The Postconceptual Condition

Peter Osborne

Description

Tracking the postconceptual dimensions of contemporary art
If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, "it is the function of artistic form.to make historical content into a philosophical truth" then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that truth. Never has this been more necessary or more difficult than with respect to contemporary art. Contemporary art is a point of condensation of a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms and technologies of image production. Contemporary art expresses this condition, Osborne maintains, through its distinctively postconceptual form. These essays-extending the scope and arguments of Osborne's Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art-move from philosophical consideration of the changing temporal conditions of capitalist modernity, via problems of formalism, the politics of art and the changing shape of art institutions, to interpretation and analysis of particular works by Akram Zataari, Xavier Le Roy and Ilya Kabakov, and the postconceptual situation of a crisis-ridden New Music.

Sujets

• Critical Theory
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Conceptual
• History of art
• Formalism
• Moscow Conceptualists
• Conceptualism
• Archive
• Criticism
• Autonomy
• Contemporary art
• Globalization
• Archive (homonymie)
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 30 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786634214
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

The Postconceptual Condition
The Postconceptual Condition
Critical Essays
Peter Osborne
First published by Verso 2018
© Peter Osborne 2018
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-420-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-490-0 (LIBRARY)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-422-1 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-421-4 (UK EBK)
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
Names: Osborne, Peter, 1958– author.
Title: The postconceptual condition : critical essays / Peter Osborne.
Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050552 | ISBN 9781786634207 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern – 20th century – Philosophy. | Art, Modern – 21st century – Philosophy. | Conceptual art. | BISAC: ART / Conceptual. | PHILOSOPHY / Criticism.
Classification: LCC N6490 .O7334 2018 | DDC 709.04/075 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050552
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Stella
Contents
Preface
Part I. Time of the Present
1. The Postconceptual Condition: Or, the Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today
2. Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time
3. Temporalization as Transcendental Aesthetics: Avant-Garde, Modern, Contemporary
Part II. Art and Politics
4. Theorem 4. Autonomy: Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?
5. Disguised as a Dog: Cynical Occupy?
Part III. Institutions
6. October and the Problem of Formalism
7. Existential Urgency: Contemporaneity, Biennials and Social Form
8. Archive as Afterlife and Life of Art
Part IV. Art and Image
9. The Distributed Image
10. Information, Story, Image: Akram Zaatari’s Historical Constructivism
11. Dialectical Ontology of Art: Xavier Le Roy’s Retrospective in/as Contemporary Art
12. The Kabakov Effect: ‘Moscow Conceptualism’ in the History of Contemporary Art
13. The Terminology is in Crisis: Postconceptual Art and New Music
14. The Image is the Subject: Once More on the Temporalities of Image and Act
Notes
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
Index
Preface
If as Walter Benjamin maintained, ‘it is the function of artistic form … to make historical content into a philosophical truth’, 1 then it is the function of criticism to recover and try to complete that truth. Never has this been more necessary or more difficult than with respect to contemporary art. The word of criticism, of course, is never final. Indeed, it is the passing, historical character of art and criticism alike – their ‘necessary abandonment’, as Roland Barthes once put it 2 – as much as their immanent suspension of that passing character (in criticism, by writing) that places them into relation with such truth; relations that must thus be constantly renewed.
Today, it is the relations constituting the space of a global capitalist modernity, overdetermining other social relations with an insistent yet disjunctive and crisis-ridden contemporaneity, that must first be understood, as a condition of the renewal of a criticism that is to be at once both historical and emphatic (related to truth), and hence negative in relation to the world as it is. It is in the gap between the passing historical meaning and the truth of a work that the ‘untruth’ of the present appears.
Contemporary art is a point of condensation of a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms, and technologies of image-production, which it treats as artistic materials and subjects to technical procedures in order to wrest these forces, forms and technologies from their everyday functions and re-present them anew. To comprehend such art, one must pass through the many different layers of mediation that are embedded in its materials and encompassed within its forms. Systematically, this would require a fluid process of transdisciplinary reflection and concept construction, which is methodologically complicated and empirically far-reaching, the product of necessarily collective rather than merely individual research. 3 That is a process which, for all the intellectual materials available, scattered across the disciplines, has hardly begun. At the level of criticism, however, one can exploit particular instances and occasions, in order to render the contingent emblematic, a part of the whole, through the more concrete conceptualizations associated with the essay form. This is what I try to do here, in different ways, and at different levels of abstraction, in essays that are very much a part of the afterlife of this book’s precursor, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art .
These essays are located at that imaginary crossroads where the discourse of the university meets the speech of the artworld in the hope that the former might acquire greater actuality, while the latter may find a more lasting, critical and theoretical form. All but the first two, more theoretically wide-ranging, essays were initially written for talks at art institutions or as essays for art journals, in Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and Sweden. They aspire to keep open a critical space within the transnationally proliferating discourses of contemporary art: a space that is summed up here by the terminologically difficult idea of a postconceptual condition, which is expounded in Chapter 1 . Each essay sets out from a position broadly outlined in Anywhere or Not At All and develops it further by exploring its application to a particular occasion, institutional situation or body of artistic work; or by counter-posing it to competing theoretical positions. 4
The essays move from philosophical debates about the ‘Time of the Present’ – the attempt to give historical definition to ‘contemporaneity’ and its relations to other modes of temporalization, such as modernity and avant-garde – to interpretations of particular works of contemporary art (‘Art and Image’), via reflections on cultural-political and institutional forms: in particular, issues of autonomy and activism, in the art–politics relation, and the changing character of art-institutional spaces. There is thus a general – but non-systematic – movement within the book ‘from the abstract to the concrete’. The movement through Chapters 8 to 10 , for example, charts a single argumentative development, at different levels. In each chapter throughout the book, it is what Hegel called ‘the whole’ that is the ultimate, determining object of the analyses, yet the whole necessarily appears in each instance only negatively, via different levels of abstraction and mediation.
The texts have been revised to remove a few purely occasional remarks, along with some recapitulations of theoretical content. However, thematic overlaps have been retained, and in some cases developed farther, to maintain that rhythm of allusion and variation characteristic of the essay form; indeed, of form as such. As for the judgements that are inevitably bound up with such analyses: as Lukács famously remarked, the ‘value-determining thing’ about judgement ‘is not the verdict … but the process of judging’. 5 Which does not mean that the verdict is otiose.
London, February 2017
PART I
Time of the Present
1
The Postconceptual Condition: Or, The Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today
 
Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title. It mimics, first, a text that, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, though perhaps not yet sufficiently to have acquired those ‘revolutionary energies’ that André Breton (and after him, Walter Benjamin) sought in such objects: Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . It is approaching forty years since the first publication of that ‘seemingly neutral review of a vast body of material on contemporary science and problems of knowledge or information’, which proved to be (in Fredric Jameson’s phrase) ‘a kind of crossroads’. 1 Those, like Jameson, who took the road called postmodernism have long since had to retrace their steps (surreptitiously or otherwise) or accustom themselves to life in a historical and intellectual cul-de-sac. The postmodern episode, as we might call it, an episode in the history of criticism, enlivened theoretical debates for little more than twenty years (1979–99) and, retrospectively, its fate as a periodizing category had already been sealed by the time of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe ten years previously (‘1989’) and the turn to theories of globalization that followed – before Jameson’s 1991 magnum opus, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (the source of my second borrowing) had even appeared. 2
Periodizing Capitalism (Contra Jameson)
How very late, it now seems, still to have been periodizing capitalism as ‘late’ in 1991, at the very moment of its most powerful renewal