The Materiality of the Artwork

The achievement of Conceptual Art, lies in having generated – historically and aesthetically – the notion of art as such that substantially altered accepted ideas of art. Since art was primarily about the idea, which could basically manifest itself in any medium, suddenly one could be an artist without having to be a painter, sculptor, musician or poet. But as for a substantial and structural modification of visual art in terms of its relation to the economic, Conceptual Art met its limits. More than any other artistic phenomenon of the late 1960s, Conceptual Art exposed the gap between the ambition to change the way art is interwoven with society and the limitation of such an ambition. From a culturally critical standpoint, Conceptual Art exposed the inner conflict of art between its own ambition and social reality. Such an assessment comes close to the attitude of Buchloh, for whom „it seems obvious, at least from the vantage of the early 1990s, that from its inception Conceptual Art was distinguished by its acute sense of discursive and institutional limitations […] without aspiring to overcome the mere facticity of these conditions.” (39)

From this perspective the claim for artistic and social impact transforms into an exposition of those circumstances that render a direct intervention and effectiveness of art impossible. Thus there isn’t a gap between saying and doing or, in other words, no contradiction between the ambition of art to negate its product status and its ultimate failure to do so. Rather this tension expresses a dialectic that characterizes the status of the artwork in bourgeois society. An understanding of the commodification of art can be derived from Adorno, for whom culture is deeply embedded in the structure of commodity production, which is on the one hand necessary, because only then does it accrue a certain ideological independence — from the church and the aristocracy — but on the other hand, it makes the art object a mere market commodity deprived of a social function. And art as a “free” aesthetic work has to oppose that status. To this dialectical condition belongs art’s dual character “as both autonomous and fait social” (40), or as Adorno also phrases it, „autonomous structures and social phenomena“ (41). According to Adorno, art is not only a “fait social” because of „its mode of production, in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated” and not because its themes are social ones but also “by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position as autonomous art”. (42) Only via critique can an artwork that itself is part of an essentially alienated society transcend society. Art can acquire significance only if it manages to implicitly criticize those conditions from which it cannot escape. The involuntary complicity between art and society urges art towards protest, yet necessitates that any protest immediately becomes choked and fruitless, more a formal gesture than an angry polemic. This limit of critique, which is rendered explicit in Conceptual Art, determines the relation between art and society.

Adorno’s conception of the dialectical relation of art and society derives from the historical approaches that aspired to overcome the tradition of an idealistic separation of artistic and social production in aesthetics. Marx introduces the term “production” for the production of both intellectual and material necessities. His ambition was to overcome the antagonism of the aesthetic and the practical that constituted the core of philosophical idealism. “Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law,“ he writes. (43) Marx brought together the force of production and form — i.e. social relations — and marked them as different aspects of one phenomenon.

The specificity of Adorno’s position lies in his attempt to combine an approach, critical of ideology with the concept of art’s autonomy. In Adorno’s view, the artwork exists in a society that does not have an outside, yet the artwork must claim an outside to legitimize itself as art. It needs to create a distance from the sphere of objects, to be a “[thing] of a second order”, (44) a spiritualized version of the commodities it opposes. Since art is inseparably linked to society by its own historical and material preconditions, it can only gain legitimacy by distancing itself critically from society.The fact that art is embedded in society is unavoidable but nonetheless compromises it. It is a necessary evil that the artwork must overcome via its form and method of signifying. On a level of representation art can claim an outside that it does not and cannot have.

Adorno’s theory combines the autonomy of the artwork, i.e., its position outside, with a radical critique of society. But the critique signifies a negative force, which can only materialize in the artwork against what already exists. This negativity is without immediate application or use, because Adorno has a deep mistrust for any immediate pragmatic intention of art.

“It is not only through its manifest practical intentions, but rather through its mere existence – indeed, precisely through its impractical nature – that art manifests a polemic, secretly practical character. This however, cannot be reconciled through the insertion of culture as a category – ‘cultural activities’ – into the totality of prevailing practice as has been done under current conditions with total smoothness.” (45)

Adorno is skeptical of any kind of productive or pragmatic impact of art on a social level, because for him the societal is just a sphere of alienation. Therefore the relation between art and society can only be conceived of as one of negation — but a negation that always remains symbolic and that has to come to terms with its own limitations with respect to its impact on real circumstances. Seen from a theoretical perspective, the relation of art to its own praxis remains a blind spot and a paradox that cannot be overcome. Art is fueled by the ambition to negate or overcome something with which it is and remains inseparably linked on a level of representation. In this regard, there is a connection between the art form of sculpture that attempts to transcend its own materiality and Adorno’s postulate that art must strive to negate its own participation in society. The failure lies in art’s inability to extend signification to the level of the factual. In its practice, in its performative effect on the circumstances it criticized, Conceptual Art neither criticized nor weakened but rather further differentiated and elaborated what one culturally and historically understands a commodity to be. And it had a similar effect on the critique of the object. The introduction of certificates (which guarantee the authenticity of the artwork in many examples of Conceptual Art) has reaffirmed the inevitability of a material fixation when art encounters the museum and the market instead of suspending it.

This perspective becomes apparent when one focuses on the factual, cultural and ethical implications of an aesthetic that is oriented towards the performative dimension of art. The facticity of this now comes to the fore. The point of departure is less the recognition of problematic conditions and circumstances than the way in which these circumstances constantly get produced and reproduced via practices and actions —and by any given artwork. As we have seen in the context of Buren’s works, Judith Butler theorizes this process as “performativity.” Thereby we can understand what an artwork is capable of generating — be it affirmative or towards social change — precisely because of its linkage to social institutions and processes. What becomes significant and meaningful here is not the representational level of the artwork, not what it claims or signifies, but its factual existence, which becomes the point of departure for artistic agency and positing.

To understand the concept of the performative in this way means to focus not only on what an artwork intends to do, but also on its unintended and unreflected effects. The performative emphasizes an artwork’s constitutive effect on precisely those conditions into which it is embedded and by which it exists. From the perspective of the performative, artworks not only are products of given circumstances, they also contribute to the existence of these very circumstances. Not only is social reality represented in artworks, but they also constitute it both concretely and categorically. Concretely here refers to processes that are initiated by the production and the existence of the artwork; categorically, refers to categories that are intentionally or unintentionally reproduced in the process. Seen from this angle, the artwork is far from powerless; on the contrary — as an integral part of society — it has an inherent agency (which, however, can be directed intentionally only to a limited degree). Via the concept of performativity one can explain how an artwork co-constitutes social reality in its most fundamental parameters (for example, the historical and cultural form taken by the category of the commodity.)