Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde

REVOLUTIONARY TIME AND

THE AVANT-GARDE

REVOLUTIONARY

TIME AND THE

AVANT-GARDE

John Roberts

First published by Verso 2015

© John Roberts 2015

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-913-4 (PB)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-912-7 (HC)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-914-1 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-915-8 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roberts, John, 1955–

Revolutionary time and the avant-garde / John Roberts.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-78168-913-4 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-78168-913-4 (paperback) – ISBN 978-1-78168-914-1 (ebook, US) – ISBN 978-1-78168-915-8 (ebook, UK)

1. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) 2. Art–Philosophy. I. Title.

BH301.A94R63 2015

701–dc23

2015013225

Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Press

To my daughter, Gilda

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Avant-Garde After Avant-Gardism

1. Art, Negation and the Avant-Garde

2. Autonomy and the Avant-Garde

3. Belatedness, Internationalism and the Avant-Garde

4. The Avant-Garde and Praxis: Metastasis, Situatedness and the Topological Turn

Conclusion: Crisis, Stratification and the Avant-Garde

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

The arguments in this book have been in gestation since the early part of the millennium, when I began rethinking the function and role of the avant-garde. As such, my writing has unfolded in response to two key issues: the increasing economic crisis – and shifts in the new digital economy and the labour–capital relation – and the expanded post-conceptual terrain of artistic practice. Importantly, these issues overlap, redefining the functions and place of art, and, as such, transforming how we think of the relationship between artistic labour (would-be free labour) and non-artistic labour on a global basis. Indeed, the international landscape of art’s production and reception is largely unrecognizable from twenty-five years ago. In this respect a great deal of art criticism and art history is now patently inadequate to the transformed horizons and thinking of contemporary art and culture. In fact what is at stake, more broadly, is a complete re-periodization of art in the twentieth century in order to shift its reified narratives and categories and their dreary intimacy with the scholarship of museum and market alike. A lot of stripping out and structural readjustment will need to be done, rather than glamorous fine-tuning or picaresque redecorating. Consequently, there is a fundamental political and philosophical requirement to forge a new language of critical engagement with the new relations of production and reception, to continue to define another place for art, a transformative place, an ‘unmarked place’, that brings the futures past of art into new constellations of meaning and new lines of engagement. This is an active and partisan requirement, then, in the face of an increasing authoritarian de-historicization of art and continuing mourning for some lost (modernist) object, or obversely, the fantasy of social connection, or ‘promise of the promise’, and all the other revived transcendental machinery of flight or denial. Thus what is required is neither a new romantic spontaneity of the non-concept to get us ‘through’ theory (à la Deleuze or Latour), nor the redemption of the quotidian or picturesque in order to make us feel nostalgic about Labourism, as in T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner’s revivification of L. S. Lowry (Tate 2013). That the politics of art in the latter are reduced to a phantasm of a phantasm has real political implications here: it locks the spectator into a supine, ‘this is all-we-can-hope-for’ from art and political transformation. English parochialism meets disappointed cultural and political expectations is a familiar story on these shores, reeling in former leftists to do the work of ‘reason’ and ‘reasonableness’ once the prospect of radical change has receded, but here there is a needling, disgruntled anti-avant-gardism, as if to speak of the avant-garde is to invoke the hideous spectre of infantilism. What is the greater infantilism, though – to take the sleep of capitalist temporality for reality, or to wish to be wakeful at all costs? What is required on the radical left is an unabashed commitment to theoretical creativity and ambition and lack of political fear; the construction of research programmes rather than melancholic gazes and beatific (national-popular) swooning.

Some of the terms and concepts I have formulated in order to map and analyse the changes of contemporary art and a defence of the avant-garde may be familiar (post-art, deflationary critique, post-conceptualization, asociality) but most will not (autonomy-as-the-critique-of-autonomy, ‘art after art in the expanded field’, the ‘suspensive’ avant-garde, adisciplinary research, situatedness, post-visualization, metastasis, the centrifugal spectator, realized reflexivity, the second economy, internationalization of the margins). Nevertheless, in both instances, the intention is not just to provide a novel array of concepts, but, rather, to give shape and coherence to the new forces and relations in art.

A number of people and events over the years have been important in the development of my thinking on the avant-garde. I would like to thank David Cunningham for inviting me to speak at ‘Returns of the Avant-Garde … Post-War Movements’, University of Westminster, 24–25 November 2000; to David Hopkins for inviting me to speak at ‘Mapping the Neo-Avant-Garde: Theorising Art, Literature, Music and Film in the 1950s and 60s’, University of Edinburgh, 23–25 September 2005; to Dmitry Vilensky and David Riff from Chto Delat for inviting me to share a platform with them on the theme of the avant-garde at Documenta 12 in Kassel, 16 August 2007; to Dean Kenning for inviting me to participate in the symposium ‘Art: What Is the Use?’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 11 January 2011; to Mark Dunhill and George Unsworth for inviting me to present my paper ‘Art After Art in the Expanded Field’ at the Cochrane Theatre, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, 7 February 2011; to Devin Fore for inviting me to present my ideas on the contemporary avant-garde to the Slavic Department at Princeton University on 11 October 2011 as part of the lecture series ‘Bolsheviks Without Borders’ (the paper, ‘Against Cannibalism: Chto Delat, Russia and the New Avant-Garde’, forms part of chapter 4); to Viktor Misiano for inviting me to speak on the avant-garde as part of the curating summer school ‘Doing Exhibitions Politically’ at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, 2–21 July 2012; to Joseph Backstein for inviting me to speak at the conference ‘Judgement Day or an Issue of Aesthetical Judgement’ at the Polytechnical Museum as part of the Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 28–29 September 2012; to Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks for inviting my PhD. students Carina Brand, Chris Gomersall and Michael Birchall and myself to speak at the avant-garde workshop ‘The Avant-Garde: A History, a Theory, a Politics?’ at Edinburgh University, 12–13 June 2013; and to Ulrich Steinberg for inviting me to the Hochshule in Karlsruhe in January 2014 to discuss my ideas on Peter Bürger and the avant-garde – and also for his longstanding support. In addition, thanks to Rita Felski for publishing my ‘Revolutionary Pathos, Negation and the Suspensive Avant-Garde’ in New Literary History, no. 41, in 2010, as part of a special issue on the avant-garde. Her cordial invitation enabled me to further develop my historical, political and philosophical thinking on the avant-garde for this book. And finally, thanks to Euripides Altintzoglou and Chris Gomersall for their comments on the manuscript. Some of the chapters have been published in abbreviated form: A few sections of ‘Avant-Garde After Avant-Gardism’ were published in Chto Delat, no. 17, 2007. The first part of chapter 1 was published as ‘Art and Its Negations’ by Rasheed Aareen in Third Text, no. 104, 2010, and in German by Frank Berberich in Lettre International, no. 107, 2013; the second part of chapter 1 was published as ‘On the Limitations of Negation in Badiou’s Theory of Art’, in Journal of Visual Art, no. 3, 2008, edited by Mary Anne Francis. Parts of chapter 4 were published as ‘Art and Praxis: Metastasis, Legibility, Situatedness’ in The Noologists Handbook and Other Recent Art Experiments 2008–12, edited by Suzana Milevska (Archive Books, Berlin, 2013) and ‘Art, Politics and the Topological Turn’ in Art Beyond the Market, edited by Karen van den Berg (Sternberg Press, New York, 2013). The section ‘The Ends of Art’ was first written as an (unpublished) discussion document for the show ‘The Ends of Art’, curated by Euripides Altintzoglou at Beton 7 Gallery in Athens, 5–26 July 2013, and the section ‘Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour’ was published in ECONOMY: Art and the Subject After Postmodernism, edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (Liverpool University Press, 2015).

INTRODUCTION

The Avant-Garde After

Avant-Gardism

The avant-garde is currently much maligned and misunderstood. Treated overwhelmingly as a historical category by conservatives, postmodernists and revolutionaries alike in the wake of the original avant-garde, its continuing dynamism and critical content has been either denied or foreshortened. Indeed in Europe and North America in the 1980s and 1990s – down to the proto-avant-gardism of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou today – it has suffered from caricature or enfeeblement. Too often politics steps in to save the art, or art steps in to diffuse the politics, leaving the art and politics separated.¹ But far from the avant-garde disappearing as an active possibility after its destruction by the combined counterrevolutionary forces of fascism and Stalinism at the end of the 1930s, it has remained a compelling pole of attraction for artists since 1945, and, as such, an unyielding source of artistic re-adaptation and re-theorization. This is because the avant-garde in its revolutionary forms produced a profound shift in expectations about art that coincided with the demise of traditional bourgeois cultural relations and practices and bourgeois modes of aesthetic judgement. In attacking the academy and artisanal modes of artistic practice – which were focused principally on painting and freestanding sculpture – art liberated itself from the constraints of craft-specificity in order to place itself within the advanced technical relations of the epoch (photography, film, mass production itself). This required a fundamental epistemological and cultural reorganization of art’s modes of production and reception and the identity of the artist. The category of art was no longer embedded in delimited notions of artisanal artisticness and authorship – painterly or sculptural expression – but in the transmaterial and post-disciplinary realm of the ‘thought experiment’. The fundamental shift initiated by modernism, then, was less the move to painterly abstraction than the subsumption of art under the logic of art’s conceptual and formal conjunction. In other words, art embraced ‘general social technique’ as the necessary means by which its opening up to autonomy was to be sustained against its reduction to tradition and academic precedent.

In these terms painting could no longer act as the supreme arbiter of value, given that for art to advance and make sense of its historical conditions of emergence, it had to break with its own retarded conditions of conceptualization. This is why the attempt to think art solely through painting in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War produces its own evasions and symptomal disorders, because whichever way the open syntax of painting might be defended, the openness of this syntax itself is underdetermined – that is, it has no cultural purchase as social technique and, as such, has an attenuated relationship to the extra-artistic real. This is why, although painters continue to paint, it is impossible to imagine an advanced journal of painting today: for whatever tales of formal complexity might be spun from painting’s recent histories, it cannot have any heteronomous purchase on the extra-artistic. All it can provide structurally is a melancholic allure in which the debilitated zones of ‘personal creativity’ are offered as a resistance to theory and a resistance to political praxis. Even those painterly practices that themselves resist this option (such as in the work of Gerhard Richter) are themselves caught up in its dilemma: to continue the historical achievements of painting by ‘other means’. Hence, in the years 1915–39 art looks in two directions simultaneously in order to escape the dismal prospects of a vacuous personal creativity or melancholic staging of painting’s own end game. Inwardly, there is a return to the studio as a Renaissance-type studiolo (intellectual study), and outwardly, an attachment to the artist as technician or operator in which the making of meaning is identifiable with the execution of art as a concept, as a speculative discourse on art’s multiple formal and cognitive possibilities. The artist, as a result, takes it as given that freeing the artist’s expressive hand from this process is the best means of sustaining the process of conceptualization. Seven axioms present themselves as a consequence of this shift.

1. Art is not a thing or set of discrete things, but an evental process in which objects may or may not play a part, and, therefore, ultimately do not fix the possible meanings, strategies or outcomes of art.

2. Art as an evental process is determined by its social and political conditions of emergence and possibility.

3. Art as an evental process, determined by its social and political conditions of emergence and possibility, is theoretically driven, insofar as making sense of these conditions means that practice and theory are coextensive.

4. As a theoretically driven set of practices necessarily embedded in the conflicts and divisions of the social world, art produces transformative effects and affects in the world.

5. As a theoretically driven set of socially transformative practices, art is at all times a collective or group enterprise, insofar as artists participate with other artists, technicians, workers and non-artists directly or indirectly in the social division of labour; this, in turn, presupposes art’s dissolution into general social technique.

6. The function of the artist and the concept of artistic skill are the specific outcome of this process of general social technique; authorship is first and foremost interdisciplinary and processual.

7. Art, as a theoretically driven set of transformative practices, sets itself the historical and critical task of incorporating its speculative strategies and practices into the advanced scientific and technological forms of general social technique; art participates in the advanced relations of production.

The question of art’s conceptualization, then, is less a localized stylistic phenomenon than an ontological priority of the modern division of labour, and, as such, it is indivisible from the supersession of art’s traditional mimetic and motor functions. This is why, in the epoch of art’s traditional demise, these axioms are inescapably Hegelian, in defiance of all the feeble and anti-historical diatribes against the erosion of artistic skill and value: in defining the end of art’s traditional mimetic function as the ‘end of art’, Hegel opens out a space in which the possibilities and limits of art can be articulated and defended as a necessary task of modernity. As such, the recurring etiolated humanist histories of art in the twentieth century (bourgeois and leftist alike), which are increasingly revived today, do violence to the post-classical, post-traditional and ultimately ‘post-art’ condition of art, rendering incomprehensible its extended conceptualization. In The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (2007),² I explored this fundamental historical shift through the development of a labour theory of culture in which the relationship between skill-deskilling-reskilling formed a dialectical triad for understanding art’s self-negating place within the intellectual and social division of labour. In this book, however, my concern is the mediating category of the avant-garde within this dialectic. For it is precisely the avant-garde as a space of the non-identitary tasks of revolution and modernity – pursued from within the technical challenges of art’s post-art status – that brings art’s conceptual self-articulation (under the emancipatory name of the ‘end of art’) to self-consciousness. In defining why this is so, we therefore first need to outline why Hegel, the ‘end of art’ and conceptualization are not such strange companions as one would initially assume. For a defence of the avant-garde is fundamentally about establishing an adequate periodization of the modern.

Hegel and the Ends of Art

In writing on art after the 1960s the ‘end of art’ is a recurring fantasy of liberation or a nightmare of decline: art is somehow seen as having arrived at a stage free of its formal autonomy after the rise of the ready-made and the critique of authorship, and, as such, is now waiting to enter – or has already entered – into everyday experience and the realm of non-artistic technique, or, conversely, is seen as being fatally caught up in a spiral of decadent self-destruction as a result of this history, and therefore, as being desperate to recover a sense of aesthetic order. If both positions see art’s history as burdened by repeated reflection on its own condition of possibility, for the former this is wholly positive, while for the latter this is largely negative. This is because the first position sees itself, essentially, as a break with the past in order to refunction ‘art’ beyond art, whereas the second position sees the would-be terminal crisis of art as the spiritual or even emancipatory prelude to the restoration of a stable set of artistic skills and values. Thus, if both arguments see the ‘end of art’ from diametrically opposed positions, they nonetheless both feel the claims of the art of the present as intolerable, as something that cannot go on in the same way to the same ends. There has to be a shakedown, here, now. ‘The end of art’, then, is an intoxicating notion, for it assumes that art can no longer make its way in the world, without (1) giving up its present identity as art in order to transform itself into a living force in everyday life, or (2) discarding its long and hard-won reflection on its conditions of possibility in order to reclaim its proper and rightful identity as an integrated aesthetic experience. This means that the present of art under the conditions of art’s extended modernity is servile to art’s explicit exhaustion as a modernizing idea, be it as a defence of autonomy, for the first position, or as a defence of art’s self-abolition, for the second position. Both arguments, consequently – of either break or restoration – are periodizing claims on the present, the recent past and future of art. They, in a sense, proclaim the ‘end of art’ in the form of a declaration about the (true) modernity of the present. For the first position, the present represents a ‘time of the now’ that needs to be grasped as an instance of unfulfilled modernity; for the second position, the present is held to reinforce an outmoded modernity, a dead weight that needs to be swept away without regret in order to bring art into balance with the past. In a significant sense, therefore, these reflections on art’s periodization are concerned with an older debate about capitalism and modernity: on the one hand, capitalism and modernity are the (conflicted) gateway to a future foretold, and on the other hand, modernity (if not capitalism) is the very impediment that puts a brake on a viable future, and, as such, needs to be destroyed. Broadly, the first periodization encourages us to define the great avant-garde transformation in the means and ends of art in the first two decades of the twentieth century as the putting in place of art’s critical renewal, and the second sees the avant-garde as the very source of art’s historical problems, the trigger for the nihilistic auto-destruction of art under modernity.

The prestige of the former position, though, has been far greater than the prestige of the latter over the last thirty years. Indeed, the idea of art as in terminal and decadent decline as a result of an essential loss of stable artistic skills (precisely painterly skills) has little support beyond the outré and marginal defenders of certain craft practices. There are certainly pockets of painterly modernist resistance to the rise of post-conceptual practice today, yet this resistance rarely amounts, inside the professional bounds of the official art world, to an ontological dismissal of the legacy of the avant-garde tout court. This is because, whatever criticisms and reservations defenders of the modernist painterly tradition might have of the post-conceptual present, there can be no abandonment of the modern per se without the intellectual destruction of modern painting itself. This is because, in attacking artistic modernity it is difficult, by extension, not to attack capitalist modernity, leaving very little space to defend the modern separate from the critique of political economy; this is why to defend a pre-modern traditionalism, or classicism, or other integral aesthetic position under advanced capitalism becomes a phantasm, an imaginary reconciliation of what cannot be reconciled.

The classification of the epoch of the contemporary as a period of insuperable decline, therefore, usually comes from outside the professional orbit or critical-theoretical realm of art and, accordingly, is invariably framed and defined by a populist ressentiment. So, the ‘end of art’ in these terms has been a recurring motif when the defence of the contemporary has been seen as refusing or making no space for the ‘common spectator’. Consequently, this common spectator has taken the form of not just a rightist rejection of modern art and contemporary art’s disrespect for traditional skills and painterly pictorial integrity, but also a leftist dismissal of contemporary art’s would-be elitism and obscurantism. Indeed, this kind of periodization, on both the left and right, tends to mobilize a humanist religiosity in its critique of what it perceives as the loss of direction and reason in art: art has lost touch with the ‘human’ and its everyday numinosity; therefore, in order for it to contribute to the repair of the social bond it must invoke and replenish the aesthetic achievements of the past.³ But if the social (anti-capitalist) limits of this humanist religiosity are soon reached, they nonetheless have a powerful ‘second life’ in humanism’s mobilization of the ‘aesthetic’ against theoretical abstraction and conceptualization. This is where the ‘end of art’ continually finds its advocates on both the right and left, secular and religious. For, in conflating stable artistic skills with the human and universal values, the ‘conceptualization’ of art since the 1960s has been associated with the enfeebled activities of a professional clerisy: that is, the recourse to art-as-Idea, the abandonment of painterly visuality and expression, are no more and no less than the imposition of a professionalized and bureaucratic modernity on art. In conditions, therefore, where humanism cannot or will not make good its critique of modernity as a critique of capitalism, this conflation of ‘conceptualization’ and theoretical abstraction with the ‘end of art’ is perhaps the most common version of the humanist periodization of art’s modernity today. Ideas as art, and about art, can only get in the way of the intense aesthetic encounter between the spectator and the artwork. As a result, this argument tends to exist as the fall-back position when the market influence of the remnants of the painterly modernist canon is threatened, as it is today, by the increasing growth and influence of art’s second economy (that precarious realm of under-monetized and unwaged artistic activity that the majority of artists now operate within). Much of this critique of ‘conceptualization’ is low level and undertheorized, so, when it does burst out and cohere into an intellectually ambitious position, it is worth acknowledging, particularly when it emerges from within the art world itself. Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art is beautifully symptomatic in this respect.⁴ In fact, it etches a sharp line around the humanist account of the ‘end of art’ that allows us to clarify why the humanist reading of the ‘end of art’, in its move against ‘conceptualization’, is invariably apocalyptic in its religiosity.

Kuspit draws on the legacy of the humanist temporalization of modern art as decadent and self-alienating in order to reclaim what he sees as the lost aesthetic intensity of authentic artistic expression. In this he identifies value in art above all else with what he calls the artist’s expressive transformation of aesthetic materials, a process that is far more specific than one might assume. Thus, his attack on ‘conceptualization’ is not just directed towards Duchamp and his post-conceptual legacy – most obviously – but the entropic tendencies he identities more broadly with the modernist, painterly canon itself. If Duchamp’s use of the readymade is ‘a pathetic mockery of art and of the creative act’,⁵ Barnett Newman’s zip-canvases are an ‘afterthought of the primal aesthetic encounter’.⁶ Duchamp and Newman

do not realize that the process of making a work of art – even an abortive non-aesthetic work of art such as the readymade – is itself a transformative aesthetic experience. They do not realize that the creative process is an aesthetic process, and that the work of art that results from it is the result of the aesthetic transformation of everyday experience of reality, thus affording a fresh experience of it.⁷

This is the ‘end of art’, then, as a condemnation of what is perceived as the ‘weak’ subjectivity of the contemporary artist and spectator – a subjectivity content with the supine or submissive manipulation, assimilation or paring away of aesthetic materials. And this is why the ruling entropic conditions of art find their direct expression, Kuspit argues, in a hatred of sensuous form and craft skills. Art’s self-critique turns into a resentment of the strong artist who places painterly solitude and the necessary distance of art from life above that of the noise of art’s mediafication and ‘cultural distribution’. In these terms, Kuspit pours scorn on a whole range of practices and forms – from performance, to photography, to installation art – that he designates pejoratively as ‘post-aesthetic’ and ‘post-art’ and describes as seeking to ‘blur’ art and life. ‘Life has clearly won the competition which is why art joins in – or rather is colonized by it. Art becomes humble and full of self-doubt as a result of its capitulation.’⁸ If this condemnation of post-aesthetic ‘decadence’ is overly familiar, it is not surprising, because it recalls in quite stark terms early twentieth-century post-Nietzschean German art history and critical theory, which identifies the sickness of modernity with the ‘objectivity’ of technology and the corrupting assimilation of art into Idea, and which has become the lingua franca of various versions of technophobic critical theory since the 1930s.⁹ As such this post-Nietzschean expressionism has become the other, if less assertive, voice of ‘end of art’ humanism’s critique of theoretical abstraction and conceptualization: contemporary art is sick and entropic because it takes life away from the artist’s powers of aesthetic irreconcilability. Without the intense engagement of long-term aesthetic transformation in the studio, the artist is subject to the ‘post-art’ lures of weak subjectivity, and then, fatally, to the political vicissitudes of art as life. This is why, for Kuspit, the ‘end of art’ under the regime of post-aesthetics and post-art represents the end of the ‘religion of art’, in which art’s necessary illusions prepare a ‘gateway to the realm of spirit’.¹⁰ It is precisely art’s indifference to the world that allows the spectator to enter its aesthetic particulars as a civilized ‘sanctuary from the barbarism of the world’,¹¹ thereby creating a psychic space ‘in which we can own ourselves and survive’.¹²

Kuspit’s defence of a radical subjectivity in an administered world is a perverse and ahistorical assessment of ‘aesthetics’, ‘politics’ and ‘value’, and, as such, does violence to the emergence of conceptualization in art as an emancipatory horizon. His use of Hegel and the concept of ‘spirit’ in order to ratify his humanist ‘end of art’ is, therefore, highly contentious. For Hegel, art is far from being entropic under modernity; rather, under the modern division of labour the loss of the traditional function of art represents a profound expansion and renewal of art.¹³ So when Hegel talks famously about the ‘end of art’ in his reflections on early romanticism he is not referring to anything so simple-minded as the end of an ‘integral art’, or laying claim to a lost realm of sensibility, as if mourning for a lost world of unity between reason and sense. On the contrary, early romantic art presages a new sensibility in which art necessarily makes its way in the world through art transcending itself as art. As he argues in the Aesthetics: ‘Romantic art is the self-transformation of art within its own sphere and the form of art itself.’¹⁴ And crucial to this, contra Kuspit and the humanist ‘end of art’ school, Hegel’s position is essentially a critique of the autonomy of the aesthetic: that is, he rejects the notion of the aesthetic as an invariable norm against which artistic quality and value might be measured.¹⁵ For Hegel the final demise after romanticism of an aesthetics based on an integrated account of beauty is precisely what opens up aesthetic judgement to new kinds of evaluation, because once the normative place of beauty is destroyed there is no obvious way to logically isolate aesthetic judgement. Hence the ‘concept’ of art can change depending on the social agreements under which art develops. Indeed, for Hegel what makes art modern is precisely this process of the socialization of its practices and judgements. But Hegel makes an additionally important and fascinating qualitative assessment of this conceptual post-romantic shift: art is in some sense more vital, more encompassing than its previous pre-modern incarnations – not because artists in the modern period now make better art, but because judgements of quality are now selfconsciously integral to artistic production and reception, leading humans to freely externalize themselves in artistic practice. Externalization, here, though, does not simply mean the formalization of self-expression, but the intellectual and collective self-recognition of human beings in the transformative processes of artistic production, or Bildung. Art, therefore, is not the place where sensuousness per se is secured, but rather, the means by which spirit (intellectual reflection and struggle) is made manifest. Which is not to say, thereby, that the artwork is equivalent to a process of intellection, of the execution of ‘ideas’, but rather, that ‘the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but, despite its sensuousness, is no longer a purely material existent either.’¹⁶ This makes Hegel’s writing on art profoundly anti-classical and anti-aesthetic and also remarkably attuned to modern art in the twentieth century. As Robert Pippin, in ‘What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)’, argues, ‘The history of art for Hegel represents a kind of gradual dematerialization or developing spiritualization of all forms of self-understanding’, producing ‘what could be called something like greater abstraction in the means of representation.’¹⁷ In other words, for Hegel the post-romantic condition of art is one of realized reflexivity.

The ‘end of art’, then, has two distinct meanings in Hegel’s thinking that give different emphases to the issue of art’s ‘cessation’. On the one hand, under the new post-romantic conditions, the centripetal force of beauty and mimesis on judgement is over, releasing art into abstraction (conceptualization), and thereby destroying any notion that art is, or was, a natural kind (there is no essence to art); art is a processual reflection on its own historically produced terms. But, on the other hand, the crisis of classical tradition does not necessarily mean that art is the best place for realized reflexivity to extend itself; indeed, for Hegel it is philosophy that is far better placed to do this on the grounds that most art appears overburdened by its past. And it is this notion of the ‘end of art’ as a new beginning that cannot be born that is usually identified with Hegel’s view on art. One of the difficulties of interpreting Hegel’s notion of the ‘end of art’, therefore, is separating out his historical ontology from his empirical judgement about the particular condition of painting and the arts in the first decades of the nineteenth century. If Hegel could not see clearly how art might be a medium of spirit, he nevertheless saw art as now being subject in the long run to a very different historical and cognitive regime than hitherto, and, as such, his thinking runs directly counter to the ‘aesthetics of sensuousness’ of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schelling. If human emancipation emerges for Hegel directly against the limits of nature, then it must also define itself against the sanctification of sensuousness in art. Such sensuousness can only return reflexiveness to the religiosity of the ‘worshipful’ and nature-haunted image.¹⁸ Now, this does not make Hegel a prefigurative modernist. No doubt he would have been horrified at the transformation of realized reflexivity into modernist art proper, certainly late modernist art. Thus we should not confuse his profound grasp of the problem of conceptualization in art with post-readymade conceptualization as such, as if he looked into his runes in Berlin and saw Joseph Kosuth standing on the horizon. Yet immanent to his dialectics is the most thoroughgoing acceptance of art as a historical category that logically cannot be submitted to limits or norms, outside, that is, of the negation of the negation of negation. Thus, for Hegel, to make art is at the same time to define art, to subject it to a process of self-scrutiny on the basis of art’s historically and socially constructed norms. As Pippin says:

Normative claims to knowledge, rectitude, spiritual life, or even claims to be making art, or that was good, are now made with the self-consciousness that the authority of such claims can always be challenged and defeated (or such claims could simply ‘die out’, lose historical authority) and must be in some way defensible to and for subjects if they are to be defensible at all.¹⁹

But, if Pippin is a good guide to why the Hegel of artistic ‘conceptualization’ is more persuasive than any Hegel of artistic ‘termination’, there nevertheless are problems with his use of Hegel and his understanding of the emergence of post-romantic ‘abstraction’. Pippin is far too eager to conflate abstraction in art and the end of traditional representation with abstract art as such, providing an overt philosophical justification for Michael Fried’s and T. J. Clark’s readings of modernism. This is based on a compression of Hegel’s notion of post-romantic art as a median point between ‘immediate sensuousness and ideal thought’ into the confines of the teleology of abstract painterly sensuousness. Pippin does not exactly say that the spirit of Hegel’s abstraction resides in 1950s American abstract painting and abstraction as a whole (as Clement Greenberg might have said in an unguarded moment), but all the same he does infer that the sensuousness of painterly abstraction assimilates conceptualization against mere intellection. Hence an unreflective normativity is smuggled back into Hegel’s realized reflexivity, insofar as Pippin fails to historicize abstract painting