Contemporary visual art has attracted little attention from Anglo-American philosophers working the in analytic tradition. Starting with a path-breaking article by Timothy Binkley in the 1970s, most of the little writing there is in analytic aesthetics on recent visual art has addressed the challenges to understanding posed by conceptual art, signaled initially by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and then efflorescing around 1970 in works by Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, and other artists. The challenge stems from the fact that such works seem to arise within the tradition of Western visual art, but that the works’ visual aspects, what the works offer to visual inspection, is either in some sense inessential to the work, or even non-existent, in that the works primarily exist as a thought-experiment, or a set of instructions, or some proposal, all of which may not even be embodied or realized in some material artifact. Since for the most part philosophers have accepted that such proffered works are indeed works of art, a major topic has been whether and in what sense such conceptual works possess or make use of an artistic medium. If the medium of, say, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is oil paint and canvas, then is the medium of a work of conceptual thought, or language, or rules? Or, alternatively, are conceptual works of (visual) art instances of a novel genre of (visual) art whose members lack media? Or should one conceptualize instances of conceptual art in terms of the type-token distinction, where the works are sui generis types whose tokens may or may not exist?
In a paper published in 2005 the philosopher Sherri Irvin drew attention to a different aspect of contemporary visual art, the newly prominent fact of a great many artworks that are presented along with explicit instructions for novel ways in which they must be displayed, conserved, or encountered. In that paper Irvin’s main example is a work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor entitled Time and Mrs. Tiber that consists of a display of jars of preserves together with some recipes for preservation. Shortly after the work was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada a number of the jars developed a mold and then were discovered to be infected with botulism; as a health hazard, the infected jars were then destroyed. Considering Magor’s changing instructions on whether and how the jars may be preserved or replaced, Irvin introduces the concept of the ‘artist’s sanction’, a public aspect of the artist’s intentionality in making a work. The artist’s sanction is manifest in an artist’s enacted decision to display a particular work in a certain kind of context. So initially Magor specified that the infected jars be destroyed, with the consequence that the work too would destroyed; this was consistent with her claim that the work was ‘about’ the impossibility of preserving things. Later Magor changed her mind and accordingly recreated the infected jars, while specifying that when the jars, and so the work as a whole, could no longer be displayed they be kept for study. In changing her instructions for conservation, Magor changed her conception of what the work consisted in, and so altered what she had sanctioned. The role of an artist’s sanction in the practices of art is fundamentally ontological: the sanction specifies the boundaries of the work, fixes fundamental features of the work, and specifies the genre to which the work belongs. The artist’s sanction constrains, though does not determine, any serious interpretation of an artwork. In much of the world’s art, the artist’s sanction is implicit in the work as typically displayed; a painting hung in a gallery is defined by its borders, it may not be touched, its offers features for visual inspection, some of its salient features place it within a genre, the work should be preserved so as to maintain its visual appearance indefinitely, and so forth. Irvin suggests that recognition of the artistic role of the sanction is particularly important with regard to many works of contemporary art, in that in many cases a contemporary work of visual art consists not only of a material artifact placed in standard conditions of display, but also includes the artist’s specification of special, non-traditional instructions for how the work must be experienced.
In her new book Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art, Irvin calls such non-traditional instructions custom rules. The book as a whole is first of all an exploration of ontology of contemporary artworks that feature such custom rules, and additionally the range of types of such rules, and the ways in which the prominence of such works alters contemporary gallery- and museum-based visual art as a whole, and finally the topics to which works with custom rules address in especially apt ways. Irvin discusses a range of non-traditional contemporary works, but her most central example now is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s celebrated “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which consists of 175 pounds (the weight of Gonzalez-Torres’s beloved Ross) of hard candies piled up against a wall. In a paradigmatic instance of a custom rules, the artist instructs viewers not just to look, but also to take a piece and eat it; and he further instructs the institution displaying the piece to replenish the work daily. Irvin thinks that such works featuring custom rules as part of their content are so widespread and well-established in contemporary visual art that their existence marks the ontology of contemporary artworks generally, in that what hitherto had been default conventions of display, such as that the work should not be touched, are now variables (139-40) and experienced as options. So a contemporary artist must as a matter of conceptual necessity decide whether the work should be touched or untouched, altered by the viewer or left unaltered, gnawed upon or not.
Irvin proceeds as follows: Having alerted the reader to the prominence of custom rules in contemporary visual art, she notes that custom rules typically apply to one or the other of three ontological aspects of an artwork: to the non-traditional conditions under which the work may be displayed (as with works by the artist El Anatsui where the manner of display of his large blankets of flattened and wired together bottle caps is left to the host institution); to the ways in which the work may or may not be conserved (as with the specific instructions on whether to preserve or replace banana skins in a work by Zoe Leonard); and with strictures on whether and how the viewer might participate or interact with the work (as in Gonzalez-Torres’s instruction to take and eat a piece of candy).
Having devoted a chapter to each of these kinds of custom rules, Irvin raises the issue: are artworks that constitutively feature custom rules a new and sui generis kind of art, or are they continuous with and a development of earlier kinds of art? Irvin argues for the latter option by focusing on the characteristic functions of an artistic medium. Irvin characterizes the medium of a work of (visual) art as “a system comprising both [a physical] support and a set of conventions and practices for deploying that support.” (128) Artistic media prominently display five characteristics: “First, medium-specific conventions may set the boundaries of he artwork, or identify which aspects of a presented object are eligible for appreciation . . . Second, medium helps to structure artists’ choices . . . Third, and relatedly, medium plays a role in our explanations of the work’s features and their relationships to each other. . . Fourth, medium structures how we attribute meaning to the artwork’s elements . . . Fifth, medium-specific conventions and practices establish what is normal and expected within the medium”. (129-31) Irvin accordingly argues that the use of custom rules in contemporary art also displays these characteristics. Of particular importance is her account of how the use of custom rules fits the fourth point concerning how an artistic media structures the viewer’s attribution of meaning to a work’s elements. In addition to making salient what will count as a basic feature of the work and the primitive meaning the feature carries—recall Gonzalez-Torres’s stipulation about the total weight of the candies--, custom rules, just by virtue of the fact that they are custom and so non-traditional and in violation of hitherto implicit default conventions, can “be expressive by butting up against constraints on what is normally understood as feasible or reasonable to demand or permit”. (144) This explains, so Irvin argues, why works with custom rules are so frequently a part of contemporary political art, as such works themselves exemplify something of the resistance to convention that is also part of such works’ subject matter. Another characteristic topic of works containing custom rules is finitude, especially as part of works addressing decay and death. The use of non-traditional materials subject to decay, such as again Leonard’s banana peels, permits such works to exemplify the very subject that they are about.
Irvin’s book is a rare, perhaps unique, instance of a serious work of Anglo-American analytic philosophy of art that focally addresses something characteristic of contemporary visual art. This is a book of dense yet clear argumentation and that additionally displays a masterful command of recent work in the analytic philosophy of art. Inevitably questions arise: is the approach to contemporary visual art through its so-called ontology a coherent and fruitful enterprise? What fuller characterization of contemporary visual art does Irvin presuppose, and is that characterization plausible and comprehensive? Does the widespread use of custom rules in contemporary visual art have the characteristics and consequences that Irvin claims? I turn to these critical questions in my next blog post.
References:
Timothy Binkley, ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring, 1977))
Sherri Irvin, ‘The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Vol. 63, No 4 (Autumn, 2005))
----Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022)