‘contemporary art’ has no critically meaningful referent; that it designates no more than the radically heterogeneous empirical totality of artworks produced within the duration of a particular present (our present); that it is, thus, not a proper part of a critical vocabulary at all. Certainly the expression is often used in that way. However, both the conceptual grammar of the phrase – its dependence upon a difference from an art that is not contemporary – and the affirmative inflection of this difference in current usage (contemporary art is more living, more actual, and thus to be valued more highly than other art with which it, paradoxically, shares time) mitigate against such an indifferent empiricism. So what kind of discourse is required to render the idea of contemporary art critically intelligible?
That is the question addressed in this book, in part experimentally, by trying to produce such a discourse. This is a discourse, first, that is neither merely empirical nor temporally inclusive. Not all art that is recently produced, or would call itself or be called by others ‘contemporary’, can be understood to be contemporary in an art-critically significant sense. ‘Contemporary’ is, at base, a critical and therefore a selective concept: it promotes and it excludes. To claim something is contemporary is to make a claim for its significance in participating in the actuality of the present – a claim over and against that of other things, some of which themselves may make a similar claim on contemporaneity. So, second, we need a discourse that is responsible to the general critical concept of the contemporary – that is, which engages with the philosophy of time. The notion of the present at stake in art’s contemporaneity is not a simple one. Nor does it stand outside of history. This means, third, that such a discourse must be reflexively grounded in the semantic history of ‘the contemporary’ as a critical category, and attend to the peculiarly privileged role within it of its applications to art. Fourth, such a discourse, though reflexively historically derived, must nonetheless impose certain critical demands upon the art that it interprets. The dominant category of modernist art criticism was for many years, up until the 1960s, the category of medium. The subsequent dissolution of the limits of mediums as the ontological bases of art practices, and the establishment of a complex and fluid field of generically artistic practices, has posed new problems of critical judgement to which the concept of the contemporary represents an increasingly powerful response. However, this concept must be constructed rather than merely discovered. Finally, in recognition of both the individuality and the contingent historical character of art, a critical discourse of contemporary art can only develop through the interpretative confrontation with individual works. It must participate in the on-going critical history of art, as well as in the revival of a philosophical art criticism. Such, broadly speaking, is the kind of discourse about contemporary art that this book attempts to inhabit and to produce. Its outcome may be polemically condensed into a single and simple, speculative proposition: contemporary art is postconceptual art. For reasons of dialectical method, the book as a whole is required to get a sense of precisely what this proposition means in practice and how it functions interpretatively. I shall use the remainder of this introduction to expand upon the intellectual context, method and structure of the book.
Criticism, History, Philosophy
In 1965, as part of his response to a series of ‘Charges to the Art Critic’ from the directors of a seminar on art education at Pennsylvania State University, and in studied contrast to the growing formalism of the dominant-but-declining modernist criticism of his rival, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg declared: ‘Art criticism today is art history, though not necessarily the art history of the art historian.’3 This assertion appears remarkable today, nearly fifty years later, and not just because of its insistence upon the historical dimension of a practice that has become ever more preoccupied with synchronic relations – in particular, between art and other cultural forms. It is remarkable because, in asserting the independence of the historical dimension of criticism from the discipline of art history, it raises the fundamental but rarely discussed question of precisely what kind of art history art criticism is (or should be), and what its relations to the art history of the art historian might be. This is a question that goes to the heart of thinking about contemporary art, the privileged object of art criticism, not least because it concerns the historical, rather than the merely chronological, determination of contemporaneity. That is to say, it demands a commitment from art criticism to a certain philosophy of time.
Both art criticism and art history have changed since 1965. There are fewer grounds for the condescension of the critic towards the art historian today, and more reasons for a reversal of the relation – in part, because of the historicization of the 1960s itself, with the invention of the burgeoning genre of the history of contemporary art. But the question of the specific character of that art history which art criticism is, or might be, has not merely remained unanswered; it has become further obscured from view. Art criticism and art history has each had its own problems to deal with. Intellectually serious criticism of contemporary art remains in the grip of a constantly renewed, self-declared crisis.4 This crisis is cultural-economic or ‘institutional’ in origin (contingent upon transformations in the social character of art institutions during the 1980s and 1990s, and their diminishing need for the mediations of a historically oriented criticism), but it is nonetheless intellectual for that. Where it thrives as a cultural force, outside of the academy, art criticism largely concentrates on literary aspects of journalistic presentation and often treats its object as little more than an occasion for communications of a more general kind.5 Meanwhile, art history has been transformed as a part of broader changes in the disciplines of the arts and humanities in Anglo-American academies. Yet successive widening of the intellectual scope of the discipline – via the new social history of art, feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies, towards the euphoric horizon of studies in ‘visual culture’ – have not brought it any closer to adequate forms of specifically art-critical judgement, although they have produced a network of discursive affinities between the new art histories and contemporary art itself, at the level of that art’s thematic concerns. This is, in part, a result of convergent trends in art-historical and art education. Meanwhile the history of contemporary art – a genre dominated by second-generation October art historians – remains largely documentary and reconstructive in character. Its professional formation discourages art-critical judgement, although it often involves a documenting and reconstruction of critical positions held by artists and critics at the time: a kind of criticism by historical proxy. Studies in visual culture often appear closer to art-critical discourse than art-historical ones – indeed, they increasingly occupy institutional spaces of criticism – despite their even greater distance from questions of art judgement. However, this appearance covers over and hence helps to sustain the general absence of historically grounded criticism of contemporary art.
The situation dates back to the failure of the project of a ‘critical postmodernism’ in the face of the problem of judgement, in the early 1980s. Hal Foster identified the problem early on, but made little headway with it theoretically.6 Just how blocked it would become can be seen twenty years later in the October roundtable discussion, ‘The Present Conditions of Art Criticism’, in which the very idea of critical judgement caused consternation among the discussants, most of whom still associated it, exclusively, with a late Greenbergian notion of ‘quality’.7 Thierry de Duve attempted to break the impasse with his return to Kant after Duchamp, replacing the former’s ‘This is beautiful’ with the latter’s ‘This is art’, while insisting that the latter continue ‘to be read as an aesthetic reflexive judgment with a claim to universality in the strictest Kantian sense’, despite the accompanying claim that the term ‘art’ functions in the judgement as a ‘proper name’.8 Ultimately this foundered on philosophical confusions about both Kant and naming alike. Nonetheless it set a standard for the articulation of art-historical, art-critical and post-Kantian philosophical discourses to which little subsequent work has aspired.
Meanwhile the general theories of representation, both epistemological and political, which predominate in studies of visual culture – usually, if unwittingly, semiotic culturalist variants of the liberal pluralism of US political science – have shown themselves to be singularly ill-suited to grasping the specific and deeply problematic character of the experience of contemporary art. The character and object-domain of the field remain plural and contested, their relations to art unresolved. But