Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
at stake in contemporary art by moving across (and in the process, reworking the relations between) an array of disciplinary formations, ancient, modern and new: philosophy, art history, art criticism, sociology, psychoanalysis, urban studies, architecture, political theory, literary history and ‘theory’ per se – to name but the most prominent. Here, these articulations and crossings are made from the standpoint of a conception of philosophy that recognizes the constitutive role of non-philosophical discourses and experiences in all philosophizing, along with its irreducibility to them. The para-academic, part-public institutions that provided the occasions for the composition of early versions of parts of this book provided the institutional conditions determining their specific transdisciplinarities. I have retained some traces of this trandisciplinary process of construction in the discursive structure of the book, which deliberately exhibits occasional abrupt shifts in discursive register and modes of argumentation, within what I hope is nonetheless an articulated whole.
Loosely Romantic
Chapter 1 deals with the core temporal meaning of ‘contemporary art’ as the art of contemporaneity. What is ‘the contemporary’? Different, often implicit, answers to this question overdetermine the concept of contemporary art. Chapter 2 approaches the postconceptual character of contemporary art, first negatively, through a critique of the conflation of art and aesthetic, and then positively, through the idea of a historical ontology of the artwork. The early Romantic philosophical sources of the structure of postconceptual art are then themselves directly deployed in an interpretation of a work by Sol LeWitt. Chapter 3 provides a critical engagement with some of the philosophical confusions of the literature on modernism. It develops a new philosophical concept of modernism consistent with the idea of the historical ontology of the artwork, and explores the consequences for modernist criticism of the destruction of the ontological significance of ‘medium’. Chapter 4 examines the work of the US artist Robert Smithson as an exemplary instance of the transcategorial character of postconceptual art, produced as a consequence of the critical destruction of ‘medium’. Chapter 5 explores the necessarily ‘distributive’ character of the unity of postconceptual works, though an investigation of photographic ontology and the radicalization of its immanent multiplicity of visualizations brought about by digital technology. Chapter 6 outlines the elements for a construction of the concept of art space, within the terms of a historical ontology of urban form. Chapter 7 reflects, correspondingly, on the temporal dimensions of art space – attention, memory, expectation – associated with the idea of the postconceptual work as a ‘project’, introduced in Chapter 2 and further elaborated through the idea of project space, at the end of Chapter 6.
The structure of the book is, philosophically, loosely Romantic, in the sense that it may be read as a series of seven collections of fragments (hence also as seven fragments), with systematic intent. The radical particularity of the history of art, and the radical nominalism of contemporary art, vitiate any attempt at formally systematic comprehension or presentation, but they demand a constructive systematic intent nonetheless. Whatever unity there is to the book is thus a distributive one, which is carried equally within its parts as across the whole. In order to register the non-conceptual dimension of the historical character of its object (‘contemporary art’), I have retained a relationship to the contingencies of the realizations of some particular artistic projects in most chapters. Work by Walid Raad/The Atlas Group provides the artistic bookends that hold the text together. However, the intention is not to construct (or reproduce) a canon, but to develop a critical practice of philosophical interpretation.
The fiction of the contemporary
The construction of a critical concept of contemporary art requires, as its premise, the construction of a more general concept of the contemporary. After a brief reflection on the semantics of the contemporary, this chapter outlines such a construction, via the extension of this semantic field to its widest and philosophically most fundamental object: history. The contemporary appears there, first, structurally, as idea, problem, fiction and task; and second, historically, in its most recent guise as the time of the globally transnational. When this conception is transposed onto the artistic field, contemporary art appears, in its strongest critical sense, as the artistic construction and expression of contemporaneity. Two aspects of the artistic articulation of the space-time of the contemporary as a transnational globality are highlighted below, with reference to the work of The Atlas Group, 1999–2005 (to whom I return at the end of the book, in Chapter Seven): the fictionalization of artistic authority and the collectivization of artistic fictions. Attention to these two constitutive aspects of contemporary art, as an art of contemporaneity in a global context, makes the work of The Atlas Group emblematic of a new kind art, which aspires to articulate the fiction of our incipiently global contemporaneity to its fullest extent.
The root idea of the contemporary as a ‘living, existing, or occurring together’ in time, specifically, within the periodicity of a human life, has been around a long while. Derived from the medieval Latin contemporarius, and the late Latin contemporalis, the English ‘contemporary’ dates from around the mid-seventeenth century. It was only after the Second World War, however, that it began to acquire its current historical and critical connotations through its use, first as a specification of, and then in contrast to, periodizing uses of ‘modern’. Perhaps it was the collective sense of survival in the aftermath of a war that had opened up social experience beyond national frontiers that produced in Europe the association of a new historical period with the temporal quality of the shared present itself. The immediate postwar years saw new uses of ‘contemporary’ in English to denote both a specific style of design (‘contemporary design’) and the artistic present more generally (‘contemporary arts’), in their differences from the preceding period. This is the source of that sense of up-to-dateness with which the term remains predominantly identified in popular usage.
When the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) was founded in London in 1946, for example, it was very up to date indeed. Doubly and paradoxically so, in fact, in so far as it both fed off the residual energies of the pre-war avant-garde, acting out a weakened version of its temporal logic of futurity, and took a step back from that avant-garde’s ruptural historical futurity into the more expansive present of a new beginning. In the years immediately following the Second World War, the future was imaged as much by the desire to throw off the restrictions of wartime life and achieve some kind of ‘normality’ as by the fundamental social changes that the end of the war was to bring about.1 In the UK, unlike France and Italy, no break with capitalism was envisaged, but rather a different capitalism, of peace and social democratic reconstruction (although ‘Cold War’ would soon become the new name for peace in Europe). The transformation of ‘advanced’ art’s identification with a radically different future – associated in Britain largely with surrealism – into an identification with a more extended present exchanged the anticipation of an ‘end of art’ (the famous avant-garde dissolution of art into life) for a focus on interactions between the arts, and popular and technologically advanced arts, like cinema, architecture and advertising in particular. This was characteristic of the work of the Independent Group at the ICA (1952–55), for example, culminating in the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1956. The future, apparently, had already arrived – a standpoint later ironized in Victor Burgin’s 1976 photowork, This Is the Tomorrow You Were Promised Yesterday.
However, the separating of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ that this notion of contemporary arts involves in no way dominated the historical consciousness of the institutional field of art at that time.2 Rather, the contemporary acted there mainly as a qualification of (rather than a counter to) ‘the modern’: the contemporary was the most recent modern, but a modern with a moderated, less ruptural futurity. ‘Contemporary’ was still not enough of a critical concept in its own right by the 1970s to be included in Raymond Williams’s influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). And a decade later, when Matei Calinescu updated his book Faces of Modernity