Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne

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-remarked-upon ‘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

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