PAVILION

naïve. Form and content are held together
at the expense of all historical and
political complexity, to the point of removing
the event - the death of Andreas
Baader - from the present, and turning it
into the occasion for a crude propaganda.
Yet it is precisely this crudeness that
offers it an element of redemption, since
it gives it an aspect of anti-art (art-historical
repetition as lack of contemporareity)
that, pardoxically, helps make it a ‘contemporary’
work.
Alternatively, something like Sigmar
Polke’s Risk Game, 2002 (fig. 5) continues
to mine the seam of the readymade,
in the spirit of Richter’s photo-paintings,
leaving the determination of the structure
of the image to the participants themselves.
The artistic act here is primarily
that of selection (a market model of
autonomy as choice), with the composition
of the image itself internalized to the
practice of representation/communication
that is artistically re-presented. This
relies upon a type of auto-representation
of history that found its archetypical contemporary
form in the images of abuse of
Iraqi prisoners taken by US troops in
Abu-Ghraid (figs 6 and 7).
So far, I have located the question of the
political within contemporary art only at
the very general structural level of the
dialectic of autonomy and dependence.
However, as these examples show, the
more concretely political meaning of
these structural aspects (primarily, ‘freedom’)
depends upon the dialectic of individuality
and collectivity at play within ‘the
law of form’.
(ii) The dialectic of individuality and collectivity
(or, the crisis of mediations)
The dialectic of individuality and collectivity
at play within the law of form in works
of contemporary art may be summarized,
briefly, as followed.
1. The individuality of the work of art is
the ontological marker of its autonomy -
its autonomous production of meaning
(production of the self-conscious illusion
of an autonomous production of meaning)
- and the basis of its constitution as
an enigma. This enigma lies in the fact
that in their autonomous meaning-production,
works of art act like subjects.
They are objects that act like subjects -
human subjects, individual bourgeois
subjects - the subjectivity of which consequently
remains opaque. As such, they
draw attention to the objecthood, and
hence opacity, of human subjects themselves,
and thereby to the illusion constitutive
of the philosophical concept of the
subject itself. That dialectical transformation
of the object into a subject that is the
work of art is matched, epistemologically,
by a dialectical reversal of the human
subject into an object, which renders subjectivity,
in itself, opaque.
2. However, meaning is collective.
3. The work of art must thus mediate its
ontological individuality with the collectivity
of its (potential) meanings. This is the
function of its self-legislating ‘law of form’.
Form is the artistic mediation of the
social, at a whole range of levels, from
artistic materials (including technologies
of production) to techniques and productive
practices.
4. If politics is an active constitution or
construction of the social, then the political
aspect of art here will lie in the con-
structive aspect of form, in the construction
of form as mediation. Questions thus
arise as to what are the main forms of
mediation of the individuality of works of
contemporary art with the collectivity of
their meanings; and what are their political
significances?
These questions are complicated by the
peculiarity of social form in capitalist societies.
For in capitalist societies ‘collectivity’
is itself already formal: abstract and
alienated via exchange relations and the
commodity form. Famously, exchange
relations break down historically received
collective meanings. In this respect, ‘the
social’ in its distinctively capitalistic sense
(as opposed to the communal) is not a
‘collective’ form in any positive politically
meaningful sense. Capitalistic sociality
(the commodity/the value form) produces
‘individuals’ who are united only in the
mutual alienation of their sociability, in a
new kind of what Kant called ‘asocial
sociability’. Yet such individuality has
nonetheless, historically, provided the
model of freedom; hence the political
centrality of libertarianism - of all stripes -
to capitalist societies. Yet absolute individuation
destroys meaning. This is the
contradiction at the heart of what Adorno
calls the growing ‘nominalism’ of modern
art, which is essentially a crisis of mediations.
In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, nominalism
is not an abstract philosophical position
about the status of universals, but a
socio-historical claim about the declining
artistic significance of objective aesthetic
norms. ‘The universal’, he writes, ‘is no
longer granted art through types and
older types are being drawn into the
whirlpool.’ Individual works are forced to
establish relations to universality - including
the universality of ‘art’ itself - in new
ways. This tendency towards a ‘prohibition
on predefined forms’ is inherent in
the modern conception of art as such, in
the ‘progressive particularization’ out of
which the aesthetic conception of the
work as an expression of subjective freedom
emerged, in opposition to subsumptive
models of judgement. However, once
the principle of individuation becomes a
‘directive’ - and hence a new form of
abstract universality of its own - it threatens
the structure of the work with a
reduction to its materials: ‘Unchecked
aesthetic nominalism … terminates in a
literal facticity’. Adorno presents this situation
as something of an impasse, an
‘historical aporia’. 25
However, there is more dialectical movement
in the situation than this formulation
suggests. For if modern art is to be true
to its rejection of received universals in
the name of subjective freedom, it must
also reject the absolutization of its own
inherent nominalism, and enter into new
kinds of relations with universals - both
old and new. If contemporary art has
social substance to the extent to which it
‘gives shape’ to the antinomy of aesthetic
nominalism by ‘winning form from its
negation’, this need not be a merely negative
dialectic. Rather, it requires new
forms of mediation. Indeed, this was the
historical significance of isms for Adorno
himself: those ‘programmatic, self-conscious,
and often collective art movements’,
which, in their day, ‘by no means
shackle[d] the individual productive
forces but rather heighten[ed] them … in
part through mutual collaboration.’
However, despite this crucial mediating
function, Adorno has a predominantly
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