Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

226 Okwui Enwezor
Moreover, modernist art was said to function with an internalized
awareness of the hierarchy that structures the relationship between its constitutive
parts, such as how the relationship between works of art came to
be conceived as distinctions across genres, forms, and mediums (a heritage,
no doubt, of classicism) evident, for example, in a line that separates Wne and
applied art or the relationship between mediums such as the one between
painting and drawing. On the other hand, contemporary art is understood
to proceed from the evisceration of the idea of the authority of originality
and aura of the image. Rather, through its heterogeneity and the structure
of simultaneity, it has overseen the remarkable dispersal of the legacy of
modernism.
One legacy of the expansion of the idea of contemporary art is
the degree to which it abjures and has remained largely ambivalent to the
dialectic of modernist art (between originality and aura), having taken aboard
the idea that art is deWned neither by its speciWc medium nor by the form
through which it declares the very purpose of art. Of course, the two models
for this cultural turn in the understanding of art in the twentieth century
remain cogent. The Wrst is the radical termination of the idea of originality
that Duchamp Wrst inaugurated through his assisted ready-mades. The implications
and consequences of Duchamp’s intervention are already well known,
even if they have developed their own cargo cult of epistemological reiWcation,
sedimentation, and certainties as art history. However, Duchamp’s mutilation
of the perceptive order in which the work of art is embedded is more
than the transition between the meaning of an object, whether technologically
fabricated as many of his assisted ready-mades were or the artistically
fabricated work in which originality rests on the fact that the work is singular
and not repeatable by any technology of standardization. It is in the
discursive domain of art’s deWnition that Duchamp’s proposition is said to
generate that moment when the history of contemporary art is said to begin.
Similarly, Walter Benjamin’s conclusions in his essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Production” has been equally deployed as the watershed
theory that deWnes the tension between modernist art and contemporary
art, between the artistically fabricated and the technologically generated.
If we take Duchamp’s intervention and Benjamin’s theory as the
immediate ancestors for the proposition of what Thierry de Duve identiWes
in Duchamp’s gesture as the shift from here is art to this is art, 6 we would,
nonetheless, still remain very much preoccupied with what the object of art
as such is after the reelaboration of its plasticity. There is, of course, a second
horizon through which we can read some of the conclusions that, since
the 1960s, have continuously questioned both the nature and status of the
work of art. The struggle as such is not so much how does art generate its