In my previous post I summarized the philosopher Sherri Irvin’s account of the concept of the ‘artist’s sanction’ and her recently published book Immaterial that gives an account of a phenomenon distinctive of prominent instances of contemporary visual art: an explicit artist’s sanction in the form of custom rules forms part of the content of many contemporary artworks. The book advances four major claims about such custom rules: 1. Their role in contemporary visual artworks is primarily ontological, in the sense that they specify the boundaries of the artwork and/or essential features of the work and/or which if any parts of the work may be replaced without the work being substantively altered or destroyed. 2. Custom rules cluster around three aspects of contemporary visual artworks: how the works may be displayed; whether and how the works may be conserved; how one may participate in or engage with the work, beyond the default condition of visual art that the work should be looked at. 3. Contemporary visual artworks that feature custom rules as part of their content are indeed works of art, in that the rules are part or the whole of the works’ artistic medium, as evidenced by the fact that the uses of such rules share central characteristics with and for the most part fulfill the same functions as the uses of artistic media in traditional and modern artworks. 4. The artistic use of custom rules lends itself in an especially apt and intimate way to two prominent topics addressed in contemporary visual art: finitude (especially as figuring in decay) and social or political resistance or protest by oppressed or marginalized groups and peoples.
In this post I interrogate the first claim, that concerning the allegedly ontological role of custom rules in contemporary visual art, as well as Irvin’s explicit methodological commitments that motivate her particular approach to custom rules. Her discussion of methodology occupies a small part of the book (pages 22-37), and has something of a free-standing quality, in that, having stated there the reasons for her methodological choices, she proceeds for the rest of the book without any further such reflection and with no references back to that discussion. As explicitly stated, her methodology and the philosophical commitments it expresses are as follows: 1. The book is an exercise in “an exercise in social metaphysics” in “offering an account of a kind of thing that is constructed by people and plays a role in the social practices of a community.” (p. 22) 2. She follows the conception of social ontology offered in two prominent books by the philosopher John Searle in treating contemporary visual artworks as institutional facts that possess a ‘status function’ assigned collectively by “community conventions, practices, or agreement.” (ibid.) 3. The topic of the book is not anything and everything that might be reasonably considered contemporary art—she explicitly excludes street art and contemporary dance--, but only the art that is the concern of the community whose central members are “[visual?] artists and museum professionals.” This contemporary art community and its practices are “divergent, contested, and influx,” but nonetheless “sufficiently robust to allow us to define the functional role of the contemporary artwork.” (p. 24). 4. The ‘status function’ assigned by this particular community is (I take it) ‘being a work of (contemporary visual) art’. What roles are distinctive of that status function can only be discovered by empirical investigation. (p. 25) Such investigation reveals that “the most basic and fundamental aspects of the functional artwork-role” are the following: “The work is created by one or more artists. It is presented for audience members to encounter, perhaps on multiple distinct occasions; these audience members, including critics and members of the public, experience it and respond to it. Frequently, it is the object of restoration and conservation efforts. Frequently, it is the sort of thing that a museum may collect.” (p. 27)
One set of questions that suggest themselves about Irvin’s account concern the very idea of a social ontology, and of an ontology of art in particular. The ontology of art is a prominent topic in analytic aesthetics of the past two decades, and whose roots go back to many of the major works in the philosophy of art of the 20th century. Standard accounts (as given implicitly or explicitly in works such as Kraut (2007), Lopes (2007), Rohrbaugh (2003), and Thomasson (2004)) cite early instances of the ontology of art in R. G. Collingwood’s claim that works of art are fundamentally instances of self-expression and Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that works of art are fundamentally imaginary. A cautionary note is often struck with regard to Nelson Goodman’s claim that a performance of a piece of written music that contains a single wrong note is not a genuine instance of the piece; this is regularly cited as an attempt at ‘radical revision’, kind of ontology of art gone mad, that violates our basic intuitions and practices concerning what counts as a (genuine) piece of art. Accordingly, there is in recent writing broad acceptance of what the philosopher David Davies called ‘the pragmatic constraint’ that ontologies of art must treat as fundamental the works bearing the properties rightly ascribed to them in our reflective practices of art criticism and appreciation. Irvin explicitly endorses this, while adding that her focus is more on “practices of art creation, conservation, and curation” (p. 24)). More generally, the ontology of art attempts to uncover the identity-constituting properties of artworks, and then places those entities and their properties among a broader field of entities including other artifacts, thoughts, and material objects. Much of the recent work acknowledges that different kinds of artworks embody different ontologies, and that these differing ontologies can be grasped in terms of differing specifications of the type-token distinction. So, for example, a traditional painting is fundamentally a token, while a poem or a written musical work is a type with multiple realizations or instances. Irvin again follows this in claiming that contemporary works of visual art that feature custom rules as part of their content have a different ontology than works of street art or dance.
Now, one might follow along with the project of uncovering and analyzing the ontology of contemporary visual artworks, but still raise the question why and whether this is a potentially fruitful way of thinking about art. What illumination might such an approach offer? Irvin’s core claim is that the custom rules in many instances of contemporary visual artworks are constitutive; as she puts it, “The rules [in particular the custom rules] of contemporary art constitute artworks and the practices of displaying them; they also regulate how installers, curators, conservators, and audience members should engage with the works.” (p 33) So we are to think that we cannot begin the activity of understanding and appreciating these works until we know what the works are, on pain of otherwise failing to attach our responses to the very things to which we are attempting to respond. But Irvin’s central claim, and with it her approach generally, are only plausible under a massively truncated conception of contemporary art and its practices. Or so I shall claim and argue in the forthcoming third and final part of this review.
References:
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938)
David Davies, Art as Performance (2004)
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (1968)
Sherri Irvin, Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)
Robert Kraut, Artworld Metaphysics (2007)
Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan.’ (2007) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (1)
Guy Rohrbaugh, ‘Artworks as Historical Individuals.’ (2003) European Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 177-205
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary (1940)
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
-----Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)
Amie Thomasson, ‘The Ontology of Art’ (2004) in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy