| Reviews |
APR 14 | ART MONTHLY | 375 | 35 |
BOOKS
David Joselit: After Art
Memes, weak signs, viral, poor, intolerable
and pensive images; the 21st century has come
bundled with a glut of neologisms seeking
to describe the accelerated nature of digital
image production and exchange via neat, pithy
units of language. Uniquely, for socio-cultural
theorising, attempts at classication have come
from a wide eld. Professional thinkers or
rather those paid to speculate on cultural matters
like Jacques Rancire, Boris Groys and Hito
Steyerl, deliver their ideas via essays couched in
the grand tradition of image speculation kick-
started by Walter Benjamins essay The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Online, in the chatrooms and comment elds
of imageboards (large web forums that operate
on the upload and exchange of images by
members), new terms come unencumbered
by the need for academic exposition and arise
in tandem with the phenomena they describe
(eg seles cameraphone self-portraits are).
What lies beneath and compels these attempts
at classication (whether those engaged in
the pursuit know it or not), is the spectre of
the internet, the age of unprecedented image
saturation it has ushered in, and the need to
make some kind of sense of it all. Stepping
into that breach with After Art is US curator,
scholar, art critic and occasional editor of October
magazine, David Joselit.
An easily digestible amalgam of three
lectures previously delivered under the title
States of Form, After Art is Joselits attempt to
convince us that images possess vast power [to
generate capital and inuence politics] through
their capacity for replication, remediation, and
dissemination at variable velocities. This may
be a truism obviating any need for further
exploration, but there is more to Joselits
endeavour; the book proposes that actors within
the art world should harness the digital image so
that we may exploit its potential power in newly
creative ways. The reason this is necessary is
because we are living in an age Joselit identies
as being after art. Why after and not post?
Initially Joselit writes that post leaves the
art object intact albeit transformed or negated,
whereas after shifts emphasis to its effects its
power under the conditions of circulation.
It is a spectacularly vague sentence that is
left hanging, without clarication, until the
books nal few pages. There Joselit reveals
a surprisingly conservative view. For him
contemporary art is all about reference, whereas
modern art was a vanguard for the promotion of
and research into how images constitute secular
knowledge. In the books mid-section this is
sketched out: contemporary art no longer has
the ability to show us how new images might
carry new content (was that ever arts main
purpose?); instead, contemporary artists are like
search engines, their consciousnesses crawling
through high and low culture to connect pre-
existing material in order to present audiences
with networks of old meaning. These networks
come in two forms: grid-like image presentations
la Sherrie Levines Postcard Collage #4, 2000,
and large-scale immersive systems (in which
images are arrayed or generated) that Joselit
dubs formats think Rikrit Tiravanijas or Ai
Weiweis relational situations, or installations by
Matthew Barney and Thomas Hirschhorn. It is
a nice idea, but are these top-tier artists really
indicative of where things currently stand?
Beyond the human-search-engine model,
Joselits central thesis, the idea that images
become more powerful when reproduced online,
is informed by a reassessment of Benjamin. In
the books pointed rst chapter he asserts that
Benjamins brilliant analysis has become a
roadblock; that accelerated digital reproduction
infuses images with vast power; and that in
todays neoliberal, globalised economy what
use is a bourgeois concept like aura to anyone
anyway. Again, anyone who has thought
independently about Benjamins essay for a few
minutes will have come to a similar conclusion.
A more accurate position would be to pair
Benjamins loss of aura with the powerful image
distribution model in order to offer them as
opposing states within a system of meaning that
exists in perpetual equilibrium. In fact this has
always been the case, even in Benjamins time
some images are emasculated by distribution,
while others gain power. Take grafti and
subway art, for instance: a well-used analogy is
that the internet is like a vast network of train
tracks, while web pages are like different train
companies that use those tracks to run their
services; the goal of subway art is to get your tag
on as many train cars as possible so that it may
gain in notoriety, and yield the image-maker
prestige, fame and the authoritative power of
ubiquity. This is exactly how image circulation
functions online, and its power, whether it is an
image of Joseph Kony, Beyonc or some satirical
illustration of a political gure, is based on the
quick recognition of surfaces. But while depth
is an essential property of art and slowness a
necessary condition for its appreciation, why
would anyone want to reduce their work to the
status of a vapid meme?
There are some compelling angles explored
within After Art, but a cohesive cogency never
arrives perhaps due to it being the product
of three lectures stitched together. While the
attempt to dismantle the Benjaminian roadblock
is laudable, the use of computational metaphor
(the human artist as search engine) is reductive,
restrictive and as inaccurate as the popular brain-
as-hard-drive analogy. As you would imagine
for an academic of Joselits stature, After Art
offers an informed, accessible, if fairly standard
image theory for the information age. But if and
when the paradigm shifting text arrives, my
money still says it will come from outside the
institution, not from established critics, curators
or academics within.
After Art, David Joselit, Princeton University Press,
2012, 136pp, 13.95, 978 0 6911504 4 4.
MORGAN QUAINTANCE is a writer, musician and curator
of Pre Owned: Looks Good Man at Cell Projects,
London to 27 April.
Large purpose-built artists studios to rent
Ideal for sculpture, fabrication and large-scale projects
Affordable rent inclusive of business rates
www.acme.org.uk/studios/highhouse - highhouse@acme.org.uk
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