PAVILION

Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge MA and London,
1999, p. 465 [N 4a, 2,].
2. ‘The West’ is, of course, a historically constituted
geo-political category, rather than simply
geographical one. It spatializes a set of powerrelations
between the dominant Euro-American
powers and ‘the rest’, and thus signifies different
spatial unities according to its historical and
political context. For example, it was until
recently used to exclude ‘Eastern’ Europe -
despite its being part of Europe - while including
Japan. See, Stuart Hall, ‘The West-and-the-
Rest: Discourse and Power’, in Stuart Hall et al,
eds, Modernity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp.
184-227; and Naoki Sakai, ‘Dislocation of the
West and the Status of the Humanities’, Traces
1: Specters of the West and the Politics of
Translation, edited by Naoki Sakai and Yukiko
Hanawa, Traces, Ithaca, 2000, pp. 71-94. Since
1989, there has been a tendency to try to draw
the line within so-called ‘eastern’ Europe itself:
instituting a competition of economic-ideological
conformity to become part of ‘the West’.
Meanwhile, Japan ponders the benefits of decoupling,
with the prospect of a new East Asian
bloc raising the spectre of an inverted (Chineseled)
revival of the idea of a Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere, once central to the spatial
imaginary of Japanese fascism.
3. See, Peter Osborne, ‘Radicalism and
Philosophy’, Radical Philosophy 103
(September/ October 2000), pp. 6-11;
‘Modernisms and Mediations’, in F. Halsall, J.
Jansen, T. O’Connor (eds), Rediscovering
Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art
History, Philosophy and Art Practice, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, pp. 163-177; and
‘Modernism and Philosophy’, in P. Brooker et al
(eds), The Oxford Handbook on Modernism,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, Ch. 20, forthcoming
2010.
4. The landmark exhibitions here were the 1936
‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ show, with Alfred H.
Barr’s famous stylistic flowchart on the cover of
the catalogue, terminating in just two streams
(‘Geometrical’ and ‘Non-Geometrical’ Abstract
Art) and the Bauhaus show of 1938. The subsequent
claim for the US inheritance of the
European tradition (explicit in Greenberg, for
example) was, of course, not just a national
claim, but a wider ideological claim about the
USA’s leadership of the ‘free’ world during the
Cold War. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983.
5. See the critical history of the lineages of
negation at work here outlined in the ‘Survey’
essay in Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art,
Phaidon, London, 2002, pp. 12-51.
6. See Peter Osborne, ‘Art Beyond Aesthetics:
Philosophical Criticism, Art History and
Contemporary Art’, Art History, Vol. 27, no. 4
(September 2004), pp. 651-70 - reprinted in
Deborah Cherry (ed.), Art: History: Visual:
Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, pp. 171-190.
7. See Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties:
American and European Art in the Era of
Dissent 1955-69, Everyman Art Library,
London, 1996.
8. The origins of this victory date back to a different
‘9/11’, 11 September 1973: the assassination
of Allende, the socialist President of
Chile, and the delivery of the Chilean economy
to the so-called ‘Chicago boys’ - the group of
neo-liberal economists gathered around Milton
Friedman at the University of Chicago. See
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism,
Oxford University Press, 2005.
9. For the effects in an expanded Europe, see
Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (eds),
The Manifesta Decade: Debates on
Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennals in
Post-Wall Europe, Roomade/MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 2005. For an early attempt at a
documentation of post-89 eastern European
art, see Irwin (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary
Art and Eastern Europe, Afterall Books,
London, 2006.
10. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde,
trans. Michael Shaw, University of Minnesota
pres, Minneapolis, 1984.
11. See Peter Osborne, ‘The Power of
Assembly: Art, World, Industry’, in Zones of
Contact: Catalogue of the 2006 Biennale of
Sydney, Sydney, 2006.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
(1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997 , p. 24.
13. Cf. Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure:
An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist
Theories of History (1971), trans. Jefffrey Herf,
MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1981,
which identifies the need for a ‘determinate
negation of the structuralist negation of history’
(p. 108).
14. This notion of ‘becomings- and ceasings-tobe-ontological’
is to be distinguished from the
generic becomings of Deleuze and Guattari’s
cyclical territorializations, de-teritorializations
and re-territorializations, which take place on a
single ontological plane, characterized by repetition,
and thus acquire determinacy only empirically,
and retrospectively. As such, their theorization
lacks determinacy in its futural dimension,
in principle.
15. The word ‘determination’ is liable to generate
confusion in English-language theoretical
discourse, because of the history of its use to
refer to the process of causation. I use it here in
the philosophical sense of its German equivalent
(Bestimmung), in the idealist tradition, to
refer to a process of giving conceptual or
semantic determinacy to something (i.e. to particularization).
Failure to distinguish between
these two senses has created a long history of
misunderstandings in the relations between
these two traditions. It is in the sense in which I
use it here that, for example, Hegel wrote in the
Preface to the 2nd edition of his Encyclopedia
(1827) not only that the reader would find many
parts of the book ‘developed into more detailed
determinations (Bestimmungen)’, but also that
the new edition had ‘the same vocation
(dieselbe Bestimmung)’ as the first one. G.W.F.
Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T.F.
Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris,
Hackett, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1991, p. 4. In
a similar sense, Marx wrote in the Introduction
to the Grundrisse (1857) of ‘the concrete’ as,
methodologically, a result: ‘the concentration of
many determinations, hence unity of the
diverse’. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of
the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft),
trans. Martin Nicholas, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1973, p.101.
16. What follows is a conception of the work of
art that derives, in broad outline, from Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory (1970), as read through the
history of visual art since the 1960s - in much
the same way that Aesthetic Theory itself mediates
Walter Benjamin’s early theory of the artwork
via the history of (primarily, musical and literary)
modernism.
17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 225.
18. Ibid., p. 226.
19. Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative
Character of Culture’ (1937) in Negations:
Essays in Critical Theory, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1968, pp. 88-133. For Adorno’s continuing,
albeit critically modified, adoption of this
position (‘its thesis requires the investigation of
the individual artwork’), see Aesthetic Theory, p.
252.
20. See Stewart Martin, ‘Autonomy and Anti-Art:
Adorno’s Concept of Avant-garde Art’,
Constellations, Vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 197-207.
21. Thierry de Duve, ‘The Readymade and the
Tube of Paint’, in Kant After Duchamp, MIT
Press, Cambridge MAand London, 1996, Ch. 3.
22. Jeff Wall, ‘Monochrome and Photojournalism
in On Kawara’s Today Paintings’, in Lynne
Cooke and Karen Kelly, eds, Robert Lehman
Lectures on Contemporary Art, Dia Center for
the Arts, New York, 1996, pp. 135-157, p. 152 -
Wall himself applies this description to the
series of Today paintings, rather than to the
earlier One Thing.
23. This was one of the formal components of
Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. See
Peter Osborne, ‘Remember the Future? The
Communist Manifesto as Cultural-Historical
Form’, in Philosophy in Cultural Theory,
Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp.
63-77.
24. Both Caravaggio’s Martydom of St Matthew
(St. Luigi Francesci, Rome) and Crucifixion of
St Peter (St. Maria del Popolo, Rome) appear to
be evoked - among other, earlier sources.
25. Aesthetic Theory, pp. 199-201, 219-220.
26. Ibid, pp. 222, 24-25.
27. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectic
Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical
Ensembles (1960), trans., Alan Sheridan-Smith,
Verso, London and New York, 1976, pp. 255-6,
266.
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