Panel proposal at the SEP on Art and OOO. Seeing has Harman’s the keynote there, I’d imagine it will be a very interesting panel. Ennis you all know, (or should know if you don’t know) Francis Halsall is a fantastic writer on system art, (I’ve mentioned his work a few times in my thesis), I don’t know who Tim Scott is, but its an Irish affiliation all round I’d say.

If lack of time wasn’t an issue, I’d be up there.

Aesthetic Objects: Art and Object Orientated Philosophy

Panel Proposal

Lucy Lippard‘s description of the ―De-materialization of the Art Object that occurred in the late 1960s demonstrated how the problems in defining what an art object is became compounded by the multiple forms of postmodern and contemporary art.

At the very least it is now taken for granted that an art object is not definable as a discrete, material thing that is independent from its situational and historical context(s).

This panel addresses this by looking at how philosophical theories of objects impact on the theories, practices and experiences of art. In particular the relatively recent discussions of Object Orientated Philosophy/ Speculative Realism will be discussed with a view to considering their relevance for contemporary art discourse. This means not only to consider how art as a practice of object making constructs complex, relational objects but also how such objects might engender and demonstrate certain forms of thinking about the world.

1. More than Theory: On Speculative Realism and Aesthetics Paul J. Ennis (Philosophy, University College Dublin)

The influence of speculative realism has tended to hit hardest outside its home turf of philosophy. Unlike previous philosophies that first garnered attention within the academic discipline of philosophy, speculative realism has largely bypassed this stage of purification whereby its passes the various stress tests that deconstruction, Deleuzianism, and other hybrid forms of thinking underwent. Speculative realism, especially its object-oriented strand, has been, since its inception, propelled along as much by non-philosophers as by philosophers with a particularly strong following in aesthetics, theory, and media studies. In this paper I want to demonstrate the reasons for this phenomenon anchoring my argument first and foremost according to a simple insight: speculative realism has never gifted other disciplines an aesthetic theory on a platter and then departed into what they consider more serious matters.

Uniquely amongst contemporary philosophers with an interest in aesthetics the speculative realists intend to show how aesthetics is at the heart of thinking as a rule. This has lead Graham Harman, the original object oriented ontologist, to claim outright that aesthetics is first philosophy.‘ Some have argued that such claims from the speculative realists derive from their realism or, to be precise, their weird realism.

This weird realism, one sometimes hears, encourages speculative realists to engage with the also often quite weird world of art and aesthetics. I do not dispute that on the theoretical plane this is valid, but I wish to point out that the reason for the alliance between speculative realism and aesthetics is essentially a pragmatic one. This does mean they both are involved in some shoddy marriage of convenience, but it does mean that the Latourian pragmatic- realism resting beyond the current forms of speculative realism make it difficult to fall into the beautiful soul syndrome so often worn by continental philosophers.

It is in this sense that we must come to accept that the contribution to contemporary philosophy from speculative realism is precisely its constant subversion of the sanctity of philosophical theory and its willingness to engage in pragmatic-realist alliances – chief among them the alliance with practical object-oriented aesthetics.

2. Art as Guerilla Metaphysics: Graham Harman, Art and Objects Francis Halsall (Philosophy, University College Dublin & Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design)

Using examples from contemporary art this paper thinks through Graham Harman‘s claim that aesthetics may be a branch of metaphysics.

Two of the most seductive yet troublesome claims that Harman has made on behalf of Speculative Realism/ Object Orientated Philosophy are: (i) the default state of reality is that I am protected by firewalls from the objects lying outside me.‘ And (i): Intentionality is not a special human property at all, but an ontological feature of objects in general.‘

These related claims are seductive because they promise a way out of those philosophical trajectories (in both the continental and analytic traditions) that lead away from the world and toward forms of transcendental idealism that bracket any deeper reality out of existence.

Yet they are problematic for precisely the same reasons; that is, whilst gesturing toward reality, Speculative Realism, by accepting that the world withdraws into a shadowy and weird realm beyond human thinking, simultaneously seems to deny human access to a domain of reality where objects reside. Harman‘s argument thus appears to undermine philosophical attempts to provide knowledge of a mind independent reality. Reality might be there, but it can‘t be fully known through the operations of human thought.

If Harman is right that, all human relations to objects strip them of their inner depth, revealing only some of their qualities to view then we face the problem of how to think beyond the context of human relations to the world into which we find ourselves flung. Husserl‘s epoché was just such an attempt and Harman argues that, the great breakthrough of phenomenology namely Husserl‘s call to get back to the things themselves, would have been impossible without suspending natural objects from consideration.

However, as Merleau-Ponty argued, the phenomenological reduction is difficult if not impossible to achieve. My argument is that aesthetic experience provides the opportunity for such bracketing.

Using specific examples of contemporary art by Martin Creed and Liam Gillick I argue that it is precisely in the strangeness and oddness of the experience of art as art that our natural attitudes toward the object of reflection are suspended. Works of art, when they succeed, present instances when natural assumptions about the world can no longer be taken for granted. In aesthetic experience certain aspects of everyday experience are suspended and the object withdraws from us to become an inscrutable and open aesthetic form. Thus art can also be a form of thinking, and art practice forms another branch of what Harman calls a Guerilla Metaphysics‘ orientated toward the occult strangeness of the world and its objects.

3. A Cut and a Fold in the Cascade of Things Said: The Work of Art as Discursive Object. Tim Stott, (School of Art and Design, Dublin Institute of Technology/ Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin)

A work of art such as Tino Sehgal‘s This Objective of that Object (2004) posits the object of art as a discursive event. As declared by the five interpreters who perform the work: The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion, which indicates this as a work constructed discursively by the inclusion of self-referential observations and commentary. The work makes a series of cuts in discourse, and that is all: no documentation is produced, no recordings, no contract of sale, none of the customary objects that indicate the work of art.

John Bock‘s Klütterkammer, of the same year, also takes discourse as the medium for its forms, but differently. Here, found and fabricated objects are folded into an absurdist but coherent lexicon as props and characters for the artist‘s performances. These performances are densely coded and multiply distributed through different mediums—lectures, catwalk shows, rehearsals, film screenings, projections—to the extent that the objects folded into them become discursively saturated and always require further readings.

Both of these works raise a particular problem: namely, the temporal status of the object of the work of art. This is a question not of what kind of thing is art? But rather, as Nelson Goodman once asked, of when is art? Seeking to account for changes in the status of art following the introduction of the found object‘ and so-called conceptual art, Goodman addresses art as a temporal rather than substantive problem.

In their attempts to avoid the reification of art, both Sehgal and Bock construct objects as performed events within discourse. Yet these objects remain, as art, anachronic. What is, on the one hand, singular and discontinuous, and to be engaged in the play of its immediacy, on the other hand does not fully belong to or fully resemble its time, and is therefore capable of being otherwise at other times. As Didi-Huberman, claims the work of art is two-faced with regard to time. Particularly in the case of Bock and Sehgal, the work of art is, somewhat paradoxically, both discursive event and recurrent form; both a cut and a fold in discourse.

Arguably, only as such can the work of art be observed in all its complexity as an object (or set of objects) among but apart from others.

The constructivist account of the work of art provided by Goodman and others provides a compelling description of the temporal distribution of its form and of the discursive contingencies of its objects. Yet the challenge remains, as it was for Foucault, to give a materialist account of these peculiarly incorporeal objects and the fictions through which they are presented.