Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

228 Okwui Enwezor
The issue of the authenticity of the work of art, and by extension
that of the artist (who in a typical postmodernist term became the author),
has a sociocultural basis beyond the art-historical questions it generates, especially
as the basis for conceptual art becomes more and more dissociated from
the polemics of statements about art to the politics of that statement and,
Wnally, the politics of representation. The legacy of Duchamp in the formulation
of the theory of conceptual art produced consequences beyond his
original intent, to the extent that at a certain juncture, Duchamp ceases to
be a useful avatar for the range of heterogeneous strategies and statements
that have devoted themselves as expressions of artistic intention outside the
framework of objects and images.
Benjamin Buchloh has rightly observed that in “Confronting the
full range of the implications of Duchamp’s legacy . . . Conceptual practices
. . . reXected upon the construction and role (or death) of the author just as
much as they redeWned the conditions of receivership and the role of the
spectator.” 9 Although Buchloh’s historical claim is in part correct, in relation
to the spectator, the historians of conceptual art have been largely silent.
What I mean is that in the postwar transformation of the global public
sphere, the traditional construction of the spectator within both Western
and modernist understanding had experienced a radical rupture with the
emergence of postcolonial discourse. Postcolonial and civil rights discourses
put under the spotlight a new kind of spectator. This spectator would construct,
during the postwar period, new subjective relations to institutions of
Western democracy and economics. For example in the United States, desegregated
institutions needed also to rearticulate the philosophy informing
their work as public spaces. The appearance of the subject within the framework
of the experience of art was a new phenomenon that hitherto was
unacknowledged, insofar as the concept of the institutions of art experienced
pressures to be more attentive to the publics toward which it directed
its undertakings. It was not just the primacy of the art object that demanded
new consideration, but the primacy of the social exclusions that purportedly
were built into the way institutions of art mediated the history of those
objects. The postwar democratic public sphere repositioned the spectator in
ways that would only become much clearer with the emergence of certain
politically centered interpretations of subjectivity, models of subjectivization
that were dependent on a number of socially bounded identiWcations (gender,
sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc.) of which multiculturalism today functions as
the dark specter of the politics of the subject. While conceptualist paradigms
may have opened a space for the considerations of some of these shifts, surprisingly
the operation of conceptualism still predicated itself on the hinge
of the modernist dialectic of the object and the gaze. As such, the shift in