Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010 Page: 39
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Intelligence...is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools
to make tools.
- Henri Bergson
It's like a discipline without the discipline of all of the discipline.
- LCD Soundsystem
"Einstein's brain," begins the eponymous chapter in Roland Barthes'
Mythologies, "is a mythical object," embodying both mechanical perfec-
tion and quasi-gnostic illumination. The same terms could describe genius
artworks, too-as a union of technical mastery and some fundamental,
obdurate kernel of inspiration, divine or otherwise. It bears mentioning,
nevertheless, that obduracy isn't always inspired. In fact, sometimes it's
just stubbornly obscure. Somewhere in the middle is "smart art."
Over the past fifty years, a number of artists have turned toward ana-
lytic philosophy for the themes and forms of their work, marshaling its
precise language and even its argumentation into the visual arts. Vaulting
into aporia from a springboard of academic heavyweights and analytic
discourse (which gives it the allure and authority that technical mastery
might have provided in another century), smart art today can often look
to viewers like Einstein's brain did to Barthes: rigorous, erudite, rational-
and yet, entirely beyond one's grasp.
This elusiveness traces back to smart art's foundations in the late
1960s. In his 1969 essay "Art After Philosophy," Joseph Kosuth is careful to
establish his bailiwick: not over truth or knowledge about the world but,
rather, over (tautological) truth and (often conflicted) knowledge about art
itself. He writes:
Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their
context-as art-they provide no information whatsoever about any
matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation
of the artist's intention, that is, he is saying that a particular work of
art is art, which means, is a definition of art.2
Kosuth so circumspectly avoided empirical or extra-artistic claims in order
to better level his tautologies at his target: the authority of modernist crit-
icism in the tradition of Clement Greenberg. Kosuth's putsch would con-
sist in redefining art itself, carrying the modernist inquest into the essence
of a specific medium to its extreme: the ontological investigation of art or
art-in-general.3 Peter Osborne describes this project as exclusive or strong
conceptualism (as opposed to weak and inclusive conceptualism, whoseproponents included Sol LeWitt as well as, unintuitively, philosopher and
artist Adrian Piper). Osborne calls strong conceptualism an "odd philo-
sophical interlude" in the history of conceptual art.4 And yet, to judge by
the work of contemporary artists, from Falke Pisano and Benoft Maire to
Martin Beck, Liam Gillick or Thomas Hirschhorn, that philosophical inter-
lude has generated many variations, and even something of a tradition.
The project for these subsequent generations, however, is visibly dif-
ferent and considerably more diffuse than Osborne's strong conceptual-
ism. If the realignment of art in ontological terms is no longer the primary
stake for smart art, its strategies have remained the same: namely, the use
of analytic philosophical tropes to gain social control over the artwork. In
a discussion with Justin Lieberman in this issue, Chris Sharp posits that
the trajectory of the term "strategy," from its one-time martial use to its
recuperation by the marketing industry, is paralleled in "retard art"-and,
I would add, in smart art, too. The erudition exuded by smart art has come
to operate as a substitute for technical mastery, as intellectual dazzle that
compensates for plastic indifference, or even emptiness. Bamboozling its
viewer into passivity, it forecloses critical exchange.
Philosophy and/as Art
Smart art emerged within a generation of artists who were largely uni-
versity-educated and confronted with the new opportunities and antag-
onisms of their epoch. These artists began making art in the shadow of
critical powerhouses, Greenberg first among them, whose standards of
judgment left little margin for new art, particularly art that responded to
the society and politics of advanced capitalism and the various headways
made in civil rights and progressive social politics. It thus seems inevita-
ble that criticism and art would butt heads, and would do so over the very
definition of art.
Osborne indicates philosophy as "the means for [the] usurpation of
critical power by a new generation of artists: the means by which they
could simultaneously address the crisis of ontology of the artwork [...] and
achieve social control over the meaning of their work."' Deploying phil-
osophical, logico-linguistic discourse as the artwork was thus a two-fold
strategy to shift authority of the work from criticism to artworks and the
artists who made them, while (ostensibly) leaving no aesthetic remainder.
While this can be seen as liberating the watershed works of the 1960s, con-
ceptualism's "usurpation" can be read not merely as an affront to old-guard
critics but as one possible reaction to the "de-skilling" of art through the
course of the twentieth century. Where technical skill became increasingly
irrelevant, a level of intense erudition and verbal facility became nearly39 ART LIES NO. 66
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Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010, periodical, 2010; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228031/m1/41/?q=%22Puleo%2C+Risa%22: accessed June 8, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .