It is easy to be cynical about the present relations between art and philosophy. Too often it seems that artists, critics, and curators want the same old things from thought as such and from certain star thinkers in particular: intellectual support for weak or overreaching work, conceptual appliqué on what is essentially consumer journalism, a resonant name to stick in your talks-program brochure. (Full disclosure: Like many art writers, I’ve been party to this last practice, and gladly: I interviewed Jacques Rancière at the Frieze Art Fair in 2005.) At worst, this situation makes for comically inflated claims about the art at issue, especially as regards its political import, and a good deal of bloviating by academics who are often coming touchingly fresh to contemporary art. And at best? Well, two recent volumes suggest some answers. In the past decade or so, Rancière’s work has provided the art world with a timely out from the seeming impasse of pre-millennial postmodernism and from troublesome complicity with now weakened but still disreputable market forces. The suspicious frequency and ease with which Rancière is cited, however, should not distract from the seriousness of his philosophical undertaking when it comes to art: Nothing less than a demolition of our familiar narrative concerning modernism and modernity and its replacement with a complex lineage of competing aesthetic-political regimes. At the heart of this new story is a protracted rupture of old artistic forms by scandalous forces: unruly bodies freed from the strictures of classical proportion, plebeian voices raised in aristocratic genres and milieus, a remarkable democracy of objects achieved in word, paint, and celluloid.
Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art is an unexpected addition to Rancière’s project, in part because it starts from a somewhat antique formal and scholarly premise. The book is modeled on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a study of literary realism written by the exiled German scholar during World War II and published in 1946. Like Auerbach, Rancière begins each of his short essays (14 as compared with 20 in Mimesis) with a quotation that suggests a moment of innovation in the book’s historical span—in this case, 1764 to 1941. But whereas Auerbach was convinced of a type of progress (the advance of psychological realism, from Homer to Virginia Woolf ), Rancière presents a history of disruptions: from Johann Winckelmann’s description of the mutilated Belvedere Torso to the documentary experiment of James Agee in Now Let Us Praise Famous Men.
En route between 18th-century Dresden and New York of the mid 20th century, Rancière sketches, as his subtitle has it, a series of “scenes” in which good aesthetic form yields to the perspective of the common man (Stendhal), the profusion of common things (Emerson), and the transformation of sculptural volume into active surface (Rilke on Rodin). Frequently, these small but intricately drawn studies involve some defining paradox, as in the case of the valorization after the French Revolution of mundane subjects for painting—a move that has more to do with the institution of aestheticist indifference to subject matter than the revolutionary invasion of art by the figures of workers and beggars. If there’s a single exemplary instance among all these scenes, it’s the billowing form and force of the serpentine dancer Loie Fuller, described by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé as “classic insofar as entirely modern,” and the subject of Rancière’s most luminous essay.
Given Rancière’s insistence on these privileged moments in the history of art and art criticism, it’s tempting to read Aisthesis as a belle-lettristic addendum to his more sustained and systematic works, akin to the sort of essayistic volume that Verso puts out by others (such as Alain Badiou or Slavoj Zižek) when they are between magnum opuses. That would be a mistake. Such is the clarity and complexity of Rancière’s thought here, and so intimate is he with the writings excerpted and the works to which they refer, that one has to conclude that
this is a fundamental test of his broader conceptions of artistic, literary, and political history. The question is, why does the book end in the middle of the last century? Auerbach’s Mimesis concludes with a bravura reading of a passage from Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse—that is, with an advanced modernism that the war had interrupted. There’s no such declaration of contemporary allegiance in Aisthesis, so that the book practically begs for a second volume—and urgently.
If Rancière seems to falter before the recent past, the arrival of a contemporary, as opposed to modern, art after World War II is one of the starting points for Peter Osborne’s ambitious and frustrating book, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. The contemporary, he suggests at first, is not merely our vaguely defined present, but like the modern, a self-conscious and self-described period. Or is it? There are competing timescales, for sure: The contemporary may also have begun in the 1960s or following the convulsions of 1989. On the other hand, it may not be a period at all, but a state of complex self-involvement and self-difference. Contemporary art, writes Osborne, is post-Conceptual art—art that has learned from Duchamp and the Conceptualists of the 1960s, but more recently turned back, mostly via photography and video, to an “aestheticized” concern with the image as such.
Osborne’s critical throat-clearing here is reasonably engaging but also quite familiar, and it is hard to see it as the thorough going philosophy of contemporary art that he also announces in passing—still less as enabling the profound engagement with individual works that he asserts would be essential to such a philosophical criticism. When Osborne does turn to specific artists and particular works, the examples are again familiar. The Atlas Group is adduced, a decade after Walid Raad dissolved that conceptual-documentarist disguise, as a prime instance of the contemporary fictionalization of artist and subject matter. There are sections on Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson that substantially overstate, in order to dismiss, weak readings of their work in terms purely of painting and sculpture. And there’s an egregiously throwaway passage that accuses Tacita Dean and others of mere nostalgia for the 1960s when they make work related to Smithson.
Throughout, Osborne insists that what we need is a new and properly philosophical art criticism—and he may well be right. But I have to say I doubt it will look much like Anywhere or Not at All, with its paltry roster of contemporary artists and its excruciating recourse to the usual tropes of academic prose: tin-eared word choice (“problematicity”); capricious, not to say demented, use of italics; and that odd proprietorial tone by which the author gestures in advance at what will have been argued by chapter’s end. That said, Osborne’s real and valuable insight in this book is one he shares with Rancière: If there is to be a new art criticism, it will need a new, or at least a reanimated, form. Both writers attempt a fragmentary structure that is as much indebted to Romanticism as to the avant-gardes of the last century; it’s just that only one of them has managed to fully conjure that form into being.
This article appears in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters.