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at the level of its social content, as well as those of This process may be summed up in three theses: 1111
both its own historical logic and, more concretely, 2
its relation to guration – this more immediate 1. We live in an emergent global modernity. 3
sense in which art is conceived as being ‘abstract’ 2. At the same time, there are many modernities; 4
being but a particular artistic means for the expres- but the logic of multiplicity of these moderni- 5
sion of the other two. Indeed one might say, from ties is different – has a different conceptual 6
this point of view, that art is the privileged social shape – from the multiplicity of previous 7
site – or at the least, the catalytic trigger – for the forms. 8
experience of abstraction, in and for itself, as an 3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, geo- 9
historical form. Modern art extracts abstraction politically, about the hegemony of the West, 10111
from its various social sites and re ects upon it as but about the hegemony of capital. 1
form. Hence the danger, but by no means the 2
necessity, of aestheticisation, which involves a Let me explain these, very brie y, in turn. 3
forgetting of the social bases of abstraction as a 1. We live in a global modernity. This is to 4
form of experience. say, the globalisation of certain socio-economic 5
Such are the presuppositions about modernity processes currently constitutive of modernity as a 6
and art that govern what follows. However, if the form of historical experience (overwhelmingly but 7
modern is a temporal concept, it nonetheless has not exclusively, capitalist relations of production and 8
certain spatial – speci cally, certain geo-political – exchange) means that, for the rst time historically, 9
conditions of existence. These conditions are as a result of the collapse of the Soviet system (the 20111
currently undergoing radical transformation in the dream of a socialist modernity), and at a certain 1
process of the globalisation of capitalism as an level of abstraction and possible experience, moder- 2
economic and cultural form. It is for this reason, in nity is everywhere. Modernity has become spatially 3
my view, that the global capitalist modernity that one. There is a single spatial ground to the de ni- 4
is currently emerging must be considered a distinc- tion of the historical present. In particular, within 5
tively new historical form of modernity itself. For the current form of capitalist globalisation, the two 6
the fundamental change in its spatial conditions main geo-political conditions of the previous form 7
alters the distribution and dynamics of its temporal of modernity (colonialism and the Cold War) are no 8
form. This is not ‘late’ modernity (it shows no signs longer the primary spatial basis for the temporal 9
of ending), let alone ‘postmodernity’ (an idea that differentiation of the new. The temporal differen- 30111
appears more preposterous by the day), but, more tial of the modern is no longer primarily derived 1
simply, another, more generalised form of moder- from historically xed or enduring socially coded 2
nity itself: supermodernity, perhaps, in the light of spatial differences; it is immanent to a single plan- 3
the intensi cation of its temporal immanence, etary space of which all places are a part, albeit in 4
although personally I do not favour the term. radically uneven ways. This temporal differential is 5111
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1111 distributed across global social space in new, more carrier of the principle of capitalism, historically,
2 complex and often rapidly changing ways. but capitalism is increasingly generalised, residing
3 2. At the same time, there are many moderni- immanently in the global economic system,
4 ties: distinct forms of experience of the modern. following a territorial logic that may enter into
5 However, these are either socio-spatially speci c con ict with the geo-political interests of its primary
6 forms of experience of (the one) global modernity ‘hosts’. Global modernity (one, internally differen-
7 (socio-spatially embedded perspectives on its glob- tial, historical present) is as much, if not more,
8 ality, if you like), or the result of social processes about the historical effects of the relations between
9 and practices at lower levels of spatial organisation: different forms of capital, as about the relations
10111 within regions, for example, or within historically between capitalist and non-capitalist social forms.
1 received patterns of inter-national domination. The Different forms of capital refunction (appropriate
2 ‘modern’ temporal coding of such historically and transform but also preserve) a variety of non-
3 received relations of domination (colonialism, impe- capitalist social forms, producing historically
4 rialism, Cold War) subsists within global modernity, ambiguous identities and contradictory experiences
5 but it conditions, rather than in itself determining, of abstraction.4
6 the distribution of temporal differentiations at a This emergent global capitalist modernity has
7 global level. This multiplicity of modernities has a two additional spatial features to which I would like
8 new conceptual shape, to which the idea of ‘alter- to draw attention: 1) an intensi cation of the
9 native’ modernities is inadequate. For as Harry primacy of temporal over spatial relations to the
20111 Harootunian has argued, the notion of alternative point of the immanent negation of place as a spa-
1 modernities tends to reinscribe the historically tial variable – which is not the same thing as the
2 received geo-political particularisms of the moder- negation of space, since ‘space’ is not reducible
3 nity/tradition binary of colonial difference, within its to ‘place’; 2) a focusing or concentration of this
4 generalisation (through simple quantitative multi- process on changes in the spatial determinations of
5 plication) of the rst term.3 The multiplication of metropolitan centres, giving rise to what Saskia
6 modernities within global modernity has, rather, a Sassen has called ‘global cities’ or, more broadly,
7 more complex, distributional logic. what Manuel Castells describes as ‘informational
8 3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, about cities’.5 These changes derive from changes in the
9 the hegemony of the West, so much as about the spatial logic of economic and communicational rela-
30111 hegemony of capital. Capital is not in itself tied to tions and have de nite implications for the devel-
1 any territorial principle (this is the distinctive mode opment, or fundamental determinations, of art as
2 of abstraction of the value form), although different a cultural form; implications with direct relevance to
3 regimes of accumulation may have particular geo- ongoing debates about the autonomy of art, insti-
4 political conditions of existence at particular histor- tutionalisation, and avant-gardes. It is thus through
5111 ical times. ‘The West’ has been the geo-political this spatial lens that I shall approach these debates.
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2. Art and space debates in art theory (especially around the notion 1111
This is hardly a new move. It was fashionable in the of public art)6 and critical writing about the archi- 2
1980s and early 1990s to distinguish postmodernist tectural schemes of various post-conceptual artists 3
from modernist theory by a turn (or return) to space (such as Dan Graham) and the gradual ‘architec- 4
and spatial relations, against the supposedly one- turalisation of art’ with which such art may be asso- 5
sided obsession with time and history constitutive ciated.7 6
of the problematic of modernity. That any such This is a tendency that goes far beyond the 7
move from ‘time’ to ‘space’ is simple-minded (like increased importance of architectural design to 8
the af rmative conception of postmodernism museum development and display, and the insistent 9
itself, or indeed, the idea of a temporal problem- presence of architectural projects in art spaces 10111
atic without spatial presuppositions and implica- (plans, models, diagrams, computer-simulated 1
tions) hardly needs restating today. When we speak buildings, etc), to include gallery-alteration and 2
independently of ‘time’ and ‘space’ we always deal building-modi cation as not merely institutionally 3
only with aspects of integral sets of time-space rela- recognised, but increasingly dominant, art forms.8 4
tions. Nonetheless, the spatial conditions of various Minimalism effaced the boundary between painting 5
temporal relations were undoubtedly neglected, and sculpture, drawing attention to the art object’s 6
theoretically, in earlier debates about modernity, in relations to its institutional space; post-minimalist 7
part because of the relative historical stability during art often moved outside the physical locality of the 8
that period of their implicitly assumed basic form: gallery altogether. This new type of work situates 9
the territoriality of the nation-state. The new focus itself at the boundaries between architectural space 20111
on space within Anglophone theory during the and its environment at a time when the distinction 1
1980s and 1990s, at the intersection of disciplinary between architecture and infrastructure is itself 2
transformations in geography, urban sociology, being challenged by newly integrated forms 3
political economy, anthropology, architecture, and of urban planning, made possible by new design 4
cultural theory, recti ed this neglect, to a great technologies and building processes and materials.9 5
extent, rst at the level of the local (especially, the It points back to the prescient signi cance of 6
urban), second at the level of regions (both within the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, although it 7
and beyond nation states), and more recently, at tends to de-politicise and aestheticise his legacy. It 8
the global level. However, in the main, this litera- points forward to a new stage in the development 9
ture has remained isolated from the (post-post- of the post-conceptual art culture of installation or 30111
modernism) renewal and complication of debates spatial instantiation. (Installation, on my under- 1
about modernity, in large part because of its devel- standing, is the spatial instantiation of art ideas.) 2
opment within the self-enclosed and increasingly These are developments to which the still power- 3
implausible problematic of postmodernism. It has, ful Situationist problematic of commodi cation 4
though, connected up with both post-minimalist and technological mediation (‘spectacle’) remains 5111
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1111 relevant, but to which it increasingly appears, in themselves . . . [the proliferating] transit points
2 crucial respects, inadequate. They also mark a and temporary abodes . . . under luxurious or
3 certain historical redundancy in existing forms of inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats,
4 the artistic project of institutional critique, insofar holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty
5 as they presuppose the art museum and gallery as towns threatened with demolition or doomed
6 the prevailing physical sites of contemporary art. I to festering longevity) . . . the great commer-
7 shall take a conceptual approach to these develop- cial centres . . . where the habitué of super-
8 ments, starting at the highest level of abstraction: markets, slot machines and credit cards
9 the negation of place. communicates wordlessly, through gestures,
10111 with an abstract, unmediated commerce . . .
1 3. Non-place and nally the complex skein of cable and
2 The idea of non-places derives from the French wireless networks that mobilise extraterrestria l
3 historian Michel de Certeau’s Invention of the space for the purposes of a communication
4 Everyday. Volume One (1974), but it is from the so peculiar that it often puts the individual in
5 short but powerful text by the French anthropolo- contact only with another image of him [or
6 gist Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an her]self.’ 10
7 Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992), which in As its syntax suggests, ‘non-place’ is conceived
8 certain respects inverts de Certeau’s use of the negatively, as ‘a space which cannot be de ned as
9 term, that I shall take my cue. Augé’s book is relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.’
20111 concerned to rede ne the object of an anthropo- As such, it is a form of space characterised by
1 logical study of ‘the contemporary world’. It abstraction, in which its passing inhabitants locate
2 introduces the idea of non-places as the spatial themselves rst and foremost through relations
3 dimension of a general conception of ‘super- with words. This ‘invasion of space by text’, as Augé
4 modernity’ as a culture of ‘excess’, de ned by an puts it, is understood to produce a ‘solitary contrac-
5 ‘overabundance of events’, in which the very idea tuality’ as the distinctive mode of social existence
6 of individuated culture, ‘localised in time and of its (temporary) inhabitants. ‘Alone, but one of
7 space’, has become redundant. As the spatial many, the user of a non-place is in contractual rela-
8 consequence of ‘changes of scale,. . . the prolifer- tions with it (or with powers that govern it) . . .
9 ation of imaged and imaginary references, and . . . [and] is reminded, when necessary, that the
30111 the spectacular acceleration of means of transport’, contract exists.’ Such ‘instructions for use’ may be
1 Augé’s idea of non-places embraces: prescriptive, prohibitive or informative (‘Take right-
2 the installations needed for the accelerated cir- hand lane’ and ‘You are now entering the
3 culation of passengers and goods (high-speed Beaujolais region’ are Augé’s distinctively French
4 roads and railways, interchanges, airports) . . . examples); they may be in ordinary language or in
5111 just as much . . . as the means of transport more, or less, explicitly codi ed ideograms; and
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their proponents are not individuals but institutions of ‘existence’), as itself intrinsically a special type of 1111
of various sorts, the presence of which is at times place, constituted as a place by its dialectical nega- 2
explicitly stated (Metropolitan Transport Authority), tion of place in the anthropological sense of a space 3
at others only vaguely discernible.11 Augé’s non- that generates identity-forming meanings out of 4
places are thus the dialectical residue of the dual the permanence and generational continuity of the 5
negation of place by itineracy and textuality. physical contiguity of its boundaries. That is, I want 6
However, productive as I hope this idea will be to argue, all non-places are places qua non-places, 7
shown to be, Augé’s presentation of the concept not only in addition or palimpsestically; since their 8
of non-place is both theoretically ambiguous and meaning derives from their determinate negation 9
critically ambivalent. Theoretically, it equivocates of the relation between locale and meaning, 10111
between an abstract and a dialectical conception of internal to the boundaries of physical contiguity 1
negation. Critically, it oscillates between a back- which de ne what Manual Castells calls the ‘space 2
ward-looking romanticisation of the anthropolog- of places’, which is the terrain of Augé’s analysis. 3
ical conception of place and a forward-looking (In Castells’s words: ‘A place is a locale whose form, 4
positive ‘ethnology of solitude’. This is the result of function and meaning are self-contained within the 5
the restrictions of the anthropological perspective. boundaries of physical contiguity.’)13 Hence Augé’s 6
Thus, Augé writes: various lists of ‘non-places’. Yet this form of dialec- 7
The non-place . . . never exists in a pure form; tical interiority to place tempers the radicalism of 8
places reconstitute themselves in it; relations the idea of non-place, reducing its challenge to the 9
are restored and resumed in it; the ‘millennial spatial logic of places to the blocked passage of a 20111
ruses’ of ‘the invention of the everyday’ and negative dialectic. Hence its critical ambivalence – 1
‘the arts of doing’, so subtly analysed by only poetically resolved. 2
Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and Despite his implicit account of the social basis 3
deploy their strategies. Place and non-place are of non-places in the revolution in transport and 4
rather like opposed polarities: the rst is never communications technologies in market societies, 5
completely erased, the second never totally and his understanding of their tendency to gener- 6
completed; they are like palimpsests on which alisation, as all places increasingly become places 7
the scrambled game of identity and relations through which people travel – for Augé, traveller’s 8
is ceaselessly rewritten.12 space is the ‘archetype’ of non-place14 – Augé fails 9
This is in many ways a plausible – indeed convincing to press the concept of non-place beyond its 30111
– even poetic, scenario. However, if the non- abstractly negative determination, towards the idea 1
place never exists in a ‘pure form’ (that is, as an of a new spatial logic. He leaves the concept of 2
absolute negation or annihilation of place), this place in place. For Augé, the only positive content 3
is surely because it can only be coherently of the concept of non-place resides in the idea 4
construed, conceptually (and not just as an accident of solitary contractuality, an associated ‘emptying 5111
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1111 of individuality’,15 and its necessarily being ‘over- sounds and symbols’ – not exclusively, according to
2 written’ by conventional relations of place by the Castells, but nonetheless already ‘dominantly’.16
3 actors within it. In particular, the concept of place (This is an economic-technological version of the
4 fails to register within itself the spatial dimension globalisation thesis.) The international art world is
5 of the new forms of interdependence that exceed a space of ows.
6 the logic of place (whether by transport or commu- What Augé calls ‘non-places’, it would seem, are
7 nication) and which render the notion of non-place more properly conceived as the product of the
8 necessary. Such new forms of interdependence dialectic of the space of places and the space of
9 exceed the anthropological sense of place, not by ows. In this sense – that is, critically reconceived
10111 virtue of their failure to generate a certain identity- – the idea of non-place may be developed into
1 forming type of meaning, but by their negation of a genuinely ‘post-anthropological’ conception of
2 the purely spatial dimension of place as physical place, which moves beyond Augé’s self-under-
3 contiguity. (The anthropological imagination fails to standing. In fact, it promises to move beyond
4 conceive of the possibility of an identity-forming Castells’s own still abstractly oppositional sense of
5 generation of meaning outside the con nes of what he nonetheless acknowledges to be a dialec-
6 place – in the speci c sense of a place de ned by tical relation between places and ows, in which
7 ‘boundaries of physical contiguity’. In this respect, the contradictions between their different logics
8 the conceptual destruction of anthropology is a appear, in his words, as ‘a structural schizophrenia
9 condition for thinking the structure of experience . . . that threatens to break down communication
20111 under the conditions of a global capitalist moder- channels in society’.17 (It should be noted that the
1 nity. Critical anthropology can never, in principle, be two sides of this supposed ‘schizophrenia’ are actu-
2 critical enough.) However, if one conceives Augé’s ally mainly distributed between different, hierarchi-
3 non-places in the context of such networks of cally related, social groups. In this respect, the
4 relations, they appear less as ‘empty’ or ‘solitary’ oppositional element in the structure represents a
5 versions of traditional places and more as radically con ict of interests and forms of identity, rather
6 new ontological types of place, constituted qua than a split within a single social subject: the emer-
7 places through their relations to another spatiality, gence of a new spatial elite. There is a con ict here,
8 which Castells calls the ‘space of ows’. This ‘space not over ‘space’ as such, so much as over spatiali-
9 of ows’ is a purported new spatial logic grounded sation.) Finally, such a rethinking of Augé in rela-
30111 in ‘the transformation of location patterns of core tion to Castells raises the possibility of giving
1 economic activities under the new technological analytical substance to what Hardt and Negri have
2 system . . . the rise of the electronic home and the recently called ‘a new place in the non-place’ or
3 . . . evolution of urban forms.’ It governs ‘ ows of (better) ‘a new place of the non-place’, which
4 capital, ows of information, ows of technology, would be the site of ‘ontologically new determina-
5111 ows of organisational interaction, ows of images, tions of the human’, an alternative (for them,
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Peter Osborne
republican) global form of non-place opposed to 4. Art-space as non-place 1111
the non-place of the currently emerging power they The institutional spaces of art are related to the 2
call ‘Empire’.18 new global/informational metropolitan non-places 3
It is the prophetic hope of this idea that it will through the network character of the international 4
resolve the contradiction (stoically endured by artworld, but also, more fundamentally, via the deep- 5
Augé, with a certain melancholy) between the fact rooted immanence of metropolitan spatial experi- 6
that, in Augé’s words, ‘never before have individual ence to modern art itself, both in its formal structure 7
histories been so explicitly affected by collective and context of reception. As Brian O’Doherty has 8
history, but never before, either, have reference put it, with reference to Schwitters’s Merzbau, but 9
points for collective identi cation been so the point holds for modern art more generally: 10111
unstable.’ 19 Whether or not this might be any The city provided the materials, models of 1
more than a prophetic idea depends in large part process, and primitive esthetic of juxtaposition 2
upon the relations between place and non-place, – congruity forced by mixed needs and inten- 3
places and ows; and in particular upon the tions. The city is the indispensible context of 4
constitution of places qua non-places by ows. This collage and of the gallery space. Modern art 5
happens at all levels of place-based spatial organi- needs the sound of traf c outside to authen- 6
sation: from the human body all the way up to ticate it.21 7
what Hardt and Negri treat as the (politically) ulti- The organising principle of collage is the mythos of 8
mate non-place, the planet, or at least the physical a city; and collage is at the core of a generic (non- 9
contiguity of its surface layers. (There are other medium-based) modernism. But modern art still 20111
places to which humans, or their crafts, have trav- ‘needs the sound of traf c outside to authenticate 1
elled or might be imagined to travel – other planets it’, to refer it back to this principle, because of the 2
– central to the political imaginaries of the last self-enclosed, self-insulating character of gallery 3
century. But they do not as yet bear on the space. It is in its speci c character as a self-enclosed 4
question of the actual spatial form of political and specialised place that the gallery appears as an 5
subjectivisation, which is the issue here.) Most exemplary or ‘pure’ non-place: constituted as a 6
important of all, perhaps, is the mediating level of non-place by its dual negation of place-based social 7
global/informational cities, at which we may also functions by itinerary and textuality: the itinerary of 8
locate the network of the international artworld. the viewer, the ‘textuality’ of the work – a form of 9
Global/informational cities are ‘spaces of contem- itinerary that mediates the universality of the work’s 30111
poreity’, in the literal sense of a coming together address with the individuality of relations of private 1
of times – nodal points of multiple temporalities – property. In O’Doherty’s words, ‘the empty gallery 2
and the prime mediating sites of the dialectic of . . . [is] modernism’s greatest invention’ because the 3
places and ows, the spatial register of interacting white cube is ‘the single major convention through 4
temporal forms.20 which art is passed’: 5111
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1111 If art has any cultural reference (apart from notion of ‘autonomy’. In this sense, art-space is self-
2 being ‘culture’) surely it is in the de nition instituting, once historically established through
3 of our space and time. The ow of energy what O’Doherty calls ‘the placelessness and time-
4 between concepts of space articulated through lessness’ of the gallery’s ‘hysterical cell’: art turns
5 the artwork and the space we occupy is one space into art-space. Non-place is the spatial dimen-
6 of the basic and least understood forces in sion of art’s autonomy, and thus, its continuing
7 modernism. Modernism space rede nes the modernity. What keeps this space stable, O’Doherty
8 observer’s status, tinkers with his [/her] self- argues, is the lack of alternatives. ‘A rich constella-
9 image. Modernism’s conception of space, not tion of projects comments on matters of location’,
10111 its subject matter, may be what the public but they do not so much suggest alternatives
1 rightly conceives as threatening. Now, of as ‘enlist . . . the gallery space as a unit of esthetic
2 course, [it is 1976] space contains no threats, discourse.’23 My claim is stronger: not only is
3 has no hierarchies. Its mythologies are drained, gallery-space a unit of aesthetic discourse in post-
4 its rhetoric collapsed. It is simply a kind of minimalist art, it establishes the ontological struc-
5 undifferentiated potency. This is not a ‘degen- ture of art-space which must subsequently be
6 eration’ of space but the sophisticated conven- recreated by the work in each instance wherever
7 tion of an advanced culture which has it is.
8 cancelled its values in the name of an abstrac- The ‘architecturalisation of art’ is in this respect
9 tion called ‘freedom’. Space now is not just also a reduction of architecture to art. The idea that
20111 where things happen; things make space ‘everything is architecture’, in Charles Eames’s
1 happen.22 famous words, is a particular in ection of the idea
2 A familiar minimalist insight, you might say. Indeed that ‘anything can become art’. Indeed, it is this
3 it is, and it led rapidly to the transgression of literal latter principle viewed from the standpoint of
4 (or ‘empirical’) gallery space, and the proliferation construction. Taken literally, such architectural
5 of ‘site’-based work, since ‘things make space imperialism presages the end of architecture. For
6 happen’ and not the other way around. However, the principle is unstable. ‘Everything’ and ‘anything’
7 and this is my point here, it is naïve to believe that quickly become ‘nothing in particular’ and then
8 this transgression of literal or ‘empirical’ gallery ‘nothing’. That ‘anything can become art’ marks
9 space constitutes a violation of the ontological the destruction of medium speci city, convention-
30111 character of art-space as instituted by the gallery ally associated with neo-Dada and minimalism, but
1 and the modern art museum. Rather, the space that it is more fundamentally realised in conceptual
2 art-things/relations ‘make happen’ remains art- art, as the condition of possibility of the main trans-
3 space, wherever it is, insofar as the contextual ‘art formation in the ontological status of art over the
4 character’ or function of the things/relations last three decades: namely, the replacement of
5111 remains tied up with the (much misunderstood) the primacy of the ‘object’ by the installation or
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Peter Osborne
instantiation of the art idea. Fundamentally, it is true of the museum as mausoleum, but it is 1111
not objects that are ‘installed’ here (although they becoming true of the contemporary art museum 2
may be the literal medium), or even works, but art and gallery too. However, and this is my main point, 3
ideas. Works are the product of the installation. paradoxically, art can only ‘live’ there, outside the 4
Installation has been transformed from a technical gallery, by recreating the ontological character of 5
to an ontological category. In the process, art is gallery space (art-space) in various ways, trans g- 6
becoming co-extensive with the material articula- uring the social character of the space it occupies. 7
tion of art-space. This is a process belatedly recog- Contemporary art produces (or fails to produce) 8
nised by the major art institutions and recently the non-place of art-space as the condition of its 9
symbolically sealed by the acquisition by the autonomy and hence its functioning as ‘art’. That 10111
Museum of Modern Art, New York (cathedral of is, autonomy is not an external condition of art, but 1
pre-conceptual modernism), of PS1 in Brooklyn. must be produced anew, on the basis of its external 2
Painting is itself subject to this condition. That is, conditions, in each instance, by each work, by its 3
just as during the 1960s, the status of painting as immanent negation of place. Art cannot live, qua 4
‘an’ art, sui generis, gave way to the requirement art, within the everyday as the everyday. Rather, qua 5
that paintings legitimate themselves directly as ‘art’ art, it necessarily interrupts the everyday, from 6
(‘painters’ had to become ‘artists’, they were no within, on the basis of the fact that it is always both 7
longer artists simply by virtue of being painters), so autonomous and ‘social fact’.24 It is the continued 8
the use of paint to make ‘art’ now increasingly search for a productive form of this duality that has 9
requires the painting (no longer an ontological cate- driven art beyond the literal physical space of 20111
gory) to make a claim on the broader art-space. museum and gallery into other social spaces. It is 1
One can see Schnabel struggling with this, I think, in this sense that the internal space of the gallery 2
and it is perhaps the more interesting aspect of has become, in O’Doherty’s words, ‘an emptiness 3
certain 1980s neo-expressionist works by Baselitz gravid with the content art once had’: a negative 4
and Kiefer. However, the art-character of the archi- image of the content art still seeks outside the 5
tecture of contemporary museums supervenes, gallery, compensated by the architectural art-space 6
insistently, on the objects within them. The rst, of the gallery itself. Ironically, under these condi- 7
New York Guggenheim, was the forerunner here, tions, it is perhaps works of institutional critique 8
now franchised internationally on the back of the alone that are currently keeping the contemporary 9
success of Gehry’s Bilbao building and one can see art museum alive as a space for art other than the 30111
a similar process at work in the great turbine hall architecture of the buildings themselves. 1
of the Tate Modern, in London. A peculiar reversal 2
is occurring: it is now only outside these spaces Notes and references 3
(allegedly dedicated to it) that contemporary art can 1. This is the text of a talk to the conference ‘Returns 4
‘live’ critically on its own terms. This was always of the Avant-Garde: Post-War Movements’, organised 5111
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1111 by the Centre for Arts Research, Technology and participants to redesign the area of the West Side of
2 Education (CARTE) and the School of Architecture, Manhatten from around Penn Station to the Hudson
3 University of Westminster, 24–25 November 2000. It River, exhibited at the CCA, Montreal, 15 November
draws on materials from a larger project on art as a 2000 – 15 April 2001. The prize was won by Peter
4
cultural form, ‘Art or Aesthetic?’, for which I am Eisenman, but the most impressively ‘infrastructural’
5
grateful for support from the Arts and Humanities submission was the one by Jesse Reiser and Naako
6
Research Board of the British Academy. Umemoto.
7 2. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity 10. Marc Augé, Non Places: Introduction to an
8 and Avant-Garde (Verso, London, 1995), ch. 1. Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe
9 3. H.D. Harootunian, ‘Ghostly Comparisons’, paper for (Verso, London, 1995), pp. 28–32, 78–9.
10111 the Traces conference ‘The Impacts of Modernities’, 11. Ibid., pp. 77–8, 83, 99, 94, 101, 96.
1 Ewha University, Seoul, 23–24 September 2000; 12 Ibid., pp. 87, 78–9.
2 forthcoming in Traces: A Multilingual Journal of 13. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy,
3 Cultural Theory and Translation, no.3 (2002). Society and Culture. Volume 1. The Rise of the
4 4. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Network Society (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), p. 423.
5 Class, Nation: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris 14. Non-Places, op. cit., p. 86.
Turner (Verso, London and New York, 1991). 15. Ibid., p. 87.
6
5. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, 16. The Rise of the Network Society, op. cit., pp. 377,
7
Tokyo (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991); 412. See also pp. 410–18.
8
Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information 17. Ibid., p. 428.
9 Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban- 18. Michael Herdt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard
20111 Regional Process (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989). University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000),
1 6. See, for example, Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art pp. 216–7, 208, 188–90.
2 and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996). 19. Ibid., p. 37.
3 7. See, for example, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected 20. On Castells’s analysis, space is ‘crystallised time’ or
4 Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, edited by ‘the material support of time sharing social practices’.
5 Alexander Alberro (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and The Rise of Network Society, op. cit., p. 411. This is
6 London, 1999), Pts III and VI, and Anthony Vidler, the socially dominant aspect of the space-time
Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in dialectic because it is through time that we are consti-
7
Modern Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and tuted as nite – that is, mortal – beings. It is the onto-
8
London, 2000), Pt II. logical signi cance of the constitution of nitude
9
8. For example, Jorge Pardo’s current (year 2000) through mortality that is the element crucially lacking
30111 ‘Project’ on the ground oor of the Dia Centre in from Marx’s materialism.
1 Manhatten; or Richard Wilson’s 1997 modi cation of 21. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology
2 the Serpentine Gallery, London. of Gallery Space (1976, 1981, 1986) (University of
3 9. See, for example, the plans submitted by the nalists California Press, Berkeley, 1999), p. 44. Returning
4 for New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture to this text today one is struck by both its radicalism
5111 Competition for the Design of Cities, which asked and incisiveness – so different from most of today’s
12. 194
Non-places and
the spaces
of art
Peter Osborne
writings in the purportedly critical, but largely merely 24. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. 1111
rhetorical, genre of museum studies. Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 2
22. Ibid., pp. 38–9. Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 225–9. 3
23. Ibid., pp. 107, 80.
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