Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

The Production of Social Space as Artwork 227
meanings through its many objects, forms, and mediums that can now be
extended to activities or nonactivities, be they technologically fabricated or
not, indexically structured, or programmatically schematized. But can art now
go beyond embedding itself in speciWc objects of minimalism’s phenomenological
posture, or move to a truly radical position that is its complete reduction
into nothing more than a linguistic description?
The severe deretinalization that such a reduction proposes is part
of the legacy of conceptual art in which recourse to language carries the seed
of Duchamp’s original idea, except now the model of this is art if I say so has
produced a moment of deep fecundation in which social ramiWcation has
tended to open up the space of contemplation to that of speech or just simply
the exchanges that inhere from a range of social relations, thereby transporting
the experience of art into sites of the multiple activities that today
generate art as an extended Weld of many types of transaction. Part of this
synthesis or fusion of the contemplative and the linguistic, the formal and
the social at any rate led conceptual art to attempt also to abduct the traditional
role of the historian and critic for its cause. Conceptual art was not
simply content with destabilizing the traditional categories within which
art functioned, it sought to also inaugurate and propagate a philosophy for
such destabilization as the basis for an ontology of advanced contemporary
art. Joseph Kosuth especially made this part of his credo, as witnessed in his
Art after Philosophy model. 7
If contemporary art as inaugurated by Duchamp in 1917 was
already impatient with modernist claims of the uniqueness of vision as the
prerequisite for judging correctly what a work of art is, modernist critics were
no less dismissive of the claims of certain contemporary styles, seeing them
as either fraudulent or ideologically compromised. From cubism onward,
and throughout the twentieth century, modernist art has had to grapple
with the constant pluralization of the concept of art and its forms and mediums
(e.g., the cubist collage and Wlm montage) and the hybridization of the
art object (e.g., from the ready-made and Dada). At every turn in the shift
toward pluralization and hybridization, modernist art has tried to prove its
own staying power and is not devoid of its own spectacular weapons against
the impudent assaults of Duchampian contemporary art, as witnessed in its
attempt every decade since the Wrst ready-made to storm the barricades and
seize back the space of representation that painting and sculpture represent
for classical art. In a sense, the historical debate between modernist art and
contemporary art rests on a single philosophical tension, namely the issue
of the authenticity of the work of art. For example Benjamin observed that
“The revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its
authenticity.” 8