A peculiar characteristic of contemporary art is that it is accompanied by an enormous amount of talk from artists, curators, and academics about its distinctive features, both what they are and what they should be. A widely shared assumption of such talk is that contemporary art is marked by the acceptance of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade as an art-making strategy. A readymade is not so much made as chosen: the artist starts with an idea or concept, and then chooses some object to which the idea is attached. The artist’s creative activity is focused on articulating the idea and scanning the world for a suitable vehicle. How, then, could such a narrow conception of artistic activity give rise to the great range of practices in contemporary art?

In Art in the Making, Glen Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the readymade is the fundamental model in contemporary art. However, recent developments, particularly the widespread acceptance of collective art-making, have stressed the model to a near breaking-point. Much prominent contemporary art is ‘fabricated:’ one or more artists detail how the work should be made, and artisans and fabricators make the artifacts that comprise the material dimension of the work. Why should such collective authorship stress the model of the readymade? Adams and Bryan-Wilson point to conceptual and social factors that undermine its intelligibility. First, the acceptance of the readymade implies that ‘anybody is/can be an artist’, for after all who can’t point at an object and say ‘I hereby declare thee a work of art’? The problem with this, the authors suggest, is that the readymade is a late outgrowth of the Romantic-modern conception of the artist as a ‘genius’. The social function of the genius model is to secure the conception of the artist as the primary source of a work’s meaning, value, and significance. The social factor is that contemporary works of art are now part of what Rosalind Krauss termed an ‘expanded field’, which the authors also alternatively refer to as ‘the broader environment’ (p.73) or ‘wider cultural matters’ (p.94).

In order to indicate the scope of artistic making in contemporary art, the authors introduce the term ‘production’. For them the term is extraordinarily capacious; it comprises what is traditionally called the ‘creative process’ (a phrase that does not occur in the book) of conceiving, designing, and fabricating a work, as well as any relevant social processes, such as seeking funding. The authors cite Karl Marx’s early characterization of production as “weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking” to show the level at which basic activities of ‘production’ occur, and to signal explicitly their “commitment to materialist approaches” (p.16). Most of the book is devoted to short descriptions of and reflections upon recent art works. The ten chapters range from ‘Painting’ through ‘Performance’ to the most recently emergent topics of ‘Digitizing’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’. The authors regularly note the points at which a work responds to the contemporary ‘expanded’ condition of the arts. For example, they claim that a characteristic of performance is ‘support’, the ways in which any isolated action of a single agent actually relies upon broad intersecting social networks (p.95).

The authors seem to have in mind such ‘material’ networks and practices as food production and distribution, cleaning, maintenance, and transportation. Once artworks are made in ways that acknowledge the contemporary ‘expanded’ condition, unnoticed or marginalized aspects of the work’s making can and sometimes do enter into the work’s content. The authors claim that there is a broad “problematic relationship between art and value” (p.15). Three kinds of value are explicitly noted. First, there is ‘material value’, the buying and selling price of the materials incorporated into a work. Material value has arisen as an issue due to the recent use of spectacularly expensive materials, most notoriously in Damien Hirst’s diamond-blanketed skull. Second there is the market price of the finished work, a value ultimately determined by the degree of social recognition of the artist’s alleged genius (p.141). The first two kinds of value are simply aspects of price, and so are conceptually distinct from a third kind that would usually be referred to as ‘artistic value’ (a phrase that does not occur in the book). The authors’ reference to this third kind are so brief and obscure that it’s unclear what conception of artistic value they hold, but some indications are given: it’s what gives a painting its potential to subvert the practice of painting conceived in terms of medium-specificity (p.34); it makes some works ‘compelling’ (p.208); when it is embodied in a work, the work becomes ‘potent’ (p.217).

The argument of the book, then, seems to be this: Contemporary art is constituted in part by the broad acceptance of the strategy of the readymade as the core model of art-making. This model is bound to the continued acceptance of the artist as genius, that it is social recognition of the imaginative powers of a particular individual that gives that individual’s works whatever meaning, value, and significance they have. The recent and growing prominence of multiple authorship, fabrication, and crowdsourcing serves to undermine the appeal to individual genius. So artistic value in contemporary art is uncertain, at least in orienting our understanding of multiply authored works and those that are seemingly individually authored (since individual authorship is in any case an illusion).

This summary of the argument is distant from the experience of reading the book which is dominated, as noted above, by brief discussions of individual works. Since the authors aim to present “the full spectrum of sites of production” in contemporary art, these discussions of particular works are necessarily so brief (usually a couple of paragraphs, and rarely more than three or four) that the accounts seem arbitrary. For example, in the two short paragraphs on the work of Josephine Meckseper, they note that some critics have characterized her works as “mind-numbingly obvious”. They immediately counter with the suggestion that “the mind-numbing effects of hyper-commodification are precisely what concern her.” No further evidence or argument is given in support of their interpretation other than noting that she does indeed recycle “the cliché [sic] tropes of luxury display” and that this somehow “strikes right at the heart of artistic authorship” (p.148). Perhaps the nadir of the book is their discussion of Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’. They ignore the volumes of literature on the piece, as well as Smithson’s own conceptualization of the work, to simply assert that despite the work’s great complexity, it “was at the most basic level a deployment of equipment normally used to clear a lot and lay a foundation” (p.74) It would be tedious to clarify the various conceptual obscurities here. The occasional citations of authors ranging from Karl Marx (p.16) to the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell (p.37) to the contemporary art historian Rosalind Krauss (p.12) are wholly perfunctory and at best play no role in the larger argument. This is particularly frustrating with regard to Gell, who had advanced a sophisticated and controversial anthropological account of art involving the consideration of networks of makers and users in his book Art and Agency (1998). In their concluding chapter the authors suddenly claim that the subject of ‘distributed authorship’ has been present throughout their book, and that this condition is pervasive in contemporary art (p.223); but, though they have earlier cited Gell, they do not so much as mention his attempt to demonstrate that this subject is also pervasive in, among other things, the arts of the Trobriand Islanders kula, famously studied by Bronislaw Malinowski. Is this condition, then, only pervasive in contemporary art?

Aside from hoping to gain a superficial familiarity with a broad range of recent art, one might read the book as a stimulus for reflection on the remaining force, if any, of the Duchampian model of the readymade in contemporary art. It seems to me, though, that the authors bungle this possibility because they lack any articulate conception of what one might call ‘the appreciative focus’, or what artists are offering for participation, perception, and/or reflection. A distinction of contemporary ‘visual’ art could be that the focus of appreciation is given less through a viewer’s visual perception and more through participation in tasks set by artists. Perhaps contemporary visual art is connecting with ‘wider cultural frames’ by becoming integrated or re-integrated with architecture, dance, and participatory spectacles.

Lacking anything equivalent to the notion of an appreciative focus, the authors cannot resolve the issues they set forth. A particularly damaging consequence of this is their inability to say what the content of a work is. Since on their account it is a consequence of the model of the readymade that the ‘pre-artistic’ processes out of which the artifact arises are part of the content of the work, they have no principled reason for not including in a painting the making of its frame, the cutting of the tree, the making of the saw to cut the tree, and so on infinitely. Put bluntly, the authors need to go back to school to learn the relevant basic conceptual points. But since they themselves are among the most sophisticated writers on contemporary art, and one is a prominent and high-level academic, who shall educate these educators?

Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson: Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from Studio to Crowdsourcing. (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2016. 256 pp. ISBN 9780500239339. $39.95)

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This summer the axis of art in San Francisco runs between two museums: the De Young, which temporarily houses one hundred Picassos from the Musee Picasso; and the Museum of Modern art, currently exhibiting dozens of works by Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse collected by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo [both exhibition reviewed at artcritical by Bill Berkson]. With the current staging of Wagner’s Ring at San Francisco Opera, art-hungry masses are getting a full meal from the matrix of modernism. In the galleries, meanwhile, older living masters are showing some of the most notable work.

Paul Kos is among the most accomplished of Bay Area conceptualists. His varied body of work spans over forty years and self-consciously filters Sol LeWitt’s programmatic statements of conceptualism through a concern with recovering the poetry of natural processes. In his most characteristic works, some non-semantic but evocative dimension of nature is revealed—recalling Adorno as he heard the rustling beneath meaning in the language of Borchardt’s poetry. Kos’s extensive oeuvre allows him to stage his newer works within the context of his long career. Upon entering the gallery, one encounters a series of drawings from 1969 depicting an unrealized project to set lines and semi-circles of red salt pillars in the salt flats of Utah. These images would not be out of place in an archeological reconstruction of henges and causeways. The pillars are set up in the order that they might dissolve, leaving only slightly less impermanent red stains.

This concern with the poetry of undoing and erosion frames the central element of the show: a visual and aural tunnel created by two formidable newer works, Aspen, 2009 and Beethoven Piano Sonata #13, 2009.  Aspen shows a dense thicket without background, while Beethoven depicts a piano’s hammers striking the strings in performance. Both project an image onto canvas, which is then loosely painted using the image as a template. The painted surface seems to disappear where the projected image is still, but where the wind rises or the hammers move the surface becomes just visible, as if the image were dissonant with itself –the material surface a ghost of the virtual reality. In this installation, the sounds of nature and the sonata alternate in sections of a few minutes. The effect, perhaps intended, is the decrescence of the sonata to a mechanical gurgling, then a natural rustling. Kos thereby renews something of the Romantic project of overcoming the one-sidedness of rationality, in the service of attracting to his work otherwise inaccessible resonances—quasi una fantasia, as Beethoven characterized the sonata.” [Paul Kos at Gallery Paule Anglim, May 4-June 11, 2011]

Jim Melchert is a revered figure in the Bay Area, as much for his personal generosity as for his unusual attempt to bring the tradition-bound skills of a ceramicist to the project of Bay Area Conceptualism. His poetics are rooted in a moment half a generation before Kos’s, when in the late 1950’s Peter Voulkos challenged West Coast ceramics as Pollock did for New York painting. For Kos, the conceptualist moment is the point of orientation, whereas for Melchert it’s a moment, but only a moment, in a synthetic practice. Melchert’s current show offers nearly two dozen square tiles, 3/8ths of an inch thick with sides measuring 1-1/2 or 2 feet. The course of treatment is easily recoverable: the tiles are shattered, then reassembled and mounted on plywood. The larger shards are treated as pictorial backgrounds upon which Melchert outlines forms in dark glazes that hover between the organic and the inorganic, between potatoes and river stones. Finally, he inks in a background grid of evenly spaced circles, which, in each case, end at the irregular forms—ostensibly occluding the grid. The results are reminiscent of John Cage’s later graphic works, wherein nature in its lawless guise appears somehow both beneficent and accessible, its violence overcome by visual alertness and acceptance.

A couple of the tiles result from a slightly different procedure, and their great difference in expressiveness speaks to the delicate balance of the heterogeneous elements in the main body of work. In one, Melchert allows the glazes to run to the edges of the shards, as well as to fill the interiors of the irregular shapes. This small change, together with the dark glazes set against the whitest of backgrounds, seems to raise its voice to a shriek. In the other (perhaps a piece of leave-taking), Melchert replaces the grid with a mysterious numbering of the individual shards, as if each were catalogued archaeological finds, or sections of the sky on a star-chart. This piece is the sole one given an evocative title: How It Is, the allusion to the inaugural work of Samuel Beckett’s late phase perhaps intended to darken the sense of sublimity. This is as deeply satisfying a show, both in the individual pieces and the over-all conception, as any in recent memory. [Jim Melchert at Gallery Paule Anglim, June 15-July 16, 2011]

Shahzia Sikander’s show at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter McBean gallery recalls an overly familiar scenario: an artist of substantial gifts and great intelligence, searching for a theme, confronted with a curator who’s installation of the show would make Procrustes blush. How does the work fare? Worse than one might have hoped. Besides the perverse arrangement and the supposed one-size-fits-all theme of being an individual under post-colonial conditions, the works are accompanied by the curator Hou Hanru’s texts, the philistine literal-mindedness of which is not their greatest fault.  One is alarmed to learn that “China and the U. S.” are continents; that the motif of transformation “has preoccupied artists and writers since classical (?) times” (fairy tales? Kwaikutl masks?); and that China was once dominated by “Anglo-Saxons” (perhaps a hitherto unrecorded conquest of East Asia by King Ethelred?).  In the past decade Sikander has produced a number of digital animations, and most recently video works, while continuing to make her well-known works on paper, two small series of which are exhibited. Here, Sikander characteristically submits both figurative and abstract motifs to fantastic calligraphic elaborations, interweaving the burgeoning arabesques, filigrees, and cells to the point of fissure.  The elements flow together into a whirlpool wherein the distinctions among old compositional opposites of figure and ground, abstraction and representation, and positive and negative space become moot. The problem for Sikander for the past decade has been a certain sameness of effect in the results, along with the increasing pressure for a more direct way of addressing contemporary issues—a problematic close to that of Philip Guston in the mid-1960’s. The urgencies of elaboration and intertwining repeatedly result in a rough circle against a blank background, like a ball of twine set in the center of a small, unfurnished room.

Sikander has said that she turned to animation in order to present the temporal unfolding and transformation of her elements, and that in doing so, the problem of the intelligibility of the dissolving figures might be overcome. In Hou’s selection and arrangement, the animations crowd out the works on paper while offering little compensation. The animated elements are subjected—over and over—to a process of whirling, multiplication, dispersion, and dissipation, with no gain, as far as I can see, in intelligibility or thematic density. Of the videos, Gossamer, which shows the composer, Du Yun, allegedly dancing both in a ‘classical’ style and gyrating under a fright wig, is unspeakable. But a recent work mostly documenting South Asian military bands does contain a promising sequence of paragliders, each in a different bright color, one after another slowly twisting downward, against the cropped head of a soldier.  Behind them is billowing reddish smoke, presumably marks the landing target. Here might be a theme, and a new expressiveness, that could charge Sikander’s drawings. [“Shahzia Sikander: The exploding company man and other abstractions”, Walter and McBean Galleries, 800 Chestnut St., San Francisco, April 23-June 25, 2011]

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In 1967 Michel Foucault obtained a contract for a book on Manet, tentatively titled La Noir et la Surface. There’s no evidence to suggest that Foucault got far in the writing of the book, but something of its most general intended features is suggested by the contract and some remarks from Foucault’s writings in the 1960s.  Analogously to the treatment of ‘regimes’ of knowledge in his previous book Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things in English), Foucault would have treated European painting as a series of discrete regimes, where a regime is characterized by certain dominant rules: of the depiction of space; of light; of meaning; and of significance. Masaccio founded the ‘classical’ regime, which held sway until Manet. In his work on Magritte, Foucault was to write that the classical regime was governed by two principles: the unbridgeable distance between linguistic and pictorial representation; and the treatment of visual resemblance between items, say, between a visual work and a thing, as a representation, wherein the resembling mark represented, or failed to represent, the resembled thing. Contemporaneously, in a much quoted passage, Foucault claimed that Manet had done for painting what Flaubert had done for literature: where Flaubert’s work depended for its meaningfulness and semantic density upon libraries, Manet’s depended upon museums. It was not Manet’s particular references to Giorgione, Velásquez, and Goya as much as the sheer coexistence of their work in a single building that created the possibility of modern meanings.

One remnant of this project is now in English. The thin volume Manet and the Object of Painting is a translation of a lecture on Manet Foucault gave in Tunis in 1971. In it he argued that Manet made possible the painting of the twentieth century with the invention of the ‘picture-object’ (p. 31), or ‘painting-object’ (p. 79). Conceived and practiced as a painting-object, a painting is made and viewed “as materiality,” “as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves.” (p. 31)

The conception of the painting-object has three major dimensions: the treatments of space, and of light, and the place of the viewer. Manet’s treatment of these, while opening new possibilities of painting, also rejects the different classical treatments.  Whereas, with the use of linear perspective, Masaccio forged a well-ordered pictorial space, illuminated by a single, intelligible source of light, and depicted as if from a single viewing point, Manet blocked spatial recession and emphasized verticals and horizontals echoing the actual shape of the canvas, introduced multiple sources of light (including the actual light illuminating the painting itself ) and created multiple viewpoints. Manet’s picture-object thus has a kind of internal heterogeneity unavailable to classical European painting. It also induces in the viewer a new kind of mobility and responsiveness: “The picture appears like a space in front of which and by rapport with which one can move around.” (p. 78)

Foucault offers brief analyses of thirteen works of Manet in explication of this claim. The works treated under ‘Space’ highlight a newly shallow depth traversed by horizontals and verticals: the larger lines of trees and stiff figures internally echo the edge of the support; the smaller axes, such as the filigree of distant crossing ships’ masts, are magnifications of the weave of the canvas. This yields brutally truncated accounts of the “Music in the Tuileries” and “The Execution of Maximilian.” Even briefer but more intriguing are Foucault’s remarks about the “Saint-Lazare Station”; after noting the “same tricks” of the horizontals and verticals, he suggests that the gaze of the girl into the painting and the governess outward are a play with the recto and verso of the canvas. The viewer can neither meet their gazes nor share in the objects of their looks. Foucault calls this a “game of invisibility” that Manet is playing, and here and throughout the lecture, in a strange irruption of language reminiscent of Georges Bataille, Foucault characterizes this game as “vicious, malicious, and cruel” (p. 55; see also pp. 49, 68, 79). ‘Light’ gives brief accounts of three works, with Foucault stressing Manet’s use of multiple sources of light, in particular one seemingly coming from the place of the viewing, depriving Victorine Meurent’s body of modeling in “Luncheon on the Grass” and “Olympia.” And finally in the “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” Foucault notes that these subversions of the Classical and characteristics of the painting-object result in a work that excludes “every stable and defined place where we locate the viewer.” This explains “the enchantment and malaise that one feels in looking at it.” Only here does Foucault integrate the different aspects of the modern regime. An analysis of “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” would likely have been the virtuoso culminating explication of the book, as it was to be a decade later for T. J. Clark in The Painter of Modern Life.

So Foucault presents Manet as the founder of the modern system of painting, a system that remained inchoate through the nineteenth century but regulates twentieth-century painting. Manet inaugurates, then the next century practices the conception of an artistic picture as a ‘painting-object’. It is surprising that neither Foucault’s thoughts about Manet and museums, nor the claim about the two founding principles of classical painting, are mentioned in the lecture. The conception of the painting-object bears some similarity with Richard Wollheim’s nearly contemporaneous lecture “The Work of Art as Object,” in which Wollheim claimed that the dominant conception of a modern artwork is as a material object. But whereas Wollheim thought that this conception allowed a new kind of modern psychology to be expressed in visual art, Foucault ruthlessly treats the modern work as lacking any psychology. The painting-object conception, according to Foucault, later develops into abstraction, which he seems to understand wholly implausibly as a kind of non-representational play with materiality. But there’s a hint in the lecture of a different trajectory for this conception; when Manet is described as “amus(ing) himself” (p. 54) by playing with conventions, the foreshadowing of Duchamp is unmistakable.

An inevitable question for a contemporary reader is whether Foucault adds some perspective and associated insight to recent accounts of Manet. Michael Fried’s account is so involved and idiosyncratic as to disallow quick comparisons, but Foucault roughly agrees with Clark in finding a major source of the enduring fascination with Manet’s major works in their calculated incoherence.  For Clark this incoherence is in the service of presenting and reflecting on modern life as unintelligible. For Foucault this unintelligibility is, so to speak, a structural feature, generated out of the need to negate individually the convergent treatments of space, light, and the viewer in classical painting. Foucault of course rejected the idea that there was some ‘purpose’ structuring a regime; though founded by events named ‘Masaccio’ or ‘Manet’, an artistic regime is not some consciousness writ large, but rather an anonymous set of models and constraints governing what can show up in public space and be taken seriously. Nonetheless, in an unfortunate analogy with the end of The Order of Things’ prediction of the coming end of ‘man’, Foucault here ends with the fantasy that the painting-object will be “the fundamental condition” (p. 79) of the end of representation itself. The insight into the structural heterogeneity of twentieth-century painting disappears into a failed prophecy. And given his concern to in a single lecture to analyze Manet’s work as founding a new regime, there’s very little detail or subtle observation to savor.

Later Foucault developed his genealogical method, which subordinated the earlier so-called archeological method to the orientation to more piecemeal changes in practices and towards the end of his life he became interested in the question of how people might shape their own lives as if they were, or could be, works of art. As part of this last concern Foucault returned to Baudelaire’s account of modern life, which Clark among others was to make central to the understanding of Manet. The turns in Foucault’s thought were always surprising, but it would have been no great surprise if he had returned in late life to Manet, and offered a very different account.

Michel Foucault, Nicolas Bourriaud (Introduction), Matthew Barr (Translator), Manet and the Object of Painting. (London: Tate Publishing, 2010.  First published, 2005. ISBN1854378457. 80pp. $29.95)

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Seven years ago in his Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet, What Happened to Art Criticism, James Elkins claimed that art criticism is in a state of crisis worldwide. The chief marks of this crisis are on the one hand the omnipresence of art writing (academic, essayistic, journalistic,) and on the other its lack of common ground. A sign of this latter is the abandonment of judgment , because to offer a judgment, and to convincingly sustain what’s offered, presupposes the ability to say why something matters or does not. Elkins insist that a simple return to a more judgmental art criticism is unworkable, because necessarily afflicted with “anachronism and historical naivete.” Still he hopes for an ambitious sort of criticism that exhibits three virtues: it would relate contemporary with past artworks; practice a kind of reflexivity in writing and then reflect upon the need for and the limits of its judgments; and it would attempt to take the measure of modern art. Given what Elkins says throughout the book about the conditions under which contemporary art criticism is practiced, this renewed and improved criticism seems unlikely to arise, and the conditions under which it would flourish are not on the horizon. Elkins turns the unlikely into the impossible by further demanding that art writers show intellectual responsibility by reading “everything,” a task unfulfilled by anyone since Milton.

Into the fray comes the distinguished linguist Roy Harris who has published, also with Prickly Pear, his own pamphlet, The Great Debate About Art. Harris takes up Elkins’ diagnosis and places it within the long history of discussing art, claiming, however, that as something worth analyzing and debating, art is over. The arts continue: painters shall paint, sculptors sculpt, and installers install; but the sort of ambitious criticism Elkins urges shall be stillborn. This is not because criticism won’t have works to attach itself to, but because the conditions for criticism mattering are long gone. The arts died with Dada, since which criticism has been a kind of diversion of attention from their absence. Art’s mattering was expressed in the urgent modernist questions: Is this art? Is it good or great art? Can it stand comparison with the great works of the past? But the break with the past renders the debate moot.

Harris’s pamphlet elaborates an account given in a previous book, The Necessity of Artspeak, wherein he insisted that all arts are conceptualized in terms of linguistic categories, but that not all arts are accompanied by incessant chatter. ‘Artspeak’ arises when some of a culture’s arts come to seem gratuitous or lacking an evident function. With modern art’s break with tradition, the “supercategory” of Art became problematic, and the discourse fragmented, as Elkins had argued.

The newer book, if not an obituary, diagnoses a terminal condition: the Great Debate is over. Harris’s prime exhibit is the chatter that surrounds the Turner Prize and the “boringly predictable, carefully orchestrated fuss about the annual winner” (p. 93). He is particularly exercised by a lecture given in 2000 by Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, which hosts the prize, and chairman of the Turner jury, in which Serota championed a work by Michael Craig-Martin, “An Oak Tree” (1973). The work consisted of a glass of tap water on a shelf, accompanied by a text ‘explaining’ that the work is not symbolic because the artist has as a matter of fact changed the glass of water into an oak tree. Serota undertakes a predictable set of verbal gymnastics to explain and justify the work, which Harris takes to illustrate the structure, both deep and incoherent, of contemporary artspeak.

Modern artspeak, according to Harris, was inaugurated by the proclamation of the doctrine of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ at the very beginning of the 19th Century by the great French political philosopher Benjamin Constant. The problem  (more of a problem for artspeak than for art-making) is that the doctrine is unintelligible: nothing is purely for its own sake. Harris claims that the acceptance of the doctrine produces the modernist obsession with the ontological status of art and of particular artworks. But this questioning is accompanied by an unthematised concern for what sort of language  could address these concerns. With some originality and considerable insight, Harris sees three ways of answering these modern questions: the institutionalist, familiar to readers of Anglo-American philosophy from the writings of George Dickey, who considers the social acts of artworld professionals as conferring the status of art upon otherwise unendowed artifacts; the idiocentric, which claims that artistic status is conferred as the effect of an essentially private recognition of an artifact’s viewer; and the conceptualist, which centers on the claim that an artifact is an artwork if it is or embodies the right sort of idea, a claim that is as commonly held as it is difficult to state intelligibly.

Anyone familiar with discussion of recent art will, I think, recognize these three ways. Harris notes how Serota moves unwittingly among them, as they are sufficiently indeterminate in content and scope to blend unnoticeably: Criag-Martin’s piece is art because displayed in a gallery and approved by Serota (institutionalist); the accompanying writing declares to those who have eyes to read, if not to see, its status as art (idiocentric); and the role of the material is exclusively its use as a vehicle for the idea (conceptualist). Harris does not spare his reader other examples of contemporary artspeak, including the inevitable random quote from Rosalind Krauss, “so bad as to test the limits of comprehension”.

Although it is well and interestingly put, none of this seems to me in the least bit controversial, except in the choice of examples. But Harris also wishes to argue a much larger claim, that speaking not just about ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ but about art as such, is a futile attempt to valorize a set of the world’s artifacts. He claims that ‘art’, like religion, politics, law, and economy, is nothing but a kind of contingent linguistic category of the most general sort, a ‘metacategory’. The point of the use of the category of ‘art’ is to collect otherwise disparate phenomena, the ‘arts’, in order to use them to provide models for analyzing each other, create metaphors for each other (such as “architecture is frozen music”), and to organize discussion about the need for and uses of the arts. Harris interestingly notes that the applied arts are much less discussed than the so-called fine arts, supposedly because the former are more directly and transparently related to the satisfaction of needs. But the metacategory of art has collapsed under the two burdens of attempting to justify something ‘for-its-own-sake’, and of holding together the unsurveyable breadth of the visual arts since Dada. The persistence of the unintelligible trio of justification (institutionalist/idiocentric/conceptualist)  is only ever an increasingly failing attempt at deceiving ourselves into thinking that there is some secure basis of judgment in the diverse contemporary visual arts. Harris suggests that this state is coming to an end, but there is no reason to hope for Elkins-style ambitious criticism: as ‘art’ collapses, artspeak becomes a dialect of a much broader contemporary discourse, ‘mediaspeak’. What were formerly thought of as works of art are now considered (potentially) mass amusements, and what were once art critics will increasingly become servants of the entertainment industry.

There is some truth in this larger story, but many will  balk at the scope of Harris’s diagnosis. One runs into the limits of trying to talk about artspeak without talking about works of visual art as inducing and guiding irreducibly visual (and non- or pre-linguistic) experiences. In a strange chapter of what he calls the art of “I spy,” Harris claims that the basic drive in Western art is to produce a visual image of linguistic items: that table in Van Eyck, for example, looks just like a ‘real’ (that is, linguistically categorized) table. This unappealing and implausible claim is linguistic reductionism with a vengeance, and reads like a very exaggerated distortion of the least durable of the great Ernst Gombrich’s themes, the story of the rise of naturalism in Western art. Oddly, it is the large theme of Harris’s important work in linguistics that language gains whatever meaning it has only in its primary context of use; so on Harris’s own view artspeak should be analyzed in relation to the particular works it aims to elucidate and justify. Craig-Martin’s piece is not untypical of contemporary art, but it is by no means paradigmatic or exhaustive of it. But if, as Harris acknowledges, paintings and sculptures and installations will continue to be made, people will continue to discuss them. But also (and here’s the point missing in Harris’s account) some of these makers will continue to aim to produce works that are, to the maximum, meaningfully and richly self-reflexive; and correlatively the makers and the viewers of the works will continue to evoke in language some sense of these meanings, and to place these works historically. If so, there will be some artspeak that cannot be a type of mediaspeak. Whether this future artspeak is more than a highly marginalized activity, only time, as they say, will tell.

Roy Harris, The Great Debate About Art, 2010. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, ISBN 9780984201006, 130 pages, $12.95

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The Berkeley Art Museum’s “Human/Nature” show offers the results of a UNESCO-funded project in which eight artists were matched with an imperiled region of their choice. Thus by design, the show is a revealing jumble, expressing something of what it has come to mean to respond to a place (or site, region, niche), and something of what it can no longer mean. Conspicuously absent are two of the great historical exemplars of response to place: that monument of the long labor of the locals, like Wordsworth’s Michael and his unfinished Sheep-fold; and the more recently prominent model of artistic self-effacement in ecological art, where place is all, and artists put themselves in the service of vivifying or restoring a site, while covering the traces of their own activity. Here most of the works are in the artists’ signature styles, conveying the sense that these are just the most recent products of long artistic mid-careers. The surprising commonality here is the prominence of pedagogy, the artists passing on the knowledge gained in their hithering and thithering from home to region to museum.

The work that initially seems closest to the Romantic evocation of place is that of Marcos Ramirez Erre, who has installed a version of a building, part home,  part shrine, from the Yunnan region of southwestern China. There are two video monitors on each long side of the building; one shows in real time the interior activities of cooking, playing, and eating, the other the construction of a building. An evocation of place? Well, yes, but the experience is aversive: the building seems crammed into its space, hunched just below the ceiling, its dark wood somehow foreboding in the underlit gallery. Its few decorative tiles, on the other hand, are seen as if from too close, which gives their floral patterns, which ought to be highlights, an apotropaic quality. This is a romanticism stripped of the fantasy that the representation of alien places is in the service of the viewer’s psychic integration. One is instead confronted with something unrecoverably alien, and that is unconcerned with what you think of it.

The unadorned pedagogical impulse is apparent in Mark Dion’s Mobile Ranger Library, a moveable kiosk displaying the books and maps you’ll need to make the most of your trip to Komodo National Park in Indonesia. Rigo 23’s works from the Atlantic Forest Southwest Reserve in Brazil are crowd-pleasers, and he recruited the labor of crowds of indigenous makers into them. The threats of habitat-loss and environmental destruction are seen through the now oddly atavistic metaphor of atomic weaponry. In Cry For Help, statuettes and maquettes seem to cascade from a large basket suspended over the gallery, or “Struggle For Life” to populate a nuclear submarine that has the low-tech appeal of a vacation cruise on a working trawler. Of the show’s works of pedagogical recruitment, Xu Bing’s is the nerviest and most unsettling: He taught an art class to children in Kenya and gave them the project of calligrammatic rendering the local trees with combined pictorial and linguistic devices. He then copied the results in Chinese ink-and-brush style into a single composition. Across the top, in half presented and half hidden in an English inscription in Xu’s invented quasi-ideogrammatic script, he proclaims that he has “copied the work of the children just as if I were copying from a book of old masters.” The children, he adds, are part of nature, like trees. “You must respect them.”

The two most artistically achieve works take something like Xu Bing’s achievement as given, and then take one more step. Ann Hamilton’s step is forwards: she evokes the symbiosis of humans and nature in the Galapagos through mixed sound recordings of birds cries and children’s chants..In her installation’s niche she circulates just below the ceiling images from a camera whose lens is centered on a water’s surface. The work regains something of the intensity of the Romantic evocation of place with its disillusioned inclusion of the artist’s movements and bare technological bits included among the constituents of place.

Diana Thater, forges another of her signature video installations from her trip to a South African wetlands preserve, probing animal consciousness in images presented across a skewed grid of monitors. The work earns its central placement in the show by recruiting the viewer’s movement down the museum’s central walkway into the piece.  The shifting viewing height and distance intensifies the splintered grid’s suggestion of the only ever partial and ephemeral glimpse we have of animals. But Thater’s step beyond Xu’s achievement is a step back: she renounces concern for a human/nature symbiosis, and instead launches herself with quixotic ferocity towards an unknowable other. Like the great autistic animal researcher Temple Grandin, she treats the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s answer to the question “What is it like to be a bat?”—Nagel thinks we cannot so much as imagine a coherent answer—as a provocation. One might expect that the project of an American artist evoking a bioregion in Africa would allude to Peter Kubelka’s heavily ironic and self-ironizing  experimental film classic “Unsere Afrikareise”, wherein German bwanas and their wives mingle with the natives and gun down a rhino or two; but Thater is post-irony. Her work perhaps best fulfills at least one hope motivating such a project, that the work will be a plunge into otherness, and one where the artist takes the viewer along.

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