Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art by Peter Osborne

Author:Peter Osborne [Osborne, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory
ISBN: 9781781680940
Google: OHjB1MlCeMsC
Amazon: 1781680949
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2013-06-03T23:00:00+00:00

Architecturalization: three questions

If ‘sculpture’ is an ontologically redundant category in contemporary art (despite its perennial curatorial revival as a way of presenting the very works that rendered it redundant), ‘architecture’ is a term without which contemporary art would be hard-pressed to continue to exist. If, as Duve has argued, in the nineteenth century, ‘painting’ was the name for art (and thereby the most ontologically privileged of medium-specific categories), in the 1960s something like ‘architecture’ became, if not the new name for art, then certainly, for many, its model. Similarly, just as it was by appropriating (and notionally reapplying) the name ‘painting’ to readymades that Duchamp invented a generic art, so it has been by appropriating (and notionally reapplying) the name ‘architecture’ to various art activities that art since the 1960s has transformed its spatial ontology. These practices have strong conceptual components. Like textualization, architecture was thus a mediating practice that combined an expansion and transformation of art’s spatial ontology, with a conceptual turn. Architecture has been a primary bearer of the conceptuality of contemporary art. In this regard, architecturalization appears as one of an accumulative series of art-historical revisions of the art of the 1960s, the most important of which have been those stressing the roles of performance, conceptual photography, and the internationalism of the US-centred artistic community of the 1960s and early 1970s.25 Each is bound up with the conceptual character of contemporary art. There is a complex multiplicity of interacting lineages of negation at work here in the art of the 1960s that converge into the problematic of postconceptual art, of which these successive historiographical revisionisms represent the four currently most significant aspects.

The relationship of contemporary art to architecture gives rise to three specific questions: What is the function of ‘architecture’ in the discourses and practices of contemporary art? What is the place of architecturalization in the history of art since the early 1960s? What does the prism of ‘architecture’ contribute to the criticism of contemporary art?

First and foremost, for Western art since the Second World War – locked in the prison of a restricted understanding of its autonomy – architecture has functioned as a signifier of the social, of the functionality or practicality of form: economically, technologically and politically. In this respect, architecture – like design more generally – is an archive of the social use of form. As such it functions as a gateway to, and metonym for, the urban in its fullest sense, which is to say, for modernity. In particular, as a signifier of the social, via the urban, architecture offers a ‘privileged access’ to the contemporary via the technologies of social production. The architectural aspect of contemporary art is thus that of a socio-spatial effectivity. It represents art’s social being-in-the-world, its aspiration to effect change. Architecture is an emblem of the aspiration to what Jeff Wall has called a ‘modernism with social content’.26 For art, one might even say, architecture in general holds open the original hope of Soviet Constructivism: namely, ‘to realize the communist expression of material structures’.

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