In my previous two blog posts I have considered Sherri Irvin’s recent book on rules in contemporary art. Again, Irvin draws attention to the prominence in the contemporary visual arts of what she calls custom rules, which are directions explicitly given by an artist as to how their artwork should be presented, conserved, and engaged with. Irvin argues that in many works of contemporary art such rules are parts of the artistic medium that embodies the works, and that the typical uses of such rules are ontological, in that they determine what counts as the work, what its salient features are, and/or the ways, if any, the work may be altered while remaining the same work. She considers her own investigation as itself an instance of the ontology of art, which in her view largely consists of empirical investigations and explications of the various kinds of and historically changing characteristics of different art forms. At the end of my second post I suggested that such an approach can only plausibly be considered fruitful under an impoverished and distorted conception of contemporary visual art. Given the evident intelligence, seriousness, and care in explication displayed throughout the book, how is that possible?
In this brief concluding reflection, I’ll raise questions on two points central to her account: the basic claim of ontology to read off characteristics of artworks from entrenched practices of making, artistic engagement, and (particularly important to Irvin) conservation; and the role of function in establishing the object of ontological investigation. I don’t think that Irvin’s assumptions and claims on these points are individually disastrous, but taken together they offer a flattened and two-dimensional picture of contemporary visual art that prevents her account from being fruitful in understanding and appreciating a broad range of contemporary visual art.
Preliminary to this, I note Irvin’s explicit remarks about the custom rules with regard to contemporary visual art as a whole. Early on in the book she presents a series of explicit ‘disclaimers’ (pp. 7-9) in a dismayingly smart-aleck style, for example beginning with: “What do I mean by “contemporary”? I don’t care very much about the specific details of the definition. There is some art that I want to talk about, and I’m going to slap the label “contemporary art” on it because that’s a label other people tend to slap on it.” Etc. (p. 7) She goes on to note that her examples are mostly from the 1980s onward, though she includes discussion of pieces as early as 1960. She then states that “I’m not talking about all art made these days. How could I? I focus on art that is linked to the international network of contemporary art galleries, museums, and biennials” (ibid). And further: “I am a philosopher, so this is a philosophy of contemporary art, not a history” (p. 8). One might suspect that these two disclaimers coalesce in motivating an image of a quite historically recent and partial institutional complex as an ahistorical topic of ontological investigation. History does enter Irvin’s account in three ways: First, as noted previously, she does argue that the use of custom rules emerges out of the very long-term exercise of (unarticulated) conventions providing default rules of making, display, and engagement. Second, again previously noted, she justifies the claim that the custom rules inherit and fulfill the functions traditionally fulfilled by artistic media. And third, (here I introduce a new point) she follows the philosopher Guy Rohrbaugh in thinking that artworks generally have a particular ontological identity as historical individuals (p. 118), which she explicates as claiming that artworks are individuals (whether types or tokens) that are dependent upon their material instantiation. Such instantiation is an historical event, and so, contra some alternative accounts, artworks are not timeless entities. Still, all three of these senses together amount to an etiolated conception of artistic history that involves no periods, no movements, no genres, and no traditions. Irvin insists that the use of custom rules is ‘sufficiently’ well-established to alter the ontology of contemporary visual art generally, but offers no reflections of what sort of criteria govern the judgment of ‘sufficiency’.
Question #1: What is a practice?—Irvin, and with her the recent tradition in the analytic ontology of art exemplified most prominently in essays by Amie Thomasson, claim that ontology is explicated from the objects given in stable practices. What sort of practices? In introducing the ‘pragmatic constraint’ (on which see my earlier two posts) Irvin cites David Davies stipulating that artworks “must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed ‘works in our reflective critical and appreciative practice,” and she immediately states that by contrast she “privilege[s] the practices of art creation, conservation, and curation that are centrally concerned with the artwork’s identity and persistence conditions.” (p. 24) Note that in shifting the topic from Davies’s formulation, Irvin silently drops the word ‘rightly’. Davies’s formulation leaves open the conceptual possibility that prevailing practices in many instances might ‘wrongly’ ascribe prima facie certain properties. Similarly, in an essay cited by Irvin, though in a passage Irvin does not discuss, the philosopher of art Dominic McIver Lopes likewise commits himself to the pragmatic constraint, with the qualification that sometimes “an ontology of art leads us to revise our appreciative practices; but if, upon reflection, our appreciative practices are sound, then they furnish materials for a good ontology of art.” As with Davies’s reference to ‘rightly’, Lopes’s use of the term ‘sound’ holds open the possibility of a gap between prevailing unsound practices and conceptions embedded in ‘sound’ practices that may need to be uncovered or indeed created. In Irvin’s account practices are patterned regularities of social action, but lack any further structure or determinations; Irvin is unconcerned with how practices are learned, what sorts of goods are internal to practices, and whether and how practices have internal goals (that is, all the points that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre influentially characterized as central to practices in his After Virtue). In passing over distinctions between right and wrong ascriptions, and unsound and sound practices, Irvin loses the possibility of critical reflection upon prevailing practices in contemporary visual art, at least to the extent that she adheres to ontological investigations. (A couple of decades ago I offered a similar criticism of Joseph Margolis’s conception of practice in a review of his book What, After All, is a Work of Art? (see Rapko (2000). I cannot pursue this criticism in this context; for some further discussion of artistic practices in contemporary visual art see the second chapter of my book Return to Darkness, forthcoming in Spanish from the Universidad de los Andes press). For Irvin, practice proposes and ontology disposes; no further questions are permitted.
Question #2: What is an artistic function?—So far I have discussed Irvin as an ontologist, but this is a partial simplification of her explicit statements. Again citing Guy Rohrbaugh, she writes that her “ontological theorizing about contemporary art is an exercise in social metaphysics: 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). In particular, the variety of social metaphysics she pursues is that influentially developed by the philosopher John Searle in two books. Claiming to summarize Searle, she proposes that through its practices communities construct things that meet their needs and ‘perform functions’ (p. 23). Such functions are first of all what Searle calls ‘status functions’ that communities assign to particulars, as in ‘this rock is a boundary marker’, or, more pointedly in this context, ‘this object is a work of art’. On such an account the relevant function of the rock is evident: it marks the boundary between two regions, and so plays whatever further roles are required in whatever organized activities there are regulating the relations between the two areas. But what function does a work of art have, and what associated roles does it play? Searle’s own answer would seem to be that the question is misguided, in that he says that there are what he calls general human activities (such as religion, literature, and (presumably) visual art) that do not qua general activities have assigned status functions, though these activities are taken up, institutionalized, and elaborated in particular forms by communities. But Irvin elides Searle’s reference to general human activities, and simply says that the contemporary ‘community’ of galleries and museums assigns art status to certain objects, and that in turn the functional role of such objects, at least as far as social metaphysics and ontology is concerned, is simply to supply objects to galleries and museums. As she flatly puts it, a contemporary work of visual art “is a thing that is displayed, that audience members respond to, that may be restored and conserved, and that may be collected.” (p. 27) The triteness of this declaration gives one pause. Here the elision of the gap between art as a general human activity and the particular form it takes in the contemporary world, and in addition restricting consideration of its contemporary forms to those prominently at home in galleries and museum is of a piece with her flat, non-teleological conception of practice (discussed above); all these conflations conspire to eliminate the possibility of critical reflection on the various aims pursued in contemporary visual art and a fortiori reflection upon the character and legitimacy of those aims.
Now, Irvin might reply to these criticisms with a shrug of the shoulders and simply note that they are not so much criticisms of her particular claims, but are merely ways of saying that one doesn’t find the ontology of art a promising or interesting way of investigating and reflecting upon central features of contemporary visual art. But that is not the core aim of social ontology, which rather treats even-handedly the entities of the social world and analyzes them as variations on the type-token distinction and having whatever conditions of identity, characteristics, and modalities they happen to have. One might grant Irvin’s point, but still insist that her way of framing the issue misses, indeed occludes, central aspects of her topic. To see this, consider again her focal concept of custom rules. Irvin asserts that the prominence in contemporary visual art of works partially or wholly constituted by custom rules alters the very ontology of contemporary art. But when and why are artists motivated to use custom rules? The book opens with a section called ‘Pranking Painting’ (pp. 1-7) wherein Irving briefly introduces four paintings or series of paintings that are seemingly accompanied by custom rules, including Georg Baselitz’s well-known upside down paintings, and other works that are displayed facing a wall, or painted in such a way that their surfaces will erode and peel away. Irvin cites a single instance of a series of works that is prima facie in an established artform, Gerald Ferguson’s Maintenance Paintings (1979-82), monochrome canvases that an ‘end user’ is invited to re-paint in a different color if she feels they would so ‘look better’. It does not strike me that these works are well understood as members of an artistic sub-genre consisting of paintings-and-custom-rules. Rather, Baselitz’s oeuvre is of paintings displayed with a signature gimmick; the paintings facing a wall and Ferguson’s monochromes are instances of conceptual art that use paintings to make statements; and the peeling works are familiar instances of late modernist works that aim to emphasize a dimension of the metaphor painting (or artwork)-as-material-object. And beyond her brief discussion of paintings, Irvin neglects the otherwise salient point that custom rules are applied typically in works that prominently consist of non-traditional artistic materials: candies; piles of sugar; a cube of chocolate; bottle tops; etc. The use of such materials does not invoke default conditions of display, conservation, and engagement, perhaps beyond the old taboo that one ought not touch or otherwise interfere with a displayed artifact. One might think that the use of custom rules is motivated by the artist’s interest in maximizing the meaningfulness of works that constitutively involve non-traditional materials. The question then arises: why are so many artists motivated to put such materials to artistic uses? But to answer that question, one must consider the actual history of contemporary art, as it emerged in the hands of Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Nam June Paik, and others. Such an investigation is ineliminably historical and concerned with the aims of the artists. The philosophical practice of ontology, shorn of history and teleology as it is in Irvin’s hands, can offer no illumination as to why anyone would so much as be concerned with its object of investigation.
References:
David Davies, Art as Performance (2004)
Sherri Irvin, ‘The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art.’ (2005) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (4)
-----Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)
Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan.’ (2007) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (1)
Joseph Margolis, What, After All, is a Work of Art? (1999)
John Rapko, ‘Review of Margolis.’ (2000) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
-----Return to Darkness (2022)
Guy Rohrbaugh, ‘Artworks as Historical Individuals.’ (2003) European Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 177-205
-----‘Must Ontological Pragmatism be Self-Defeating?’ (2012) in Art and Abstract Objects, Christy Mag Uiduir (ed)
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 Blackwell ed. Peter Kivy
-----‘The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics’ (2005). Journal of Aeshetics and Art Criticism
-----‘Ontological Innovation in Art.’ (2010) Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68