about ‘the art history that art criticism is’, or should be? – to return to the terms of Harold Rosenberg’s declaration from which we set out in the Introduction.
In the course of the 1980s, it became conventional to periodize the Western art of the previous forty years in terms of a transition from ‘modernism’ to ‘postmodernism’ – however vaguely or varyingly the second of these two terms was understood in this context. Greenberg’s critical hegemony had tended to fix the art-historical meaning of the first term, in a conceptually and chronologically restrictive manner. It thereby opened up the artistic field of the ‘postmodern’ as the space of its abstract negation. The problem with this periodization, however, is that it fails to endow the complexly interacting set of what were initially conceived as ‘post-formalist’, anti-Greenbergian artistic strategies of the 1960s with either sufficient conceptual determinacy and distinctness or adequate historical effectivity. In particular, it fails to register both the critical priority of conceptual art within this field and the historical and critical significance of its postconceptual legacy. It thus fails to provide a theoretical basis on which we might specify the ontological distinctiveness of contemporary art. I therefore propose an alternative periodization of ‘art after Greenbergian modernism’ that privileges the sequence: formalist modernism, conceptual art, postconceptual art – over the modernist–postmodernist couplet, and treats the conceptual–postconceptual trajectory as the standpoint from which to totalize the wide array of other anti-formalist movements. (A broader, philosophically adequate conception of modernism as a temporal logic of cultural forms would embrace the whole sequence; ‘postmodernism’ being the misrecognition of a particular stage in the dialectic of modernisms.)32
By ‘postconceptual’ art, then, I understand an art premised on the complex historical experience and critical legacy of conceptual art, broadly construed, which registers its fundamental mutation of the ontology of the artwork. Postconceptual art is a critical category that is constituted at the level of the historical ontology of the artwork; it is not a traditional art-historical or art-critical concept at the level of medium, form or style. Rather, as the critical register of the historical destruction of the ontological significance of such categories, it provides new interpretative conditions for analyses of individual works. The critical legacy of conceptual art consists in the combination of six main insights, which collectively make up the condition of possibility of a postconceptual art. These are:
1. Art’s necessary conceptuality. (Art is constituted by concepts, their relations and their instantiation in practices of discrimination: art/non-art.)
2. Art’s ineliminable – but radically insufficient – aesthetic dimension. (All art requires some form of materialization; that is to say, aesthetic – felt, spatio-temporal – presentation.)
3. The critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials. (This is a critical consequence of art’s necessary conceptuality.)
4. An expansion to infinity of the possible material forms of art.
5. A radically distributive – that is, irreducibly relational – unity of the individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time.
6. A historical malleability of the borders of this unity.
The conjunction of the first two features leads to the third; together they imply the fourth; while the fifth and sixth are expressions of the logical and temporal consequences of the fourth, respectively.
The principle of the ineliminability of the aesthetic dimension of the artwork is the product of the so-called ‘failure’ of Conceptual Art in its strong, ‘pure’ or analytical programme; that is, the idea of a ‘purely’ conceptual art associated for a brief period (1968–72) with Joseph Kosuth in the US and the Art & Language in Britain – although there are important differences between the critical positions of these artists. (The case of Sol LeWitt, the founding father of Conceptual art as a movement, is more complicated, because of his essentially psychological conception of ‘ideas’.)33 What ‘failure’ means here is the practical demonstration of the incoherence of a particular self-understanding of ‘conceptual art’. This was not an artistic failure. Indeed, it was a perverse artistic success. It was the ironic historical achievement of the strong programme of ‘analytical’ or ‘pure’ conceptual art to have demonstrated the ineliminability of the aesthetic as a necessary, though radically insufficient, component of the artwork through the failure of its attempt at its elimination: the failure of an absolute anti-aesthetic. In this sense, it staged a certain repetition of the reception of Duchamp: a repetition of the necessary erosion of ‘aesthetic indifference’. This experimental programme thereby fulfilled the classically Hegelian function of exceeding a limit in its established form (the aesthetic) in such a way as to render it visible and thereby reinstitute it on new grounds.34 In this respect, the meaning of ‘conceptual art’ must be retrospectively critically refigured to incorporate this insight.35 In its strongest sense, of a ‘purely’ conceptual or analytical art, conceptual art was an idea that marked the experimental investigation of a particular anti-aesthetic desire.
At the same time, however, in demonstrating the radical insufficiency, or minimal conditionality, of the aesthetic dimension of the artwork to its status as art, conceptual art was able to bring once again to light, in a more decisive way, the necessary conceptuality of the work which had been buried by the aesthetic ideology of formalist modernism – a conceptuality which was always historically central to the allegorical function of art. Conceptual art demonstrated in a whole variety of novel ways, with respect to a whole series of different forms of materiality, the sense in which ‘aesthetic’ in both its ancient and later Kantian senses (as sensibility and as pure reflective judgement) is a part of yet utterly fails to account for the ontological specificity of ‘art’. The aesthetic concept of art mistakes one of art’s many conditions for the whole. It mistakes art’s necessary aesthetic appearance for the ground of its apparently autonomous, and hence infinite, production of meaning, which is in fact historically relational, rather than ‘positive’ in an aesthetic sense. Conceptual art demonstrated the radical emptiness or blankness of the aesthetic in itself, as an ontological support, that derives its meaning, in each instance, relationally or contextually, whatever its precise form of materiality – and this includes those instances when it functions as a negation, as well as a carrier, of meaning.
Having exposed the aesthetic misrecognition of the artwork as an ideological fraud, conceptual art thereby established the need for art actively to counter aesthetic misrecognition within the work, through the constructive or strategic aesthetic use of aesthetic materials. The victory of the ‘aesthetic remainder’ over strong conceptualism (that is, conceptual art’s own inevitable pictorialism) was thus ultimately a Pyrrhic one. This Pyrrhic victory – and the transition to a postconceptual art that it represents – accounts for the privileged status of photographic practice within contemporary art, with its strategic or selective pictorialism (see Chapter 5, below). It was reflected upon by Art & Language themselves in their paintings and installations of the 1980s and 1990s, which were increasingly reduced to a historical reflection on their own earlier practice.36
The principle of the expansion to infinity of the possible material means of art-making follows from conceptual reflection on the de facto expansion of means that destroyed the ontological significance for art of the norms governing the ‘mediums’ previously constituting art as a system of arts. This is the liberation of the so-called ‘post-medium’, transmedia condition. It requires a new conception of the unity of the individual work. No longer identifiable with either a physically unique instantiation or a simple set of reproducible tokens (readymades), the unity of the work becomes both distributive and malleable. In its informality, its proliferation of artistic materials and its inclusion of both preparatory and subsequent, documentary materials within its conception of the work, conceptual art demonstrated the radically distributive character of the unity of the work. That is to say, each work is distributed across a potentially unlimited, but nonetheless conceptually defined and in practice (at any one time) finite, totality of spatio-temporal sites of instantiation.37 Furthermore, the material borders of this totality are historically malleable, with regard to the new relations