of an city-centre environment, each cluster of boxes standing alone as an architectural feature. Some of these reached almost to the ceiling, some were flat like a minimalist floor sculpture. Suspended from the ceiling between these simple architectural forms were eighteen large painted canvases. These images, as the press release put it, ranged "from the now almost forgotten media events of the eighties and nineties, through the push of commercial interests that explored a new freedom and individualism": and were painted by members of the group and invited artists. The images included the Oocklands development, an Eternity perfume advert, an Aids awareness benefit concert, a Keith Haring, Princess Oi and a Somalian child, Bernard Tschumi' s deconstructionist development 'Parc de Vi lIete', Terry Farrell's Charing Cross development, and a Body Shop cartoon. The urbanist irony of the work was familiar from the large body of critical postmodernist \\ork 9 on the representations of modernity in the 1980s. Its transmutation of capitalist accumulation into an image of pasteboard transience (at the time the London homeless's cardboard city still occupied an underpass at Waterloo station) mocked the speculative property frenzy of the late eighties and early nineties. In this the work touched on the 'architectural turn' in the critique of modernist hubris in much US and European eighties art. I Yet, for all its indebtedness to critical postmodernism the installation had a lightness in its execution and perverse disregard for the paintings exhibited (they were merely' decorati ve' intrusions) that made it stand out. I was impressed. In fact, I was more than impressed I sensed that something had coalesced here and that it chimed with my own frustrations with the art of the moment. For the location and the form of the installation established a certain tone of disregard: it set its face against late modernist implacability as all serious art had been doing in the eighties, but it also set its face against the dominant form of this implacability: photo-text neo­ conceptualism.