On Paul Crowther’s Theory of the Art Object (2020)—Part One

     There are perhaps only a very few pieces of theoretical or philosophical writing in the past half century that have achieved the status of obligatory points of orientation in thinking about contemporary art. On almost anyone’s list of such writings would be the art historian Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. First published in the journal October in 1979, it has since been anthologized (Foster 1983), been the subject of a conference with published proceedings that ponder its impact on two generations of scholars and its peculiar resonance (Papapetros and Rose (2014)), and subjected to critical reflection at length (Meltzer 2013). One puzzle for future intellectual historians, if indeed there are any, will be to understand the attraction and influence of such a confused and profoundly opaque piece of writing. Krauss’s brief essay argues, or at least presents, three broad claims: 1. Modernist sculpture is characterized by a kind of ‘sitelessness’, in the sense that instances of it characteristically lack pedestals and, more generally, lack any reference to the context in which they are placed. Put positively, modernist sculptures explore “a kind of idealist space” (the essay offers no explanation of this kind of space). Paradigms of such modernist sculpture are the major works of Brancusi (Krauss, p. 34).  2. There is a complete break between Modernist and Postmodern sculpture. The modernist exploration of ‘idealist space’ was artistically exhausted by around 1950, and by the early 1960s sculptures could in no sense be rightly understood as developments out of earlier sculpture (pp. 34-5). To attempt to understand the later sculptures as developments is an instance of  ‘historicism’, an intellectually disastrous style of thought wherein we attempt to comfort ourselves by diminishing any sense of novelty in history and “reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are.” (p. 31)

     Krauss proceeds to her central claim: 3. Postmodernist sculpture, having entered “a categorical no-man’s-land” (p. 35), now exists in an ‘expanded field’ (p.36), wherein sculpture is, or at least can be, initially categorized as ‘not-landscape’ and ‘not-architecture’ (p. 35). This categorization turns out to be only part of a larger scheme that includes the further categories of ‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’. All these categories can then be placed in a diagram, that (properly interpreted) shows that sculpture is only one of four artistic possibilities in postmodernist spatial arts (please bear with me for a few more sentences): there are also ‘marked sites’ (works that are simultaneously landscape and not-landscape, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty); ‘axiomatic structures’ (works that are simultaneously architecture and not-architecture, such as Bruce Nauman’s video corridors); and ‘site-constructions’ (works that are simultaneously landscape and architecture, such as Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, or the works of Michael Heizer and Mary Miss). Krauss arranges all eight of these categories (architecture and landscape and their negations, and the four artistic possibilities) in a formidable diagram called a Klein group, complete with dotted lines and arrows. The alleged beneficial effect of this novel set of categorizations is that one gains the ‘permission’ to ‘think’ these other forms (marked sites etc.) together with and as opposed to sculpture.

     Alas, Krauss provides no clues as to what one should think when one ‘thinks’ sculpture and these other forms (that perhaps will be another problem for future intellectual historians). One problem that immediately arises is that Krauss provides no positive characterization of postmodernist sculpture. Such sculpture, according to Krauss, is exhaustively characterized as the conjunction of ‘not-architecture’ and ‘not-landscape’. But a second’s reflection indicates that there are a non-finite number of things that are not-architecture and not-landscape, for example Napoleon, the Big Bang, and the contents of my stomach. And if postmodernist sculpture exists in a categorical no-man’s land, how do we know that it’s sculpture, as opposed to, say, painting or cooking? Krauss overlooks the point that all of the four (artistic) categorizations are precisely categorizations of spatial arts, and that some conceptually prior sense of what a spatial art is guides the very selection of the four categorizations as relevant to the understanding of contemporary art.

     The philosopher Paul Crowther’s most recent book in the philosophy of contemporary art is the most recent of his many books in the philosophy of art of the past thirty-five years that dispute accounts like Krauss’s on every point, and that attempt to develop an alternative account. The charge that Crowther has repeatedly brought against Krauss’s account of contemporary art, as well as the accounts of other prominent art historians, including Hal Foster and Yve-Alain Bois, is two-fold. First, these accounts treat artistic meaning as exhaustively characterized by the role that the relevant key terms play in a system of differences. So ‘sculpture’ is ‘not-landscape’ and ‘not-architecture’, but this leaves wholly mysterious what features sculpture actually has; and a fortiori such accounts ignore the ways in which constitutive features of sculpture are recruited into the meaning of actual works of sculpture. Second, Krauss and others treat the meaning of artworks as wholly determined by the context of reception or use of the work. So the meaning of a political work of art is exhaustively given in its actual political uses, or a feminist work is meaningful, and only meaningful, in the ways it contributes or fails to contribute to feminist concerns. Against these mainstream academic accounts, Crowther has argued that different art forms—painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.—do have positive characteristics, and that in a vast array of instances these characteristics play constitutive roles in the artistic meaning of works. Further, these characteristics are a source of what Crowther calls the intrinsic fascination of the artworks, and it is the appeal of such fascination that so much as makes it possible for artworks to play further roles, such as in politics.

     Theory of the Art Object reprises arguments and analyses that Crowther has given elsewhere across a range of art forms, including painting, photography, architecture, and digital art. On two central points this book seems to me to provide advances on, or at least alternatives to, his previous works, and I will accordingly focus on these. Crowther’s general argument, markedly phenomenological here and elsewhere, might be summarized as follows (with specific reference to spatial arts): Human beings are embodied, and a distinctive feature of their embodiment is their ‘spatiality’, their always existing within some determinate space. Human beings have capacities for movement within space, and these capacities are practically coordinated with their capacities for perception and imagination. The activity of perception is awareness of what is present, and the activity of imagination is awareness of what is absent—the past, the future, alternative perspectives, and hypotheticals. Human beings also have capacities for making, and one of the signal exercises of this capacity is in the making of works of art. Among human artworks are those of the visual arts, a sub-class of which are the spatial arts, pre-eminently sculpture, but also architecture, as well as recent art forms such as installation and land art.

     Now, one might find this argument unexceptionable, even truistic, while nonetheless noting that little of its conceptual content and claims is so much as registered in contemporary art theorizing such as Krauss’s. But where Crowther’s points take on particular interest is in his explication of what is involved in vision, and so in visual art. Vision is privileged among the senses in two ways: it allows the perceiver to grasp the spatial relationships among parts of an object; and it allows the perceiver to grasp the spatial relationships among many objects within a perceptual field. (pp. 10-11) As a vehicle of heightened and thematized visual perception, the visual arts will inherit and exploit these basic features of visual ordering. So relations of part-to-part, part-to-whole, and whole-among-wholes will always be at issue in the visual arts. This thought motivates Crowther’s most general claim that the distinctive media of works of art carry distinctive potentials for meaning. Since human beings are inescapably embodied and finite, their making and perception of artworks also inescapably bear meaning, associations, and resonance.

    Can Crowther’s account fill the lacuna in Krauss’s and contemporary art theorizing’s understanding of sculpture? That is to say, can it capture the distinctive features of contemporary sculpture qua sculpture, and not as the categorical no-man’s land marked by ‘not-architecture’ and ‘not-landscape’? My next blog post with interrogate Crowther’s account of sculpture, with specific reference to the challenging contemporary work of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone.

 

References:

 

Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)

Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (1983)

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1977)

Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (2013)

Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (eds),  Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (2014)