In the past twenty years I have taught classes at eight different colleges and universities. None of this teaching was the result of my having applied for a position in the standard way, with a cover letter, a statement of teaching philosophy, and letters of recommendation. One happy side effect of this is that I’ve never been formally confronted with the question of what my academic so-called ‘fields of specialization’ are. On informal occasions I tell people that my field is the philosophy of art, with particular attention to contemporary art, where the term ‘field’ just means what I tend to think about in a sustained way and occasionally write about. It’s not at all clear to me how one individuates a non-standard academic sub-field, but one would think that one individuating characteristic is that it has some set of texts that its specialists are expected to master. The existence of a widely accepted set of such texts would testify to the fact that the field has been the object of sustained research and reflection by more than one generation of academics. Now the sub-field of the philosophy of contemporary art, if such there is, certainly contains an enormous number of texts that have documentary value, such as the writings of artists; dozens of thousands of pieces of published art criticism testifying to contemporary tastes and evaluations; catalog essays that indicate how art works are presented and ascribed significance; and writings of academic art historians that express how the works are taken up and understood. But there are only a handful of works that might be thought to give general accounts of contemporary art, its features, its distinctive genres and sub-genres, its characteristic ways of making meaning and failing to do so, its foundational ideologies and myths, and its limits. My personal list of such works is quite short: the writings of the artists Robert Smithson and William Kentridge, a few works each by the philosophers Arthur Danto, Julianne Rebentisch, and Peter Osborne, and an essay by the philosopher Sherri Irvin. To this list I would now add a little work of great intellectual power and penetration, On Contemporary Art by the Argentinian writer of novellas César Aira.
The book consists of a single essay by Aira surrounded by brief and inconsequential writings of two other authors. Aira offers a general characterization of central features of contemporary art (he uses the capitalized form ‘Contemporary Art’ to emphasize that he is talking about a distinct period with particular characteristics) almost in passing. The explicit topics are the role of Duchamp and his work as a kind of foundational myth of Contemporary Art, and the peculiar sense of time and history constitutive of Contemporary Art. In the following I’ll attempt a sketch of this immensely intelligent and thought-provoking account, and offer some brief tentative reflections on it.
1.Ontology and Meaning in Contemporary Art: Aira treats Contemporary Art as a distinctive period in the arts that begins around 1970, and continues to the present. Some of his remarks suggest that Contemporary Art is a period of all the arts, but most suggest rather that he thinks of Contemporary Art as distinctive of the visual arts of drawing, painting, and poetry, as well as the various new genres of art that are either primarily visual in a straightforward sense, such as Installation Art, or, like Conceptual Art and Performance Art, that find an institutional base in galleries and museums, the distinctive institutional sites of the visual arts. The clearest indications that he thinks of Contemporary Art as largely the condition of the visual arts are that at two places he considers whether and to what degree the arts of film (p. 34) and literature (pp. 42-5). Like Peter Osborne and others, Aira takes the most distinctive feature of the ontology of a work of Contemporary Art to be its sense of not being exhaustively bound to a particular instantiation in a particular medium or physical basis; as he puts the point, a work of Contemporary Art involves a “migration of the medium, among sculpture, painting, toy, miniature, ceremony, and ritual. The painted picture [for example] at the end is merely the visible testament to the mad solitary machine that moves inside artistic activity.” (p.24) This distributed, ‘post-medium’ condition of Contemporary Artworks is motivated, Aira suggests, by the contemporary omnipresence of photographic works. A photograph is a perfection realization of the much older condition internal to works of visual art, namely, that they can be reproduced. Because of the seeming capacity of a photograph to capture a work of visual art ‘fully’, “precisely [at] the moment of Contemporary Art, it is as if a race started between the work of art and the technical possibility of reproducing it. The work of Contemporary Art flees from technical reproduction to the extent that this advances, and improves. A work becomes a work today to the extent that it remains one step ahead of the possibility of its reproduction . . . “ (p.18)
Out of its post-medium condition and this flight from the fantasy of perfect technical reproduction arise the distinctive content and semantics of Contemporary Artworks. The post-medium condition grants the Contemporary Artwork a capaciousness hitherto impossible in the visual arts, allowing a work’s content “to incorporate movement, sound, time in all its alterations, and encyclopedic information.” (p.19) To this Aira adds the point that this incorporation is in part in the service of the aim of dispelling the fantasy that a reproduction can capture everything of artistic significance in a work; the Contemporary Artist “employs her ingenuity and inventiveness to endow her work with one aspect, one point, that remains hidden, even from the most novel and exhaustive technique of reproduction.” (ibid.) In his book Depiction, Michael Podro had made a similar point with regard to the work of Marcel Duchamp (Aira’s account of Duchamp is considered below). On Podro’s account what Duchamp’s work invokes and then defeats is the fantasy that in a work of art there can be a ‘perfect’ fusion of content and form, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, what the work is about and the work’s manner of presentation of that. The fantasized fusion is forever postponed, a ‘delay in glass’. For Aira what rather cannot be captured is “that constellation of possible stories that glides over the naked photo.” (p.20) Aira calls this element in Contemporary Artworks that escapes photographic capture the ‘not-done’ (e. g. p.38); he thinks that the not-done is an element of all art, but one that is insisted upon and highlighted in Contemporary Art. Likewise, Contemporary Art foregrounds “the ultimate mission of all art” which is “to create new values and put them in circulation.” (p. 27)
2.Duchamp as the mythic founding figure of Contemporary Art: Aira claims that he first sensed something of the conditions and possibilities of Contemporary Art in 1967 when he bought and read the collected writings of Marcel Duchamp. From these writings Aira gleaned that Contemporary Art would consist primarily of “games of intelligence and invention” (p. 15); in its current appearance Contemporary Art is “a euphoric parade of inventiveness.” (p. 44) Now there are many versions of the idea that Duchamp is the founding figure avant la lettre, most commonly the claim, as typical as it is unintelligible, that Duchamp showed that ‘anything can be a work of art’. Though this typical claim cannot survive a moment’s reflection—anyone can name countless things that cannot be a work of art: the inside of a black hole, the contents of my stomach 7 years ago, etc. etc.--, it seems to recur ineluctably whenever someone tries to make sense of some especially minimal alteration of some non-traditional material in a work of Contemporary Art. Aira’s thought is completely free of this absurdity, and he urges instead the thought that it is The Green Box, the writings that preceded and accompanied Duchamp’s invention and construction of ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even’, often referred to as ‘The Large Glass’, that is the ur-work of Contemporary Art. For The Green Box supplements The Large Glass, and so is a kind of non-visible beyond of the material and so perceptible presentation of the work.
To this version of the founding myth Aira adds a remarkable thought. He notes that part of the legitimating discourse of Contemporary Art includes something like the claim that ‘Duchamp already did everything essential’ (p. 47). So Duchamp’s work opened up the space of free invention with multiple media and materials that is distinctive of Contemporary Art, but at the price of eliminating the possibility of serious or paradigm-altering invention within that space. The works within the field of Contemporary Art manifest nothing less than, but also nothing more than, “the shifting motions of a constellation of partial and provisional exceptionalities.” (p. 48) I was reminded here of a remark by the anthropologist David Graeber, who noted the puzzling phenomenon that human cultures exhibit an ungovernably vast and wild creativity in their myths, but then, through ritual, and institutionalization, chain themselves to a highly restricted range of instantiations and exemplifications of those founding myths. The curious effect of attributing all fundamental creativity to Duchamp is that “Contemporary Art, with all its rich and, for me, fascinating diversity, refutes its own name, because it is, to a large extent, the art of the past: the past of Duchamp’s life.” (p. 46)
3.Temporality and Historicity in Contemporary Art: Aira treats the origins of Contemporary Art as the product of exhaustion and intellectual laziness. It arises at the very end of the 1960’s with “the depletion of the Manet-Cézanne impulse.” (p. 46) More positively, it can be seen as the realization of the telos of modernism (p. 31) ; where modernism had an essentially futural dimension, presenting itself as a trace of the future dawning in the present and sign-posting what the future might look like, Contemporary Art is rather “the smooth and flat realization of the present” (ibid.) that “spreads itself out as a permanent present.” (p. 30) There is much to reflect upon in Aira’s claim, but one intriguing implication of it allows him to make sense of a historically peculiar feature of Contemporary Art, the odd irrelevance of taste among its artists, critics, advocates, and detractors. For taste is something that is as a conceptual matter something that is formed over time; one develops a taste, say, for a certain genre of music of one’s late adolescence, and this formed taste has something of a durable character. Later styles are liked and disliked, enjoyed or rejected, partly in terms of whether they are of a piece with the values of those works that exemplified the previously formed taste. Aira suggests that taste then requires a historical sense, with at least some minimal structure of artistic change in terms of stages. But Contemporary Art lacks stages, at least as structural features. The place of taste in previous art is in Contemporary Art occupied by wholesale acceptance or wholesale rejection: “in Contemporary Art you’re either in or out.” (p. 32) Aira interestingly notes that there is a characteristic figure ‘in’ Contemporary Art, its ‘militant Enemy’ (p. 35), who rages against its silliness, lack of propriety, abandonment of skill, etc. etc. But what one does not see is the figure who thinks that the only valuable aspect of Contemporary Art is, say, the appropriation works of the 1980’s, or the Relational Art of the 1990’s.
4. A remark by way of conclusion: It is beyond the scope of this blog piece to offer a full consideration of Aira’s thought-provoking account; I have attempted an account of central features of Contemporary Art in two little books whose points I won’t attempt to so much as sketch here. But I note that nothing in my understanding of Contemporary Art has led me to grant to Duchamp anything like the central role that Aira assigns him. Neither does Duchamp’s work play any significant role in the thought of Robert Smithson, who dismissed Duchamp’s quasi-aristocratic disdain for work and materiality, nor in the thought of William Kentridge, who proceeds as if Duchamp had never existed, and instead finds orientation from figures like Dziga Vertov, Brecht, and Max Beckmann. As Aira himself makes clear, the conceptual cost of treating Duchamp as ‘having already done everything’ is perhaps to deprive oneself of the possibility of finding instances of paradigm-shifts, developing traditions, or indeed of a kind of artwork that draws upon the cultural needs and existential depths of contemporary people. Perhaps. Or perhaps Aira is right, and the suspicion immediately arises that this indicates that there are no such needs and depths . . .
References:
César Aira (2018, originally in Spanish in 2010), On Contemporary Art
Arthur Danto (1998), After the End of Art
Sherri Irvin (2005), “The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art”
William Kentridge (2014), Six Drawing Lessons
Peter Osborne (2013), Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art
Michael Podro (1998), Depiction
John Rapko (2014), Logro, Fracaso, Aspíration: Tres Intentos de Entender el Arte Contemporáneo
John Rapko (forthcoming in Spanish in 2020), Return to Darkness
Julianne Rebentisch (2012), Aesthetics of Installation Art
Julianne Rebentisch (2013), Gegenwarts Kunst zur Einführung
Robert Smithson (1996), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings