Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
function of aesthetic practice within the institutions of Modernism,” 25 ideas are
typically present in Conceptual work, as in that done with traditional mediums,
only as exemplified, illustrated, or suggested. Otherwise, indeed, a work like
Hans Haacke’s commentary on the socio-economics of the Ludwig collection of
contemporary art—which assembles information about Peter Ludwig’s economic
holdings, the treatment of the workers in his factories, and his art
collecting—would give up its “art” status for that of an unusually presented bit
of art theory. 26 As Greenberg once explained, in modernism the arts had to
demonstrate “that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own
right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.” 27 It is precisely the
absence of the discursive apparatus on which possible actual conceptual development
depends, and which is required for analytic precision, that, along with
presentation on the walls of a gallery or museum, keeps Haacke’s work in the
domain of art rather than in that of the sociology of culture, whatever its power
to suggest ideas or raise political questions for a suitably prepared spectator. 28
One of the most striking features of Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art” of 1967 is the extent to which this key statement of principles preserves elements
of the understanding of art traceable to Kant’s aesthetics even while
emphasizing the unimportance of aesthetic features. On the one hand, LeWitt
affirms that what “the work of art looks like isn’t too important.” What is crucial
is that “it must begin with an idea.” 29 But not only does the claim that “the idea
or concept is the most important aspect of the work” have a lineage stretching
back at least as far as Leonardo’s insistence on the intellectual nature of painting,
LeWitt also accepts fundamental aspects of the modern conception of art in
describing Conceptualism as “intuitive,” “purposeless,” and “non-utilitarian.” 30
More recently, Hal Foster explained the expression “anti-aesthetic,” to which
he helped give currency in the early 1980s, as signaling “a practice, cross-disciplinary
in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g.
feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular—that is, to forms that deny the idea of a
privileged aesthetic realm.” 31 In reality, however, even when texts, or objects and
25 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical procedures: appropriation and montage in contemporary
art,” Artforum 21 (1982), p. 48.
26 For documentation, see “Der Pralinenmeister,” in Brian Wallis (ed.), Hans Haacke: Unfinished
Business (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 210 ff.
27 C. Greenberg, “Modernist painting,” in Gregory Battcock (ed.), The New Art (New York: Dutton,
1966), p. 162.
28 Speaking of Haacke’s installation MetroMobiltan, Leo Steinberg identifies the art-experiential correlate
of this form and location: “nothing practical can or will come of it, because [it] is wholly
addressed to the mind and eye, to imagination and feeling” (“Some of Hans Haacke’s works
considered as works of art,” in Wallis, Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, p. 18).
29 Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’
Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 824.
30 Ibid., pp. 822, 825.
31 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: a preface,” in idem, (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press,
1983), p. xv.
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