Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
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 back of the popularity of theories of the gaze (which function as one form of theoretical compensation for the aesthetic deficit of the semiotic paradigm), a renewed interest in Greenberg’s work, and the resurgence of photographic theory. Yet it remains conceptually removed from the main critical problems posed by the field of contemporary art in general, as Jeff Wall acknowledges in his defence of a Friedian position, by bifurcating the field into two critically discrete domains, the larger of which falls outside the scope of Friedian criticism altogether.11 Fried’s more specifically art-critical contribution to recent debates, alongside those of T.J. Clark, has been historical, in the everyday sense of referring to the art of the past: namely, to develop a criticism through and within conventional art history – a criticism of now ‘historical’ art – rather than vice versa (that is, to develop the historical aspect of criticism of contemporary art, to which Rosenberg was referring).12
Under these conditions, it is useful to approach the questions implicit in Rosenberg’s declaration – specifically, what kind of art history art criticism (ideally) is and what its relations to ‘the art history of the art historian’ might be – from a more philosophical standpoint. For, as Rosenberg himself suggested, ‘both art criticism and art history need to scan more thoroughly their philosophical substructures’ if they are to acquire a more adequate sense of their mutual relations.13 And in fact, surprisingly in many respects, there has been a resurgence of interest in explicitly philosophical discourses about art over the last two decades as part of the recomposition and diversification of art discourses that has accompanied the industrialization of its institutions. Whether these particular philosophical discourses are adequate to the comprehension and judgement of contemporary art, however, is another matter. While there has been much philosophizing about art, there has been little philosophizing of contemporary art.
The revival of interest in explicitly philosophical discourses about art has taken place against the background of what some have seen as a general ‘legitimation crisis’ in contemporary art.14 No doubt, recourse to the established cultural authority of philosophy has played a role here, in association with its relative self-legitimating ‘difficulty’. But philosophy’s intellectual contribution has been more than ideological. For contrary to the positivistic protestation of Jean-Marie Schaeffer that art itself ‘will get along very well on its own’ – that is, without critical discourse – this is perhaps less true now than it has ever been. The ‘artistic act’ may indeed be ‘irreducible to the way it legitimates itself’, but this means neither that it is non-discursive, nor that the discourses from which it draws its resources are necessarily non-philosophical.15 Conceptual art, in its canonical sense, surely put paid to any enduring illusions about that – whatever else one may think about it. Indeed, it is precisely the acknowledgement of the immanently philosophical character of contemporary art that led to the revival of the claim, by Arthur Danto among others, that art has ended.16 Yet this claim could just as easily be read as an inverted (and disavowed) acknowledgement of the inadequacy of the prevailing philosophical discourse on art (namely, ‘aesthetics’) to the distinctive character of contemporary art: an implicit 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’.17
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 ‘de-sacralization’ 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 approaches – associated 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 cultural-theoretical approaches. Furthermore, in its recent Rancièrean and (on occasion) Deleuzean guises, it has provided a medium for posing, once again, the now-classical modern question of art’s relationship to politics, after a period in which both directly intellectual and political issues were progressively excluded from critical discourse.19 These are issues that have to be addressed if the dearth of theoretically serious critical writing about contemporary art is to be overcome. However, this turn to the European philosophical tradition as a resource for art-critical discourse has as yet failed to achieve a convincing critical-theoretical purchase on contemporary art, because it has failed to come to terms with the decisive historical transformation in the ontology of the artwork that is constitutive of its very contemporaneity. If one considers the works exhibited at the growing number of international biennali, for example, or Documenta – events that in large part constitute the extensive definition of contemporary art – one will find little that most philosophers who write about art are able to engage with concretely in a manner that also engages the discourses and concerns of the art world itself. Although the growing curatorial tendency to aestheticize much recent art, including video work, is one point of convergence.
Thus, while these philosophical discourses on art pose a theoretical challenge to most contemporary art writing, by raising questions about ‘aesthetic’, about judgement, about subjectivity, about ‘nature’, and about the ontology of the artwork – which semiotic discourses of cultural theory are unable to ask – they have largely been unable to respond to their