Every Contemporary Artist is in the Position of a Non-philosopher …

“Confetti Death” (made of found plastic spray paint caps) – By Typoe

‘I don’t believe in art. I believe in the artist.’

(Marcel Duchamp)

​‘Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life, each is caught up in the vortex in which he first committed only measured stakes, each is led on by what he said and the response he received, led on by his own thought of which he is no longer the sole thinker.'

​(Merleau-Ponty) 

1. The question raised by the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher is first and foremost: what is the relation between the generic singularity and the artistic project as a form - content proposition? Within this question we find three basic aspects of that which constitutes the thought-space of a contemporary artist. Firstly, we have the generic singularity as a mode of existence: a human being who becomes something within a generic space of social categories. Secondly, we have the artistic project as a system of competing interests that designates how knowledge is not only embedded but also operative in the artistic agent. And lastly, we have the form-content proposition as the specific artwork-event, which designates what is actually produced and made real in institutional contexts. A generic singularity is a human being who develops his own knowledge and insights through the mode of existence, the artistic project and the actual artworks produced throughout his life: artwork-events appear, from one to thousands, that in their totality are a life’s work. All these artwork-events, which sum up the artistic output of a ​life lived as a gesture towards art and life in general, present their own kind of thinking in action: a non-philosophy. In three words, we can sum up the nature of this non-philosophy: self positioning, investigation and intervention. Some kind of self positions itself within the art world, some kind of investigation through a system of competing interests is carried forth, and finally the artwork-events intervene into some more or less established contexts for presenting art. Self-positioning, investigation and intervention are here understood as taking a position and emitting objects, gestures, signs, situations or environments that are received in a more or less defined context for viewing art. It is a non-philosophy because the contemporary artist thinks, but in a personalised way, through his experiences, the position he has taken, whatever artworks he has made and finally, what is stated about them. 

1. 2. What is non-philosophy and why can the contemporary artist be viewed as a non-philosopher? French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was, to my knowledge, the first to designate non-philosophy as a new possibility for thinking, and it is from him that I have taken my lead regarding the potential of non-philosophy. Non-philosophy is not antiphilosophy (Groys). For Merleau-Ponty non-philosophy is the operation of situating philosophy in whatever configuration of life: ‘No human being can receive a heritage of ideas without transformingthem through the soleact of knowingthem;without injectinginto them his own, always different, way of being.’  It means to translate the insights produced by philosophy into one’s personal existence, thereby distorting and twisting that knowledge so that it becomes a concrete experience.  It is to push the transcendental space of conceptual reasoning into the empirical space of singular existence, and in return push new concepts into the transcendental. The ‘non’ added to philosophy points to a distance between the conceptual space of philosophy and the concrete space of life in all its complexity and contradiction. It is ‘non’ because it admits to its own deficiency, its own lack of completion and perfection. Non-philosophy acknowledges its own act of deformation, distortion and misinterpretation, but gains access to the life that is there to be lived and experimented with. Non-philosophy points towards an act, towards the future, a becoming that is incomplete and unknown, and the contemporary artist will use whatever theory or movement is at hand in order to propel himself forwards. ‘Theory is no problem for the artist. Theory only interests him in as much as he can make it run in his blood.’ (Gombrowicz). This act of transposing but also transforming theory so that it is useful is exactly what makes the contemporary artist a non-philosopher, because he has taken a position in the world in order to achieve something in it. The positioning is a reflexive operation committing to some kind of theory of the world (more or less reflexive) whereby the artistic output is possible. Contemporary artists have thought about why they want to make art and what kind of art they want to make in relation to an already established art world. This reflective reasoning, specific to each artist, represents its own personal experience, and is one of the first aspects of the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher. Not that all contemporary artists began by taking a philosophy course, reading classical or post-structural theorists in order to become artists; rather, the initial gesture towards actively deciding to become an artist was accompanied by a fundamental sense of openness and orientation towards the already existing movements of contemporary art that had to be transformed into something specific: the whatever life of a contemporary artist.  

1. 2.1. Merleau-Ponty developed his idea of non-philosophy during the last three years of his life, before his sudden death in 1961 at the age of 53. He delivered three courses at Collége de France in Paris. The first was called Philosophie aujourd’hui and given between 1958 and 1959, with the first section entitled: Notre étatde non-philosophie. The second course (1960–61) was L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui, and the first section of this course was entitled La pensée fondamentale en art. The third course (also 1960–61) was Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel. Simultaneously with these lectures Merleau-Ponty was also working on the manuscript for what was later published in 1964 as Le visible et l’invisible. Here, we find a new and radical attempt to think about non-philosophy through his concept of la chair (the flesh) that plays an important role in my understanding of the experience as a radical transgression. The last manuscript he finished is now a classic essay on the relationship between painting, the painter and the act of perceiving: L’Oeil et l’Esprit (1964). What is important to grasp here is the intimate connection between non-philosophy and art that Merleau-Ponty was attempting to describe, or, put differently: his attempt was to intersect the activities of contemporary philosophy and art. In chapter 2.A.1. Merleau-Ponty and the Space of Non-philosophy I will go more deeply into the full scope of his idea of non-philosophy, and in chapter 2.A.4. Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Art I will elucidate some perspectives on how Phénomenologie de la perception from 1945 influenced the American development of Minimalism and how his thinking can be useful for an understanding of contemporary art today. 

3.1. In order to outline a fundamental ontological29 insight regarding the relationship between non-philosophy and contemporary art, I need briefly to clarify the historical background of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of non-philosophy. According to the philosopher, classical systemic philosophy reached its metaphysical endpoint with the Hegelian master-narrative of the spirit becoming absolute self-consciousness through the unfolding of the system itself. History – as the progression towards emancipation – having reached the stage of the modern democratic state, ensuring the freedom of the individual, had also come to an end in an abstract sense. This is not to say that historical events would no longer take place, but that the substance of the spirit as freedom had now become real as a rational structure within historical reality. ‘What is rational, is real, what is real is rational,’ is the infamous quote from the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts (1820). One of the ways for philosophy after Hegel to escape his dialectical prison was to turn him upside down by thinking about that cleavage in the system that negates this totality: the individuality of experience. In Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel, Merleau-Ponty quotes two pages from Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) where what is called ‘experience’ is defined: ‘This dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises (ausübt) on its self – on its knowledge as well as its object – is, in so far as the new, true object emerges to consciousness as the result of it, precisely that which is called experience. ’Experience for Hegel is the development of ‘new, true’ knowledge after it has been sent to the testing-ground of the real. In the encounter with something outside the system, the system of knowledge breaks apart, has to enlarge itself, and in this movement expand its understanding of the world. Experience becomes a rupture (Bruch-erfahrung): it breaks me apart and forces me to reconsider my being in the world. I am forced to interrogate the relation between the system and that which goes against it. That which goes against also holds the potential of something new. ‘The experience, that is to say, the effective assumption of a being, is capable of giving space to a dialectic, because it alone is the opening towards something that can reveal itself, that has its depths, a latency, and that can become a space for an ecstasy from where a true novelty may emerge.’ (Merleau-Ponty). By designating the possibility of such a point within the space of consciousness (and that it can be ripped apart: ‘Zerrissenheit’, Hegel is also opening a back door for those who later came to insist upon the absoluteness of experience. There are experiences that cannot be surpassed and integrated into the transcendental system. They designate a specific encounter between a subject and something other to it: concrete experiences happening to the individual. This insight will become integral to my understanding of the power of contemporary art today. Ultimately, contemporary art takes place in that corridor between the already established world of signs and conventions and that fringe of the other, the unforeseen, the virtual, that excess of being that points towards something beyond me. Contemporary art is visibility with infinite depth, because the contemporary artist has moved into the space of contingency: he has been ripped apart from the conventional space of art and into a new state of mind (epistemic rupture); he contains within himself that specific experience of being able to think himself and the world differently. And because epistemic ruptures happen all the time, opening up towards situations of contingency, we never know what exactly will happen in the space of contemporary art. In this state of mind I locate the fundamental thought-power of the contemporary artist as a non-philosopher.

1. 3.1. Let us return to this back door that Hegel left in his system. According to Merleau-Ponty, three philosophers push philosophy towards this new space of thinking about the concrete: A) Karl Marx (1818–1883), with his demand for philosophy no longer simply to interpret the world, but actually to change it – that is, engaging in the praxis of human life. For Marx, philosophy is social criticism of the structures that govern the production of reality, analysing the relation between ideology and capitalism, fuelled by social indignation and a revolutionary spirit. Academic philosophy (Hegel) must be destroyed and man’s creative potential must be realised. Absolute truth is not official appearance, but must be produced through praxis. B) Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), with his focus on the singular human existence as it is lived through different stages and from an interior perspective. The inner time of subjectivity evades the absoluteness of the Hegelian spirit. Kierkegaard’s discourse gravitates around existence and the questions of action, angst, decision, love, but also passion, the ironic attitude and the leap of faith. For Kierkegaard it is more important to choose your own life than to conform to the abstract principles of the state. C) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), with his demand for the rethinking of values and the quest for new values with which to live life. Postulating the Dionysiac way of life as being that of the aesthetic realm, Nietzsche initiates the affirmative experimental attitude towards life. As a critic of culture (Freier Geist) he opens the pathway for Freudian psychoanalysis in his unmasking of the rational subject, in his sense of the instinctual forces behind official appearance: the will to power. Each of these three thinkers represents his own kind of rebellious anarchistic attitude towards the system of Hegel because each placed himself as a singular authority against the absolute spirit. Each in his own way was searching for liberation; for modes of existence where human nature could individualise itself beyond the confines and dehumanising aspects of the bureaucratic industrial state of modernity.
   

1. 3.2. Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche all belong to the 19th century, but one can find them as sources of inspiration for several substantial discourses in Continental thought of the 20th century. As Merleau-Ponty states: ‘They live on in us rather than our having a clear perspective on them and we involve them in our own problems rather than solving theirs with ours.’ The Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse), Existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre), and Post-structuralism (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida) are each indebted to the way these philosophers transformed idealistic philosophy into the actual sphere of human life and all its social contradictions, existential turmoil and life-experimenting facets. When looking closely at human life, these three thinkers saw that each human being had the potential to become something other than that which was already pre-determined by the system; or rather, that the institutionalisation of freedom represented a historically unprecedented opportunity for modern man to become completely different from what he had been. Through the encounter with the experience he could be changed. But what we can experience that will break us apart, we fundamentally do not know. And this insight connects these philosophers regarding their view of the metaphysical structure of the world. Looking out of the back door towards experience one sees the radical contingency of being. And contingency must here be understood as non-necessity: a fundamental openness of being that gives space and time for the desire to exist in a different world. There is not one essential eternal foundation in our world. As Merleau-Ponty states: ‘Everywhere the foundation is recognised as contingent.’ By this he means that the way the world appears, how we relate to being and what the future will be, is not determined once and for all. These non-philosophers that Merleau-Ponty evokes believed that in our openness to the experience, we can allow ourselves to change. The political, aesthetic and cultural realm has exactly this redemptive power: to open man to a new way of being in the world. We as humans have the ability and the freedom to change the world by consciously reflecting on our relation to it. This means to question the world actively and critically in order to free a space of possibility, a questioning that later finds its apotheosis in the fundamental definition of conceptual art: to question the definitions and limitations of art. Where natural science searches for the valid invariable laws governing all possible worlds, non-philosophy engages in the virtuality of life itself. From virtuality the present receives energy to burst into the future. Virtuality and contingency recapture this common belief: that the future is unknown, that I exist within a spectrum of possibility and that as a human agent I have the power to enact nonnecessity in the world. Contingency opens the space of not-being, of the right not to be, and thereby a critical space of reasoning and new ways of experiencing the world. This is the radical situation of modernity that Merleau-Ponty already sensed was on its way in the new developments within the advanced art and philosophical positions of his own time. Today, more than 50 years after he delivered his lectures on Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel, we are now in this situation of art: that the post-Hegelian discourse of modernism in the disguise of Clement Greenberg has been superseded by the institutional insights produced by neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s. A new historical state of common ground between contemporary art and non-philosophy has emerged as a delta of possibilities for any young person who wants to make art today. A new space of freedom has become real: a vast amount of ways of making and interpreting art have materialised. Thousands of artistic positions exist alongside each other in one huge global horizontal maze of art worlds – from Cairo to Mumbai to Tokyo to Mexico City to São Paolo to Reykjavik to New York to London to Glasgow to Barcelona to Berlin to Copenhagen to Warsaw to Stockholm to Tallinn to Moscow to Istanbul – everywhere, contemporary artists are tapping into the contemporary art world as a space of unprecedented freedom and expression.

1.4.

​I propose to think of the contemporary artist – who has been around for almost 100 years as a conceptual person – as a non-philosopher. As a starting point, the contemporary artist has the radical contingency of art. Art as an essential phenomenon tied to certain ideas, genres or media no longer exist. Artworks only exists as propositions about art: ‘This could be art.’ And he who makes the proposition is the contemporary artist, because it is in the act of making art that he becomes contemporary. The contemporary artist is he who proposes artwork from an absolute background of the virtual. He proposes the artwork as an offering to art, because this is the only way in which art attains a presence.40 But this absolute freedom of the contemporary artist does not relieve the artist from his embeddedness in the generalised space of human existence: a body, a social world and a being in time (the metaphysical knot). A contemporary artist is situated in life, because he exists as the specific instantiation of the metaphysical knot: as someone who has transformed his relations to a specific body (the monstrous body) appearing within a social context (the art world) at a point in historical time (historicity). Contemporary artists become generic singularities because through their life trajectories they are framed by institutional and ideological regimes of discourses, but nonetheless have a sovereign right to their individual interests, to be proactive and to develop new ideas for future artworks. Simply put, the contemporary artist exists with a right and a power to make art. And here, ‘to make art’ is understood in a narrow semiotic fashion: the ability and will to produce whatever signs, objects and events and make them circulate within contexts of viewing art. Artists can authorise their artworks simply by proposing and presenting them to an audience. From this perspective, even the most minimal, conceptual or collective art project is expressive because it originates from somewhere and has a destination. To be able to express is to have the power to exist as the ability to produce difference in a social environment.

1. 4.1. Let me reframe the relation between the contemporary artist and the generic singularity. The contemporary artist is a sub-category within the general concept of a generic singularity – the latter designating all those individuals who become something specific in a social field. Like all generic singularities, the contemporary artist exists just as other human beings exist, but relates differently to the three basic fields: the body, the social and time, and thereby carves out a new singularity from the background of those generic categories that constitute his existence. Contemporary artists push their bodies, their social world and their time in a different direction through the fundamental choices they make regarding the art worlds to which they wish to belong, the art-historical movements from which they seek inspiration and consolation, the peer-groups to which they adhere, and then the internal decisions they make about the content of their work, pursuing specific interests and executing artworks according to stylistic logics. The beginning of a generic singularity as a contemporary artist is the gesture towards art that totalises this movement, whereby the artist comes to the point of actual art-making. Behind each artist there is an initial decision to make art, a gesture that has the radical contingency of being. There is no longer any absolute position from which to state the essence of art; there is only the specific position taken by those battling the forces of virtuality in the instauration of the artistic project.

1. 4.2. Anything and everything is possible, at least on a principle level (Danto).42 But, because anything and everything is possible, there is no medium that can come closer to the essence of art, that channels art or participates better in the idea of art than any other. A contemporary artist of today is faced with a different problem: that of the artistic project. What is an artistic project? A system of competing interests. To have an interest means to develop a certain kind of attention towards the world. Because my interest takes me in a specific direction, meaning appears and is framed. An interest is intentional: it guides my actions, it makes me decide what to do. An interest empowers me, because through the pursuit of an interest I come to know something about a specific topic, a field of themes and those who are key actors within that field. The artistic project is not just one interest, however, but a system of competing interests. Each artist may have several interests that overlap, come to the forefront, disappear and then re-emerge. They can be like a pack of wolves with a leader, but spreading out or concentrating depending on what is to be achieved. My interests constitute my research area, those topics within the world to which I am drawn, as in being fascinated, intrigued, curious and engulfed. In return, my interests give me new ideas for future art projects; they constitute my access to a situation and they authorise my choices regarding what I propose as art.

1.5. The proposition I am trying to present here is that a contemporary artist can be seen as a nonphilosopher because from his embedded situation he is confronting contingency. From this position he develops and presents a thought-space that is personalised as a specific way of engaging with the fact that everything is possible. It is a thinking in the sense that certain aspects of an artist’s thinking can be externalised and communicated (the interview, statement or projectdescription), but most importantly, it is an operative thinking, because the artist does something in this world: he produces form-content propositions – the whatever artworks that burst into the future and one day crash into our present. This demands a level of thinking infused with some kind of knowledge and certain skills to make interesting artworks. But, it is not a knowledge that follows the same criteria as the production of scientific knowledge, such as the possibility of iteration, verification and systematic study. It can be knowledge infused with desire, memory, ambition, but also a sense of uncertainty and joy in experimenting. It can be knowledge informed with the intention of making a statement. It can be knowledge infused with a white energy of freedom and exuberance. Ultimately, it is a thinking-knowledge infused with transformed experience. Firstly, the experience of having encountered numerous artworks and projects (perceptual); secondly, the experience of producing one’s own artwork or initiating collaborative art projects (pragmatic); and finally the experience of being transformed and inspired by other artists and life in general (radical). I have lived with art, and this living in all its totality has become a complex experience that fuses with my position as an exhibiting artist. My field of experience as an artist is that of having ideas for exhibitions and projects, putting artworks on display, of presenting them to a public and receiving a response. ​I have experienced knowledge of how this can be done, and which rhetorical possibilities exist as to how to install, to present and to mediate artworks, exhibitions and gestures. 

1.6. Not all artists of today are contemporary artists. There are many artists still working in traditional media, who do not reflect on their art practice, who do not engage with any of the insights or breakthroughs that have happened in that massive space of art that was opened with Duchamp’s readymade. The extreme version of the non-contemporary artist, who states he is an artist but makes art in the basement without any knowledge of contemporary art and with no audience from the contemporary art world in mind, is not a contemporary artist. Thus, I disagree with the all-inclusive position on the contemporary artist: that all artists and artworks of today are contemporary, the argument being that all art being made is always contemporary, since it comes into being in time and is thus present to the time of its own making. I disagree, because I believe that to be a contemporary artist is a state of mind, the result of a specific reflective operation, and thus a change of consciousness. A contemporary artist is aware of other contemporary artists and produces art for a contemporary art-world context. So, a contemporary artist has consciousness of the contemporary as a cultural field, and also wishes to participate in that specific art world that constitutes the contemporary. Knowledge and desire produce an intention: the contemporary artist wants to make art that is presented at institutions or exhibition spaces showing contemporary art. To be a contemporary artist is to belong to a contemporary art world. A contemporary artist exists within the post-medium condition (Krauss).45 This condition has its origins in the radical contingency of art that Duchamp revealed with his readymade urinal, and that later Merleau-Ponty designated as the condition for philosophy to become non-philosophy. The post-medium condition is the situation in which the institution of art as a system allows for whatever object or event to appear and become designated as an art object. As Arthur Danto states in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: ‘Something is an artwork if it satisfies certain institutionally defined conditions, though outwardly it may appear no different from an object that is not an artwork.’ Contemporary artists might be working with certain materials or be framed by their media, such as being categorised and labelled as a painter, sculptor, photographer or media artist, but these artists are aware that other possibilities exist, and that there is no absolute hierarchy between the different material outputs. Contemporary artists are no longer defined by the material support of the media with which they are working. 

1.7.

These reflections presented here are an attempt to show that contemporary artists are thinking beings both through their act of being contemporary and through the way they establish their artistic projects. I believe that there is a relation between the condition of non-philosophy and that of contemporary art. Contemporary artists present a vision of the world that is equivalent to a way of thinking; a non-philosophy in action. Non-philosophy is a mode of existing that becomes a mode of vision: a gaze that entails a theory of seeing and perceiving, but most importantly is ‘externalizing a way of viewing the world.’ (Danto). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty, non-philosophy is the name I want to give to this specific way of thinking about the world, which has exploded since the early historical avant garde. In the following pages I will try to demarcate the nature of this thinking and why contemporary art has become one of the more potent sites of enacting non-philosophy. Thus this book consists of two sections. The first section, The Depth of Experience, attempts to describe Merleau-Ponty’s idea and conception of non-philosophy through a reading of his manuscripts from the period of 1957–61. Here, key ideas are the role and power of experience, the turn towards the lived experience, and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh. Thereafter, I develop my own thoughts on the body, existence, position and method of a non-philosopher. Finally, I present some thoughts on Merleau-Ponty’s actuality for contemporary art as a position and practice. The second section, Aspects of Contemporary Art, deals with the space of contemporary art in relation to institutions and the agent producing art: the contemporary artist as a generic singularity. Important aspects are the artwork as a proposition, the system of competing interests, the art of contemporaneity, the framing of art through institutions, nihilism, experimentation and the notion of systemic hysteria. These are attempts to encircle different elements of the force-field constituting contemporary art and thus not attempts to convey the absolute truth about contemporary art. I end the book by presenting my thoughts on the future of contemporary art.  

1.8.

I view these reflections as a presentation of a poetics for my own practice and existence as a contemporary artist and non-philosopher. They are aspirations for my life; thoughts and ideas that push me further, force me to re-consider my practice and the way I exist in the world. My writing transforms me: it feeds back into my mind as insights that I have to acknowledge are part of me and thus confront me with an understanding I did not know existed. They are the trace of an experience of thinking something beyond me. I am a contemporary artist and in the position of a non-philosopher. It is a state of mind. 

Introduction from the book: NON-PHILOSOPHY AND CONTEMPORARY ART by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen