In contrast to Coleman, who creates a particular space for most of his artworks, a particular space that is visually and acoustically separated from the exhibition context, Daniel Buren chooses the opposite strategy and dissolves the boundary between the artwork and its presentational situation. The exhibition in all its parameters becomes his medium, or even the actual work of art. Buren’s oeuvre takes its starting point in the acknowledgement of the impact that a given situation or context has on the meaning and experience of an artwork. In fact he is the first artist to systematically address and reflect on this impact, which makes him a kind of touchstone for the thesis of this book. His early works from the late 1960s and 1970s indicate the various parameters of an artwork’s context, while his more recent works since the 1980s attempt to challenge and transform this context. In all of Buren’s works, however, the artwork as a self-contained, enclosed entity that catches a viewer’s gaze in order to be appropriated, as a meaningful object, no longer exists. It is not the object but the context and its underlying conventions that become the protagonist of meaning production. And as artistic autonomy can only be achieved by taking all parameters of this context into consideration, Buren operates like a metteur-en-scène on all aspects of the exhibition ritual. This accounts in a particular way for Buren’s newer works, such as his 2002 retrospective Le Musée qui n’existait pas at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in which Buren challenges the idea of a retrospective by changing the kind of experience a retrospective exhibition conventionally produces. Buren works on the level of the impact and effects in order to eventually establish a new exhibition ritual.
Although among the artists I discuss in this book Buren most extensively reworks the conventions of visual art, the one parameter that Buren leaves untouched is also the most fundamental convention, the materiality of the artwork. And indeed here an intrinsic connection between visual art and the socio-economic order of Western (post)industrial societies manifests itself. If artworks establish a particularly sophisticated relation between the individual and a material object, then it is precisely this attachment of subjectivity to things that lies at the heart of bourgeois industrial (and consumer) culture. It is thus no coincidence that a social order that measures itself against what it produces—a “productivist society,” as Felix Guattari calls it 7—ascribes so much significance to a ritual that is centered on the material object. Tino Sehgal throws particular light on the significance of the artwork’s object-matter because, as a matter of principle, his works refuse to participate in this mode of production. They categorically redefine the material basis of a visual artwork. His works manage to exist and remain without any kind of material objecthood. In doing so, they raise questions like: What does it imply that artworks are things and what does it mean to challenge this premise? To what extent is it possible to claim the status of a visual artwork for a situation that implies no object-matter? Which conditions have to be fulfilled in order to transform “nothing” (in a material sense) into “something” (economically and symbolically) valuable? Sehgal’s works realize themselves in actions and movements, as spoken or sung voices, and materialize temporarily in the human body. And yet, they are—like any visual artwork—present for the entire duration of an exhibition. In this way Sehgal’s works fulfill the status of a visual artwork without materially being one. In a sense they continue the claims of the avant-gardes while turning them upside down. They durably rupture the convention of the material object, and thereby give art a new form of existence. Yet contrary to the avant-gardes, Sehgal claims a position for his works within the very structures that the avant-gardes disavowed, namely the museum and the market. His works are exhibited, sold through galleries and enter museum collections.
If since the 1960s a societal significance of art has been primarily seen in art’s ability to produce some kind of “critical awareness,” it is striking that with regard to the artists discussed here the idea of criticality falls short in accurately describing their positions. Using the works of Jeff Koons, who explicitly rejects the notion of criticality, the final chapter of this book is dedicated to a discussion of the conditions and limits of criticism as a cultural practice. Thereby Koons’s works conceptually condense what I would claim is already central to the works of the other artists discussed in this book: the questions if and how art, aside from being critical, can create and challenge reality. Taken as a whole, How to Do Things with Art can be understood as either a theoretical elaboration of this question, or as a manual for artists—and I hope the book will be both.
Last but not least, some thoughts about the methodology of this book. The title is a play on John Langshaw Austin’s seminal lecture series How to Do Things with Words.8 In the lectures, held at Harvard in 1955, Austin discussed the performative, or reality-producing, capacity of language. Since then the term “performative” has become a key word of art discourse and, given the fashionable appeal of a new term that has gained a certain academic attention within the last decades, it is mostly used in a way that is a complete distortion from its original meaning. Today it is widely believed that “performative” can be understood as “performance-like.” Understood in this false sense it has become a ubiquitous catchword for a broad range of contemporary art phenomena that, in the widest sense, show an affinity to forms of staging, theatricality and mise-en-scène. As a category, however, it remains stubbornly slippery, and for good reasons, because it is based on a complete twist of the word “performative.” Hence I trace the term back to its original usage in the philosophy of Austin and later in the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, not only because I want to restore the methodological precision that the term seems to have lost with its popularity. This book is also an attempt to make it productive for and within the discourse on visual art.
My line of argument is based on the two theoretical premises from Austin and Butler: first, there is no performative artwork, because there is no non-performative artwork. Austin introduced the notion “performative” into language theory in order to refer to the act-like character of language. In certain cases he argued that something that is said produces effects that reach beyond the realm of language. Under certain conditions signs can produce reality; one can do things with words. The classic examples for what Austin at first thought would constitute a particular category of utterances—the “performatives”—originate in legal discourse: “I now pronounce you man and wife” and “I hereby sentence you to six years imprisonment without parole.” Although Austin had originally planned to isolate certain utterances under the notion of the performative, he soon understood that a clear-cut distinction cannot be made between a constative (descriptive) and a performative way of speaking. If every utterance contains both constative and performative aspects, it is tautological to speak about “performative language.” I believe the same principle applies to artworks. It makes little sense to speak of a performative artwork, because every artwork has a reality-producing dimension.
To ask about the performative in relation to art is not about defining a new class of artworks. Rather it involves outlining a specific level of meaning production that basically exists in every artwork, although it is not always consciously shaped or dealt with—namely its reality-producing dimension. In this sense, a specific methodological orientation goes along with the performative, creating a different perspective on what produces meaning in an artwork. It means to recognize and bring into discourse the productive, reality-producing dimension of, in principle, any work of art. What the notion of the performative brings into perspective is the contingent and difficult to grasp realm of impact and effects that art brings forth both situationally, i.e. in a given spatial and discursive context, and relationally, e.g. in relation to a viewer or a public. Consequently, we can ask: What kind of situation does an artwork produce? How does it situate its viewers? What kinds of values, conventions, ideologies, and meanings are inscribed into this situation? Art’s performative dimension signifies art’s possibilities and limits in generating and changing reality.
Second, the notion of performativity has nothing to do with the art form of performance. In its canonical form, the model of performativity is defined by the philosopher Judith Butler.
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