In his book Kant after Duchamp, the French art theoretician Thierry de Duve gave one of the most prominent and influential characterizations of contemporary art. De Duve claimed that Duchamp showed that any material can serve as a vehicle of an idea, and accordingly any material can become the work of art or part of a work of art. On such a conception of the role of materials in visual art, and if there are no further criteria governing the artistic process, in making works of art an artist is no longer bound by criteria, models, stringencies, techniques, and skills native to the tradition of working within any particular medium. On the traditional or pre-Duchamp conception an activity such as painting is practiced in an enormous variety of ways, but amongst these ways there is one broad strain in which it is practiced as an art; likewise with other activities such as sculpting or drawing. We might call painting, sculpting, and drawing, when practiced as arts, artforms. Such artforms are historical phenomena, in the sense that their instances arise within cross-generational traditions of making. Another characteristic of traditional artforms is that they are typically subdivided into genres and sub-genres; so painting, for example, includes genres such as historical painting, still-life painting, and abstract painting. But de Duve argues that in Duchamp, as well as in contemporary art, we have only art in general--the sheer idea of art, art qua art--, and a non-finite range of instances of art, no one of which is as it were closer to the general concept of art than another. With Duchamp the practice of art primarily in artforms (such as painting and sculpture), and so within genres (such as landscape painting or portrait sculpture), comes to an end. The affectedness, the lived importance of the media (painting, sculpture) disappears with this or it withers away and what we have are individual works of art and the concept of art.
Are there alternatives to de Duve’s Duchampian conception of contemporary art? Another route towards gaining a perspicuous overview of contemporary art might start from the thought that a distinctive feature of contemporary art, at least in relation to the previous century of modern art starting in the mid- to late-nineteenth century is the prominence of expanded art forms and new genres. An expanded art form such as painting is marked by the non-traditional uses of traditional materials (such as paint poured or dribbled onto a canvas); use of non-traditional materials (such as elephant dung deposited onto a canvas); and, most challengingly, activities that do not involve depositing pigment onto a surface, but which invoke an indeterminate range of conventions, values, and kinds of meaning hitherto associated with painting (perhaps such as the artist rolling in mud and treating the result as an outdoor painting. Along with expanded media there emerge in contemporary art new genres, such as conceptual (or neo-conceptual) art and installation art, as well as rapid adoption of new technologies as artistic media, as with video art, computer art, and internet art. So whereas de Duve treats contemporary art as exhibiting a meager ontology of a single concept (that of ‘art’) and a non-finite set of instantiations of that concept, the latter approach treats the emergence, multiplicity, and plasticity of art forms and media as central.
One attractive feature of the latter conceptualization of contemporary art is that it directs attention to and provides some orientation for thinking about developments within contemporary art, such as how new media, genres, and sub-genres emerge and develop resources for artistic meaning. A recent example of the seeming emergence of a sub-genre is characterized in a new book by the film theorist and curator Kim Knowles entitled Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices. Knowles opens the book describing how in 2008 she saw Loretta, a 4-minute experimental film by Jeanne Liotta that obliquely addresses the death of Liotta’s mother. Knowles characterizes the film is “an example of how questions of materiality, the body, death and mourning come together in a forceful appeal to the senses.” (31) Part of the artistic power of the film derives from its use of seemingly obsolete techniques—the background of pulsing and radiating yellow is hand-colored; some of the images are photograms; much of the salient imagery derives from film sprockets. By the time that Liotta made the film in 2003, these techniques and materials had been widely abandoned in film-making in favor of digitalization, and so bore the sense of obsolescence. But it a striking feature of a range of instances within contemporary experimental film-making that these ‘obsolete’ materials continue to be used. Knowles introduces the term ‘photochemical practice’ to collect all instances of film-making, from Man Ray’s films in the 1920’s through to the present, that highlight one or more of such techniques. Knowles’s book aims centrally to give an account of the poetics of photochemical practices as characteristic of this newly emergent sub-genre in film.
Knowles finds part of an initial formulation of photochemical film practices in Peter Gidal’s canonical essay ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ of 1975. (pp. 55-6) Gidal’s favored conception of film had three marks: first, such films were ‘materialist’ in the sense of foregrounding the process of their own making, both with regard to the materials used and the time spent; second, they were ‘structural’ in foregrounding perceptually evident ordering mechanisms, particularly (in the words of P. Adams Sitney) “fixed camera position [...] the flicker effect, loop printing, and re-photography off the screen”; and third, following from these two, they were ‘anti-illusionist’, in the sense of offering the viewer no narrative or indeed anything that would encourage the fantasy of seeing as it were through the projected image, rather than attending to the material, optical, and aural qualities per se of what is presented. Knowles adopts the term ‘materialist’ as roughly synonymous with photochemical, and for the rest of the book uses ‘materialist’, because this term suggests a broader artistic situation—not just the use of a particular film stock and apparatus, but the full conception that includes the creative process, the scene of the projection or installation of the film, and especially the practice’s connection with broader philosophical and cultural concerns.
However, Gidal’s conception of materialist film is too narrow to capture the specific characteristics of contemporary artistic film that interest Knowles. She notes that Gidal had no particular interest in the body except as something used in the service of anti-illusionism; in Gidal’s theory “physical encounters and tactile engagements are treated only as a means to disrupt the fabric of illusionism and draw attention to the actual production of images.” (p. 58) In Knowles’s conception the prominence of concern with embodiment in materialist film is more closely connected with its proximate positive aims, which include inter alia drawing attention to surfaces, exhibiting the power of sensuous communication (p. 71), and heightening the awareness of the film’s ‘thingness’, its material presence. (p.206) And likewise Gidal’s conception would miss the ultimate aims served in the realization of these proximate aims, which for Knowles involve broader cultural concerns, especially the exhibition of an eco-poetics or ecological awareness (in Chapter 3) and developing and sustaining artistic communities outside the mainstream (in Chapter 4). The concern for embodiment in recent materialist films is prominently expressed in two ways. First, the films express what Knowles alternatively calls ‘tactility’ (p. 53) or ‘haptic visuality’ (p. 61). These values are invoked by the previously noted interest in drawing attention to the surface of the image, but also in the film-maker’s undermining of the sense of a single viewpoint (ibid). Second, these films typically highlight their sense of being ‘artisanal’ or hand-made (p. 71) This second feature is characteristic of many experimental films since the early 1920’s, but Knowles notes a shift around 1990 towards more hand-printing and processing done by the artists themselves. The date is important in that it indicates that this shift towards intensified hand-production pre-dates the shift in film technologies from the analogue and photochemical to the digital; accordingly the sense of obsolescence carried by recent photochemical process supervenes on older and more durable concerns for highlighting the sense of the film as a made thing.
There is much else in this short book aside from this conceptualization of recent materialist films, but perhaps enough has been said to motivate the suggestion that a conceptualization of contemporary art that foregrounds ‘mediations’ such as expanded art forms and new genres is preferable to the more standard account highlighting the instantiations of the concept of ‘art’. All art, including contemporary art, is an historical phenomenon, and part of what that involves is that any work of art ‘builds upon’ prior works, whether by treating prior works as models, or through selective incorporation and elaboration of features of earlier works, and correlatively through selective or in some cases large-scale rejection of features of prior works. And on a larger scale art drifts, as George Kubler influentially put it in the early 1960’s; traditions are formed and sustained and abandoned; genres and sub-genres emerge, develop, merge, and decay. De Duve’s account, and the dominance of that account in recent theorizing about contemporary art, seem to have no way of taking this into account.
References:
Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (1996)
Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ in Structural Film Anthology (1976)
Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (2020)
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002; 3rd edition)