Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
According to Margaret Iversen, the text- and photo-based feminist work of
artists like Mary Kelly and Cindy Sherman reflects the anti-aesthetic lesson
learned from Minimalism that art can be “deflated” by being reduced “to a
thing in the world, undifferentiated from other objects.” 35 In reality, such reduction
makes this kind of work, while visibly quite different from other objects,
unreadable as art by any public other than that educated in advanced aesthetic
theory. A good example is Kelly’s Post-Partum Document of 1971–8, intended to
speak of fundamental matters of life outside the world of art, specifically of
women’s experience of childrearing. 36 In this as in her later work, Kelly
“describes her practice as like that of an indigenous ethnographer of a community
or, better, communities of women—observing, recording, and analyzing her
data, yet without assuming a privileged position.” 37 Yet, as two sympathetic critics
wrote of the Document, the objects composing it—soiled diapers and texts such
as diary entries, transcribed mother–infant conversations, and psychoanalytical
commentaries—“come across as disconnected visual clues to some academic discourse
which do little more than expose the ignorance of the viewer.” 38 Even in
championing this work Iversen has perceptively compared it, for the difficulty of
imagery and “explanatory” documentation alike, to Duchamp’s classically
inscrutable The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. 39 While the anti-aesthetic
has meant a repudiation of Greenberg’s identification of modernism with nonlinguistic
visuality, language here still hovers outside the artwork (even when that
work consists of a text) as the explanation, external to it, necessary for its full
functioning as art.
The relative inaccessibility of much Conceptualist art, and its accompanying
theory, to nonspecialist viewers is, as suggested above, an index of the extent to
which art training, production, and reception have been absorbed by academic
institutions. Beyond this, it only presents in an exaggerated way, and so makes
visible a feature of every work of art, that its readability depends on mastery of
the cultural code utilized in its production. 40 This is normally unrecognized by
the educated viewer, for whom the learned codes have become a second nature.
35 Margaret Iversen, “The deflationary impulse,” in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds),
Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991), p. 85.
36 For a presentation of this work in book form, see Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
37 Iversen, “Deflationary impulse,” p. 92.
38 Margot Waddell and Michelene Wandor, “Mystifying theory,” in Hilary Robinson (ed.), Visibly
Female (New York: Universe, 1988), p. 103.
39 Margaret Iversen, “The bride stripped bare by her own desire: reading Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum
Document”, in M. Kelly, Post-Partum Document, p. 206. For a refreshingly straightforward critique,
see Cassandra Langer’s report on a symposium on Kelly’s work, reprinted as “Language of
power” in Judy Siegel (ed.), Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1971–1990 (New
York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), pp. 311–12.
40 For a concise presentation of this point, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of a sociological theory of
art perception,” in idem, The Field of Cultural Production, pp. 215 ff.
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