For Reading Week I decided to go out a book from the library which had been recommended as function of our reading for the Studio Wall module this semester.  The volume was written past Peter Osborne called  Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Gimmicky Fine art.  It was published in 2013 in London by Verso.

Reading this was, unfortunately, hard work, Osborne uses the bookish language of  philosophy which, even having looked up the pregnant of unfamiliar words, was still impenetrable every bit to what sense, I, the reader, was supposed to make of the sentence.

One of the points I did pick upwardly was Osborne's concern nigh what was contemporary art.  The usual meaning for gimmicky is 'upward to the minute' or something which is immediately present.  Of class, as fourth dimension passes then something is no longer contemporary and has a historical reference point.  So what fine art could exist considered gimmicky fine art such that it could be the subject of art criticism and philosophy? He comments that we await at past art to critique contemporary art but contemporary art is created now not then, so how can this work?

Osborne says he wants to testify that contemporary fine art is post conceptual art.  However, that, to my mind then calls into question what is mail service-conceptual art – has the conceptual art movement ended?  I don't retrieve and so.

Osborne then goes on to comment most the nature of fine art criticism.  He quotes Harold Rosenberg equally saying in 1965 that "art criticism is fine art history though not necessarily the art history of the art historian".  This poses the question equally to what kind of fine art history is art criticism.  Notwithstanding, Osborne claims that things have changed since 1965 and there is no longer a place for the condescension of the art critic towards the art historian although he acknowledges that this makes the question of what is art criticism more difficult to answer.

Osborne points out that art history has widened to consider social, economical and cultural questions – funnily enough the subject of i of our recent lectures and my recent blog Grade and Lodge.  The next point really confused me.  Osborne says that the art globe has developed a criticism of historical art rather than developing the historical aspect of criticism of contemporary art.  And this, he says, is why there is lilliputian philosophising almost contemporary art.  Others don't know what the fuss is nearly:  Jean-Marie Schaeffer, a french philosopher, said rather scathingly 'art will get forth very well on its own' – that is without disquisitional discourse.  Osbourne disagrees – he asserts that contemporary art is worthy of philosophical assay, the problem is that fine art criticism on gimmicky fine art is merely not good enough.  Osborne's concern is that this lack of criticism has created a legitimisation crisis for contemporary art and the dearth of serious disquisitional writers remain an ongoing issue.

Osborne  suggests that the word 'contemporary' should be something which occurs in the period of a homo life – so is it something that is no more than seventy years old?  Contemporary art also requires artistic construction and expression of contemporaneity.  However, the word contemporary is used in Europe more to differentiate from pattern or art from pre-Second World War works.  The futurity was imagined by designers and artists to throw off wartime restrictions and to get back to normality.  However, the future was not imagined in the same way globally.  For case, the concept of Socialist Realism was established as the compulsory creative creed in the Soviet Matrimony in the 1930s.  To comply, works had to display clearly defined political content and a heroic manner. Abstract fine art or other modernist art were forbidden. The style was then imposed on the newly formed Eastern Bloc in the tardily 1940s.

In England, on the other manus, in that location was more consideration around a social and autonomous reconstruction rather than a complete break with capitalism.  The Beveridge Report highlighted 5 cardinal challenges for Great britain post war which prevented people from improving their lives:

  • want (acquired by poverty)
  • ignorance (caused by a lack of didactics)
  • squalor (caused by poor housing)
  • idleness (caused by a lack of jobs, or the ability to gain employment)
  • disease (acquired by inadequate health care provision)

Hence the institution of the Welfare State past the Labour Government to address these problems and the spirit of optimism which initially prevailed.

The contact with abstract, post modernist US artists had a profound touch on on European artists who had, in a way, lost impetus in developing new ways of creating fine art post-obit the terrible aftermath of the Second World War.

In England, equally the 1950s progressed, there was increased interaction between the arts and advanced technology, including picture palace, architecture and ad.  Osborne points at the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Fine art Gallery in 1956 as evidence of this.  I accept looked into why this exhibition was considered to exist such a seminal experience.  In that location were 12 exhibits made by a collaboration of artists, architects and sculptors setting out their visions of contemporary art.  The participants only had £fifty per group for materials and the exhibits were two years in the making.  The exhibition caused quite a stir – the novelty of the exhibits and the idea of collaboration to create an art piece of work inspiring much debate almost the nature of gimmicky art.

A short clip of the British Pathe news reporting on the exhibition gives a flavour of why this was seen as and so ground-breaking.

This exhibition proudly announced that the future was already here.  Although of course the future is never here.  This disappointment with the present (the future of the 195'0s) was expressed by the title of Victor Burgin'south 1970'south work cited by Osborne 'This is the Tomorrow you were promised Yesterday"

Victor Burgin 1976

This British street scene is placed next to a poem speaking of an exotic idyll which of course is the opposite of the mundane scene which the photo shows.  Contrasting the words with the image, suggests that the brave new positive time to come envisaged in the 1950s had not come to pass in the 1970s which was still aggress with social and economic issues and general discontent.

But at present back to the meaning of contemporary – Osborne says that gimmicky is the 'almost contempo modern'.  Mail service modernism fine art was previously contemporary but time has now passed and and then it is no longer gimmicky in the 'mod' sense.  Osborne talks of a merging and overlap of fourth dimension frames as to what art might exist considered contemporary and what is not.  For example, Duchamp'south prepare-mades were constructed effectually the First Earth War and therefore these would not exist considered equally contemporary fine art.  Every bit, information technology is unclear when the post-war period ends so this cannot determine a articulate bespeak after which all fine art would exist considered gimmicky.

Osborne suggests 3 time frames when contemporary art tin can be considered to have started.  First, in the W he suggests that gimmicky fine art only started in the 1960s when artists broke with the idea that art had to include an object based or medium specific work by developing performance and conceptual art.  Second, other artworks from countries such as Russia in the 1960s and 70s and China later 1989 should be included in the canon of contemporary fine art retrospectively given the lack of access or knowledge virtually those works until more recently.  Finally there is the art created after 1989 when the Berlin Wall came downwards and the Cold State of war finally concluded.  All these phases of art creation are interlinked by the cross-fertilisation of ideas through the improvement of global communications.  Because of the current transglobal nature of communications, there is more than of a demographic borderland rather than a territorial frontier for the substitution of ideas and collaboration which contemporary fine art exploits fully.

Osborne then states his master thesis: "information technology is the convergence and mutual conditioning of historical transformations in the ontology of the artwork and the social relations of art space (a convergence and mutual workout that has its roots in more general economic and communicational processes – that makes contemporary art possible, in the emphatic sense of an art of contemporaneity. "

What on earth does that hateful?  Putting aside my irritation that words which don't actually exist are invented in this extraordinarily long sentence, on reflection, I recollect that this is repeat of what Osborne has said before.  Namely, that contemporary art is fabricated by the merging of the social weather existing at the time the artwork is created and the essence or being of the artwork itself.   I am still non clear what this is supposed to hateful in the context of my art practice.  It may be that this volition become clearer as this year progresses just at the moment I am hard-pressed to sympathise the relevance of this book to the Studio Wall module at all.  Thus discouraged, I accept not read beyond the first chapter of this book which disappoints me only realistically, I can see no bespeak in struggling with the language if the concepts expressed have no resonance with me.