Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 293.
See Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004) and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
It is perhaps not coincidental that this work has emerged at approximately the same time as an unprecedented expansion in the global market for contemporary art, and the monetization of contemporary art as a key site of capital investment for the upper class, especially among the newly rich of China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. This economic infrastructure sustains an interlocking network of major collectors, biennials, galleries, critics, curators, magazines, and art consultants invested in the validation of contemporary art. For many younger artists, the idea that the “art world” described above can offer any meaningful form of aesthetic or critical autonomy is less and less tenable.
Sylvia Lavin, “The Uses and Abuses of Theory,” Progressive Architecture 71:8 (August 1990): 113–114, 179.
Ellen Feiss, “What is Useful? The Paradox of Rights in Tania Bruguera’s ‘Useful Art’.” See →
“‘October’ is a reference which remains, for us, more than exemplary; it is instructive. For us, the argument regarding Socialist Realism is nonexistent. Art begins and ends with a recognition of its conventions. We will not contribute to that social critique which, swamped by its own disingenuousness, gives credence to such an object of repression as a mural about the war in Vietnam, painted by a white liberal resident in New York, a war fought for the most part by ghetto residents commanded by elements drawn from the southern lower-middle-class … Long working experience with major art journals has convinced us of the need to restore to the criticism of painting and sculpture, as to that of other arts, an intellectual autonomy seriously undermined by emphasis on extensive reviewing and lavish illustration. October wishes to address those readers who, like many writers and artists, feel that the present format of the major art reviews is producing a form of pictorial journalism which deflects and compromises critical effort.” The Editors, “About OCTOBER,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 4–5.
Hal Foster’s Seattle-based Bay Press, which published The Anti-Aesthetic anthology, played a key role during this period. For a revealing, albeit brief, history of Bay Press, see Charles Mudede, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Bay Press,” The Stranger (January 24–30, 2002) →
Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the ‘Paraliterary’,” October 13 (Summer 1980): 40.
Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). In particular, Krauss employs Shklovsky’s concept of the “Knight’s move” to justify her analysis of art as a system of rule-based norms, against which any creative action must be waged. This gesture, of course, assigns a decisive authority to the critic or historian who is in a position to define precisely what those norms might be, and to differentiate properly productive artistic activity from random and aesthetically meaningless experimentation. This is an authority that Krauss is not shy to embrace. Under Blue Cup begins with her announcement that the book was “incited by over a decade of disgust at the spectacle of meretricious art called installation …”
Yve Alain-Bois, “Rosalind Krauss with Yve Alain-Bois,” The Brooklyn Rail (February 1, 2012) →.
The textual paradigm is premised on an underlying contradiction between an immanent formalism, as promoted by Greenberg, and a formalism that encompasses a range of ideological systems beyond the visual arts, which threatens to reduce art to a generic form of counter-hegemonic critique. This tension is evident in Under Blue Cup, where Krauss extends the repertoire of “devices” to be laid bare by art to accommodate such oddly dissimilar entities as “cars” and “photo-journalism.” Here the concept of art as defined via a self-reflexive relationship to a specific set of rules or norms becomes so capacious as to threaten precisely the kind of disordered, non-aesthetic chaos that she finds so disgusting in much installation art.
These tensions first came to a head around the special issue of October that Crimp edited on AIDS activism in 1987 (#43, Winter 1987). He left October in 1990. Crimp discusses the climate at the journal at that time in a 2008 interview with Mathias Danbolt. See Mathias Danbolt, “Front Room – Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp,” Trikster 2 (2008), see →
The tendency to associate creative agency primarily with an a priori (and usually solitary) process of conceptual ideation, rather than the activation of a given concept in and through practice, links two such disparate figures as Sol Lewitt and Thomas Hirschhorn, suggesting the ongoing influence of the Conceptualist paradigm:
Issues of reception, of course, are a point of significant tension in theories of avant-garde art. Adorno, for example, was notoriously hostile to any effort to understand the responses of actual viewers to a work of art. In “Theses on the Sociology of Art” (1972) and Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1976) Adorno critiques the sociological “effects research” of Alphons Silbermann, who interviewed audience members regarding their feelings about specific works of art. Adorno argues that any attempt to understand the responses of actual viewers or listeners to a work of art will, inevitably, diminish its “aesthetic” value, which can only ever be pre-figurative—projected into a future in which society has overcome its subordination to administrative rationality. In this respect Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy follows a familiar trajectory already established by Kant and Schiller, in which art is ultimately intended for a “viewer yet to be” rather than the viewer here-and-now. See Andrew Edgar, “An Introduction to Adorno’s Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 30:1 (January 1990): 46–56.
Andrés David Montenegro Rosero, “Locating Work in Santiago Sierra’s Artistic Practice,” Ephemera 13:1 (2013) →. Sierra, in common with a number of successful contemporary artists, has developed his practice along two complementary axes. The first is a series of performative actions, usually provocative or nominally antagonistic in nature, produced in conjunction with a sponsoring museum, gallery or biennial. The documentation generated by these actions can then be marketed commercially (in Sierra’s case, in the form of limited edition photographs that sell for up to 50,000 Euros each). His work is thus defined by two temporalities. The first involves the initial moment of presentation in a gallery or biennial, while the second, and more enduring, entails its after-life in the commercial market for contemporary art (where works of art are, increasingly, bought and sold primarily as financial instruments). It goes without saying, of course, that the dramatic expansion in the sale of contemporary art as a form of investment is a direct byproduct of the increasing concentration of wealth globally, which Sierra ostensibly deplores.
I examine a variant of this displaced form of reception in the essay “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” published in the journal Afterimage (January 1993). The essay was reprinted in Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 103–135.
We are in the early stages of developing a set of protocols devoted to a field-based approach to the analysis of social art practice at UCSD. The term “field” reflects two main concerns. First, it indicates our interest in a body of artistic production that engages the broadest possible range of social forces, actors, discursive systems, and physical conditions operating at a given site. And second, it signals a concern with the questions that these projects raise about the “proper” field of art itself, as it engages with other disciplines and other modes of cultural production.
It can be helpful here to differentiate between projects commissioned by biennials, in which many of the key decisions (regarding space, duration, and so forth) are predetermined by the sponsoring institution or curator, and artist-generated projects, in which the temporal and spatial parameters of the field of practice are fluid and indeterminate.
Even an artist as securely established in the art world firmament as Thomas Hirschhorn still feels compelled to reassure critics that his work is “pure art,” rather social work. See Peter Schjeldahl, “House Philosopher: Thomas Hirschhorn and the Gramsci Monument,” The New Yorker (July 29, 2013): 76.