How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Dorothea von Hantelmann
Издательство: Ingram
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9783037643693
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but we will see how they also—in practice—insert a different culture of remembrance, namely the memory of the body and the tradition of oral history, into their conception as artworks.

      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.

      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.

      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.