I would like to set aside, for now, the distinction between art and art with a capital A because this distinction may not exist, except as a polemical tool or an expression of personal opinion.Fifteen years ago, in “Marks of Indifference” I proposed that it was the dialectic of negation in which conceptual art implicated photography that paradoxically breached the final, most subtle, barriers to the acceptance of photography as art.That implied, I think, that photography played some central role in (...) the elaboration of conceptual art, what I am going to call the conceptual reduction of autonomous art. I don't know whether I meant to imply that or not, but, if I did, I shouldn't have because photography had nothing to do with the success of conceptual art; photography played no significant role in it. Photography was a sort of passenger on that trip. We can put it even more strongly and say that the very presence of photographs in works or discourse distracted or diminished the logic of the arguments conceptual artists were making.The most rigorous conceptual artists had little or nothing to do with photography because they had no need for it and recognized that, as depiction, it could contribute nothing to the reduction they were seeking to establish. (shrink)

A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual (...) art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA). (shrink)

Key writings by artists and theorists chart the shifting relationship between film and photography and how the rise of cinema forced photography to make a virtue of its stillness. The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; (...) photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism. Still photography—cinema's ghostly parent—was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic "shots"; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the "decisive moment" of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on—including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David—documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media. (shrink)

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’. Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension of (...) connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking. (shrink)

This work is intended to serve not only as an expression of a new idea of a philosophy, but as an apologia for philosophy as a legitimate and independent discipline in its own right. It argues that in the 20th century, truth has not been abandoned, but merely modified. The text proposes a return to truth and suggests that it is only after apprehending the truths of consciousness that the philosopher's mirror may become a kaleidoscope through which reality may be (...) contemplated. First order truth lies in the realm of discovery, and discovery takes place only within the moment of subjective re-enactment. It is through such a phenomenological criterion of validity that this work attempts to firmly ground an epistemology capable of paving the way for further substantive truth discoveries. As part of the philosophic stance advanced herein, however, epistemology and metaphysics are not developed in isolation. After analyzing other metaphysical approaches, the author utilizes the Chinese principle of complementarity to present his own conception of modified Hegelian dialecticism, as an account of systematic coherency and a backdrop to future philosophizing. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the relevance of Kant to the interpretation of contemporary art. The defining properties of contemporary art are the impossibility of definition in material, formal or stylistic terms, and the central role that concepts play in the interpretation of a work. Danto and Osborne suggest how concepts might be applied but they do not develop their proposals. Kant’s theory of judgement can provide a fuller account on the basis of the notions of purposiveness and play. The way in (...) which these notions explain the application of concepts to the world, I argue, provides a model of how concepts can be combined to form an interpretation of a work of contemporary art. A detailed example is given. (shrink)

Il saggio vuole analizzare se sia possibile parlare di arte contemporanea in termini non meramente cronologici. A questo scopo si avvale del lavoro e delle riflessioni di Peter Osborne, secondo cui l’arte contemporanea deve essere pensata non come un concetto descrittivo, ma come un concetto normativo in grado di giustificare e di rendere possibile il carattere di autonomia dell’arte. Sotto questo profilo, secondo l’autore tutta l’arte contemporanea è arte postconcettuale, poiché oggi la distinzione tra ‘arte’ e ‘non-arte’ non può riposare (...) soltanto su una dimensione estetica, ma deve necessariamente riposare anche su procedure teorico-riflessive (concettuali). Inoltre, non è più possibile configurare una storia dell’arte centrata unicamente sul medium, sulla forma o sullo stile, poiché la natura immateriale, tecnologicamente immaginale e digitalizzata delle pratiche artistiche impone di pensare la dimensione autonoma dell’arte non più attraverso la distinzione (moderna) tra ‘opera’ e res, ma come il darsi finzionale di non-luoghi. Da questo punto di vista, Osborne prova a ripensare la ‘forma’ dell’opera d’arte contemporanea in termini di una paradossale unità distributiva temporale e spaziale. In questo modo, l’unità temporalmente disgiuntiva e il carattere transnazionale (globale) diventano le due caratteristiche principali dell’opera d’arte contemporanea. (shrink)

What happens to the form of the biennial when biennials become part of a world system of art institutions, subject to the historical temporality of a global contemporaneity? In particular, what happens when the periodic rhythms of national narratives of biennial exhibitions are overcoded by a serial sequence of international biennials – competing for contemporaneity – seemingly without end? This essay approaches these questions via a consideration of the debate about the transitional symbolic significance of the 1989 Third Havana Biennale. (...) It contrasts three historical problematics of ‘the contemporary’ as models through which to think the cultural function of biennials: the critique of anthropology, or, the coeval; socialist post- coloniality, or the avant-garde construction of traditions; the historical contemporaneity of a global capitalist modernity. (shrink)