Anywhere or not at all : philosophy of contemporary art / Peter Osborne.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Osborne, Peter, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art, Modern--20th century--Philosophy.

Art, Modern.

Philosophy.

Art, Modern--21st century--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

282 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition, paperback.

Place of Publication:

Brooklyn, New York : Verso Books, 2013.

Summary:

Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. What kind of discourse can help us give it a critical Sense? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Setting out the claim that 'contemporary art is postconceptual art', the book elaborates a series of conceptual constructions and interpretation of works by Navjot Altaf, the Atlas Group, Amar Kanwar, Sol Lewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson, among others. It concludes with new accounts of the institutional and existential complexities of 'art-space' and 'art-time'. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The fiction of the contemporary 15

Together in time?

three periodizations of contemporary art

idea, problem, fiction, task

the global transnational, or, the contemporary today

Joseph Bitar

fictionalization of artistic authority/collectivization of artistic fictions: a First Transnational

2 Art beyond aesthetics 37

Art versus aesthetics (Jena Romanticism contra Kant)

periodization as historical ontology: postconceptual art

a speculative proposition

an image of romanticism (Benjamin, Schlegel, Lewitt)

fragment and sentence

information and series

process and project

3 Modernisms and mediations 71

The double heritage of the modern in art

artistic modernisms: aesthetic, specific, generic

mediations after mediums: nominalism and genre, isms and series

everything, everywhere? Polke and Richter

4 Transcategoriality: postconceptual art 99

Smithson and medium (or, against 'sculpture')

the 'interminable avalanche of categories'

ontology of materializations: non-site

conceptual abstraction and 'pure perception'

5 Photographic ontology, infinite exchange 117

Distributive unity

the photograph: metonymic model of an imagined unity

digitalization, art and the real (or, anxiety about abstraction)

the visible, the invisible and the multiplication of visualizations

6 Art space 133

Non-places and the textualization of art

architecturalization: three questions

construction and expression

art as displaced urbanism: capitalist constructivism of the exhibition-form

transnationalization: art industry

project space

7 Art time 175

Attention and distraction: boredom as possibility

distracted reception (duration and rhythm)

memory or history?

testimonies: three works

expectation as a historical category (critique of Koselleck)

expecting the unexpected: puncturing the horizon.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781781680940

1781680949

9781781681138

1781681139

OCLC:

826899635