ISSN: 1705-6411
                                   
Volume 9, Number 1 (January 2012)

Marcel Duchamp is Smiling – Objects and Concepts in Virtual Times

Dr. Gerry Coulter
(Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada) 

This beer isn’t a beer, but it is compensated for by the fact that this cigar isn’t a cigar either (Baudrillard, 1993a:180).

The readymade holds the double curse of modern and contemporary art, the curse of immersion in reality and banality along with the curse of conceptual absorption in the idea of art (Baudrillard, 2005b:92).

1. Marcel Duchamp (c 1966).

I. Introduction

Conceptualism remains strong in the making of contemporary art. It has long been controversial because of its dual relation with the official art world. On the one hand conceptual art signals the desire of many artists to have the object disappear (Baudrillard, 2005b:91), yet at the same time, conceptualism has become deeply ensconced in the art world. By the end of the 1960s Lucy Lippard had provided us with a key idea with which to appreciate conceptual works. Lippard observed that, as works which prioritize and emphasize the act of thinking more than the act of making, conceptualism was involved in the dematerialization of the art object (Lippard, 1968:32). As for the art world, its gravitational pull remains such that nothing is allowed to exist outside of its planet so long as the art world defines it as art. Conceptualism is thus both a product and victim of the implications of Duchamps’ challenge to art.
 
Over the past four decades the concept (the dematerialized object), has jostled with the object in its many material forms for gallery space in contemporary art museums. Where the presence of conceptual works once seemed very odd in galleries otherwise full of paintings and sculptures, today the object and its dematerialized other coexist peacefully. Baudrillard’s thought reminds us that all of this is merely one more example of something to which we are becoming very accustomed – the coexistence of virtual and physical objects. Conceptualism may be a child of Duchamp but it has two other important relatives – simulation and virtuality.

This paper is a series of probes into the state of conceptual art today as it has become one of the hallmarks of a “post” modern condition which holds that ideas are more important to what art is than object-hood. In our time the virtual image has taken on a value that few could have predicted in the 1960s. Today, when we pass through most contemporary exhibitions in public galleries we experience a continuing dialogue that has been established between the object and the conceptual in art. We need not even enter into the realms of computer generated art to reflect upon some of the implications of the embrace of conceptualism. Indeed, the object itself may well be looked upon today as little more than a conceptual reference.

II. The Object As Conceptual Reference

2. Geoffrey Farmer. The Surgeon and the Photographer (2009)
[paper collage, wood, metal, fabric]

Today’s contemporary art scene is indelibly stamped with both conceptualism’s love of ideas and modernism’s love of form. Some of the best works attempt to operate in the  spaces in between idea and form. A good example of such work is Geoffrey Farmer’s The Surgeon and the Photographer (2009).  At first glance when it appeared in a glossy art magazine last year I took this work to be a photographic collage from the 1930s – the work of someone like Karel Tiege perhaps.

3. Karel Teige. Collage Number 55 (1933).

Upon closer inspection I soon discovered that I had not been looking at a photograph of a photograph but of a photograph of a sculptured object (one which is ironically highly depended upon images). What interests me the most about Farmer’s (material) work is the way in which it seems to long to be a photographic collage from the past. There is, to my way of thinking, no other way to read this work than as one deeply immersed in a particular historical period in the making of art/images. When I followed the path backwards in time pointed to by Farmer I arrived there to see them as for the first time. I was struck, as I had never been before, by how collages like those of Teige seem to long to be material sculptures. This is probably due to the residue of the actual material objects which were the stuff of these collages in the first place but I didn’t feel this desiring poetic at work until I saw Teige through the lens of Farmer’s work.

In this work Farmer has achieved a representation of the mutual longing of the image and material object for one-another and this is something that rests at the heart of conceptualism. This longing is among the greatest poetic discoveries of the age of photography and it haunts contemporary art spaces today where objects and conceptual works are simultaneously present. It is a significant, but not widely discussed, aspect of conceptual art that it desires the image (as does performance art) as much as the idea. Without the image there is no “artistic” document [an object to stand in for the concept] or the idea. Conceptual works, it seems, desire the object/image as much as the image desires/takes on a material existence. Further, we need to keep in mind, as Farmer’s work provokes me to think, that the material work deeply desires the image. While conceptual work may seek dematerialization its disappearance is always, in the end, dependent upon the object status of the ever so thin images of its existence long after it has disappeared from public view.

Farmer also makes me think of how conceptual art and photography share another relationship. The moment of photography is not the few seconds when the image adheres to photographic paper in the darkroom (or in the pixilization processes of the digital). The moment of photography – analogue and digital – is a moment just before the photographer closes the shutter – everything after that moment is the history of the image whether or not the photographer is pleased with the outcome or decides to manipulate it in some fashion. Similarly, what conceptualism shows us is that the moment of artistic creation is not its recording through gesture and process in whatever media an artist chooses, but rather, the moment when the art work first appeared in the mind’s eye of its maker. As in the photographic darkroom or computer program today, the finished art work may also vary significantly from what the artist first saw in his/her mind’s eye. What conceptualism has achieved is to make us aware that thought – visualization – is central to the creative moment be it the closing of the camera’s shutter or the moment Jackson Pollock first envisioned paint flying at the surface of a canvas in a particular fashion. As such conceptualism shows us that all art is conceptual.

These are all significant aspects of the continuing dialogue within which we are subsumed in contemporary art spaces today – spaces where images, ideas, and material objects coexist often in blurred ways. Conceptual works such as Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1973) did a great deal in the 1970s to bring the image into art and its spaces of display. Kosuth saw this work as a “summation of modernism and a way out of it” (1996:411-12). Standing before the work in a gallery it only partially achieves this goal. While it manages to highlight the conceptual nature of an object it depends as deeply as any modern work on the object’s presence.

 

4. Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs (1973).

The history of art is as important and as deeply problematized in contemporary galleries today as is the question “what is art?” which can be traced to Duchamp’s Fountain almost a century ago. Farmer, to make his work, found books from which the images are cut and assembled [Farmer is the “surgeon”]. The effect of the work is a “then is now, now is then” blurring of photographic and art histories. Surrealism finds its way back into the gallery through such works as it is not a taken for granted aspect of work today as it is in Teige’s image. Farmer’s work also serves to desanctify the art object while simultaneously desexualizing it – or more accurately, blurring the sexuality of its constituent parts (a man’s hand and leg, two women’s arms, and a third arm (possibly a man’s) join with the text and fabric to make the work. Photomontage like Teige’s in the 1930s typically sexualized the collage with images of only women’s bodies even if among his purposes was to problematize the pornographic image industry of his day. Farmer captures something of contemporary androgynous culture with his blurring of the male and female body.

Farmer is working against the dematerialization of the object in this work as he brings the collage of photographic images into a material existence. It is for all the world a photograph brought into material existence and it is so because of the photographs in art history which so yearned to be material objects. In a time when many things, including art works, are disappearing into the virtual, Farmer has set his work in an art historical context to move in the opposite direction. Against Michael Baxendall who argued that “intention is the forward looking state of things... a relation between the object and its circumstances” (1985:42), Farmer’s work depends upon reconstituting an historical understanding of the object (backward looking) to fully understand the object’s circumstances. In so doing he allows us to see works from the past anew while avoiding the present tendency to see them as precursors to the virtual. In doing so however, Farmer stakes his commitments firmly in the culture of the art world. He can operate in it with a new understanding and make us see anew but I do not expect more of him. What troubles me about Farmer’s object is that, while I quite enjoy it, it operates with a lack a suspicion of the culture from which it originates and upon which it comments. Like conceptual art the maker of this object as conceptual reference may expect a level of collaboration on my part that I am unable to fully render.

The emergence of conceptualism in the 1960s was not only an indication that artists sought to make art disappear (Baudrillard, 2005b:91) it was also an indicator of the coming of the age of the virtual which we now take for granted. Conceptualism is an early harbinger of the sign standing in for the object and today standing in for the sign. As such there is a nostalgia in Farmer’s The Surgeon and the Photographer in its longing for the image as there is a longing for the object in the collage photographs of Teige and others in the 1930s. This mutual longing of image / object, and of object /sign, characterizes not only the past century of art but of modernity and what has come after it. Farmer’s The Surgeon..., is also a work of theory as have been many works over the past fifty years. In this case a work which ‘illustrates’ important themes in poststructural thought concerning the mutual longing of image and object. As such the work itself represents a longing of the object and text. Other works similarly represent the mutual longing of text and image and these are among some of the more significant works, conceptual and otherwise, of our era of virtuality.

For many conceptual artists the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear (see also Baudrillard [1995a] 1996:5) to dematerialize the object or to make art disappear. But the object has proven to be resilient in the age of virtuality and before turning to some of conceptual art’s recent triumphs, it is important to understand that whatever longing to disappear might be present in Farmer’s The Surgeon..., it is an object. A significant part of the story of the art object in the past fifty years is found in the tension between appearance and disappearance. It is part of the tension which characterizes our society today – a society in which we cannot seem to decide if we prefer the exile of the virtual to the catastrophe of the real (Baudrillard [1991] 1995:28).

III. Objects Longing To Be Image

Tonico Lemos Auad’s Seven Seas/Night (2007-09), is a series of material objects (paper bleached by the sun, a bottle standing in as a vase for a small plant and some water, atop a narrow shelf). This neo-conceptual work also longs for the thinness of the concept and the image. Indeed, six of its eight material representations of volume are as “paper” thin as a photograph. The representation of the idea of volume is integral to this work with a foot in two worlds as is the small bottle/vase. In a most subtle manner this is a work of “light art” in that the light of the sun is required to keep the plant alive as it was essential to the process of carefully fading part of each sheet of paper.

The work provides the simplicity of arte-povera but with conceptualism’s neat and tidy aesthetic. Conceptualism has long preferred the purified (clean) object and perhaps it has done so to not only distinguish itself from arte-povera (especially in the 1970s) but as a result of seeking legitimacy in the rarefied atmosphere of the modern gallery of the 1960s and 70s. Conceptualism’s interest in challenging the gallery space has tended to wane as conceptual works were embraced by galleries. Seven Seas... is also minimalist in a way which has tended to add wit to conceptual works. Time is also integral to this work but in a different manner than Farmer’s sculpture (above) where present and history meet. In Auad’s case it took three years of time and sunlight to fade the paper.

5. Tonico Lemos Auad. Seven Seas/Night (2007-09)

Seven Seas... is neo-Conceptual in its representation of objects passing to the status of the image. Its ‘askewness’ (the uneven angle at which the shelf is attached to the wall) is steadied by the lines across the adjoining sheets of carefully sun-bleached paper. The six sheets of paper, despite their thinness, might be understood to be fully in the realm of the object. Yet, to me, they long to be images. Seen as what they really are, given Auad’s treatment of them – as heliographs – they can be understood to already be images as any photograph is both (a very thin) object and image. The shelf, and the bottle are firmly rooted in the realm of objects but both are very fragile. Auad’s Seven Seas... represents the unstable, and today often delicate, status of artistic objects. The water and the plant which complete the work further affirm the transitory as one evaporates and the other eventually withers. The water also highlights the human’s place as the minder of the work as without human intervention (refilling the vase) an important part of the work will die. I can think of few works in recent years that represent the tensions, mutual longings, and fragility of early years of virtuality as well as this.

IV. Descent From The Virtual

Wallead Beshty’s Colour Curl series (2008-09) operates in the micro-space between object and image by getting as close as possible to light as a trace. While they appear to be abstract works Beshty’s Colour Curls are made in the dark space of the photography lab where he exposes chemicals to a spectrum of radiation which are then held by colour photography paper. Imagine yourself  inside a very dark [non]place watching the x-ray interact with the light reflecting properties of a chemical agent. When the x-ray meets the chemical an explosion of light waves erupt like an aurora-borealis lighting up. The result of Behsty’s process is a trace object – a photograph – and more precisely it is the very essence of photography – the “writing of light” – that points to a realm the human eye cannot see until technologies are applied to “capture” a representation of it. The colours are then reproduced given the limitations of today’s colour printers (reds, yellows, blues, greens, and black).  

6. Walead Beshty. Colour Curl (2008).

Beshty’s neo-conceptual process has discovered a way to collect trace images left by x-radiation in a controlled space. The result are his melancholy Colour Curls which harvest, from the very material world of technology, images from the very limits of the chemical processes of image making. Beshty’s Colour Curls exist in a space between idea and object. The object status of the photographic paper upon which they are recorded is but a trace artefact from this world in a way that a normal photograph is not. In Beshty’s case there is no prior image, no image as negative as he is delving into the very origins of colour in the darkness of the development process. Beshty’s conceptual work here seeks, and finds, the random art of colour at work in the most seemingly artless realm of chemicals and technology. Legibility has long been a driving concern of conceptual art and Beshty’s images are of the legibility of light as an almost automatic (rather than abstract) process.

An important aspect of the theoretical break that made conceptualism not simply another art historical movement now involves explorations of virtual spaces. Beshty has discovered interesting virtual echoes from a real place yet one we can only imagine in his works. It is, strictly speaking, neo-conceptual because it works with colour if not an object and colour takes primacy over the idea. Conceptual art has always had a paradoxical relationship to the object, form, and colour. Yet Beshty’s Colour Curls are as much about the idea of colour as they concern the colour itself. This is so because of how it is he who chooses the colour within the limits of contemporary colour printer capabilities. Neo-conceptualism, like conceptual art from its earliest days, is also about the relation of language to art. Perhaps the images Beshty creates stand in for language in a place where it has great difficulty describing (let alone imagining). Beshty’s work shows some of the promise of art for representing events which take place in virtual spaces. Ironically, these virtual spaces are inside the very real scanning systems we pass through in high security environments such as airports. Behsty’s work thus shows the poetry inside the most prosaic technologies. I suppose it can only be understood as an even deeper irony that Beshty’s very process imposes his own system of surveillance deep inside the technologies of surveillance. That the result can be understood as a work of art for display on museum walls is indicative of the depth of our contemporary desire for the image. Baudrillard ([2000c] 2002:48) noted that Frank Gehry’s architecture begins in the virtual [computer program] and moves out into the real. Beshty’s art also moves from the virtual to the real.

V. Language and Imagination

In a world where images have come to replace text Alejandro Cesarco is a proponent of an extreme conceptualism applied to photographs. In his work the image disappears entirely and is replaced by a descriptive text.

7. Cesarco. Stage Direction/Establishing Shot (2008)

The result of this work is that rather than look at a photograph as taken by someone with a camera we are each forced to create the image in our mind’s eye of the carpets, the furniture (including the unmade bed) from which we see out a window past the wrought iron railing to a steel and lavender coloured ocean and mountains. Cesarco thus removes the possibility of us remaining passive viewers and shows the role of language in making us active. The distance traversed in this process is that from victim to agent. As we put our self into the “language-image” shown here we realize that we are seeing all of this most likely from a vantage point behind two people who are also looking at this view. The work is one in which the complete and utter indifference of the world to human affairs is affirmed in the final sentence.

Cesarco’s texts in place of images range from the indifferent to the melancholy. Among the artist’s influences is Baudrillard who’s name appears among others in his video Scrabble (2001). Cesarco advances the dematerialization associated with earlier conceptualism (from object to image) another step as he “dematerializes” images into text. Against our contemporary blizzard of images Cesarco validates the imagination by calling upon us to generate multiple mental images (as many different mental images as there are viewers of the work). There is no accompanying effort to return to “Truth” in this movement merely a heightening of the understanding that each of us experience our individual truth along our own local and restricted horizon (Baudrillard [1981] 1994:108). Such extreme conceptualism emphasizes the intimate relationship between language and imagination although it might be possible for a conceptual artist of Kosuth’s generation to point out that in Cesarco’s work language takes primacy over the idea and as such that his work is neo-conceptual. However, what Cesarco has done is to show that language and idea are inseparable for humans and that it is in our imagination that they become inextricably joined. Cesarco has not reduced art to some “zero-degree” of style but has rather, elevated imagination to the nth degree. As for meaning – language merely stands in for it in each knower’s imaginative understanding.

VI. Duchamp’s Smirk

In the photograph of the aging Marcel Duchamp (image 1, above) he seems to be looking back on the twentieth century while looking right at us. Perhaps he is smiling because he feels that he made the most important contribution to art in the twentieth century by deeply problematizing what art is. Since his early ready-mades, none more so than his Fountain, art has taken very seriously the notion that anything can be art so long as its maker/finder/arranger or viewer define it as such. Duchamp ignited a spark that would become a planetary firestorm which continues to rage as images proliferate. Despite Picasso, despite Rauschenberg, despite Pollock, despite everyone who came to the fore of the art world in his century, Duchamp smiles because he knows that it is he, the anti-artist as artist, who’s ideas had the most far reaching impact on art. In the ongoing confused battlegrounds of art marked by objects, images, text, imagination, and idea, Duchamp’s smile alone sums up a century of art history. Duchamp initiated a sequence that has propelled art toward escape velocity from the object. He is one of the, perhaps unwitting (and how strange to think of Duchamp acting unwittingly), proponents of the virtual.

Shannon Ebner, like many contemporary artists, is deeply interested in the dialogue Duchamp initiated between object and image. Her chromogenic print The Crooked Sign (2006) takes the object out of its place in two ways: 1) it has been found pulled from the ground, 2) it has been dematerialized into an image and we have no idea as to where the object in the photograph is at the time of the making of the image – is it lying in the street or has it been moved to a studio for this photograph? The grease(?) stains

8. Ebner. The Crooked Sign (2006) [Chromogenic Print].

suggest that it remains in the street but some of the lines near the very bottom of the post suggest a wooden floor. In any event this print records a found object as sculpture immediately dematerialized (virtualized) into image. Like so much in our highly artificial culture the role of the object is merely to stand in for itself briefly while the process of simulation occurs. The possible multiple “out of place-ness” of the sign (as “sign”) encourages a poststructuralist smirk – one that isn’t so far from Duchamp’s knowing smile (Barthes’s smirk or Baudrillard’s grin). Since Duchamp’s time, when he might well have brought such a street sign into an art gallery for display, the object now matters less than the image-record of it for the purposes of artistic display. The out of place sign as sign (of artistic discovery – always a sign of Duchamp), further dematerialized into image, sums up much of the movement that has taken place from Duchamp and his material ready-mades to today’s conceptual ones.

It is an interesting aspect of photography, given that it is an image-object of an object which stands in for the object, that it maintains a certain scepticism towards conceptual art while being essential to recording much of conceptual art’s existence. Ebner’s image plays with the irony of object / image and the very “idea” of conceptual art as anything more than an idea. From its earliest days conceptual art was reluctant to withdraw entirely from the image (albeit aimed at promoting an idea which the object represented more than its own material existence). Today, in a time ever more image-saturated, how appropriate that photographers like Ebner provide us with images of objects aimed at promoting the idea of the “idea” represented by the image of the object. Artists continue to find, in our object based culture, that the problem of the object is very much the problem of culture. While it may grieve a 1960s survivor like Daniel Buren, the very basis for the work of Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer, or Gerhard Richter rests on this problem (Buren et. al., 1989:4). The problem such artists pose for conceptualism is that painting and sculpture can survive anything although art after conceptual art will always be understood, at least partially, through conceptualism’s lens [more on Richter’s contribution follows]. While the object remains important today Ebner does share with early conceptualists at least the idea of the rejection of the commodity but so did much of modernism and we know how that played out. Duchamp has long been contemporary art’s alibi. It is little wonder why he is smiling. 

VII. The Tentative Object

We have tended to see “virtual art” as the product of computer programs but we can also see conceptualism, in its preference for idea over object, as integral to the overall place of the virtual in art. It seems impossible today to overstate the impact of conceptualism even when artists return to the object as in Adrian Villar Rojas’s Ma Familia Muerta (2009). At first look we might say that Rojas
 

9. Rojas. Ma Familia Muerta [My dead family] (2009).

has made a work which brings the object back with a vengeance and demands a reverse to the art of dematerialization – after all, the work is almost 30 meters long and 3 meters high. Upon closer inspection though we find that this is also a work of dematerialization / virtualization in slow motion as it is comprised of wood and clay already dissolving into the forest. The work’s inherent pathos surrounds the question as to whether or not whales in the world’s oceans will survive this huge and transient work of art which will, itself, disappear in a few decades. The work is also, in our age of hyperbole – when people speak nonsensically about “saving the planet” – of the ruined quality that everything, living and otherwise, possesses. The work which begins to disappear the day it is begun is a ruin in process as are each of us, our families, and our most treasured things. As the work continues to age and soften, not unlike an ancient castle, it is enhanced by what the Japanese call “sabi” – a word which describes the accumulated patina of ruination which adds beauty to a work. “Everything solid melts into air” as Marshall Berman put it not so long ago speaking to the age of conceptualism and virtuality ever so well.

VIII. Disappearance, Slowness...

There are of course many other transient works which border on the contradictory term “conceptual object” and among these is Danh Vo’s 16.06.1974 (2009). The work is a marker of death

10. Danh Vo. 16.06.1974 (2009).

used to signify the lost grave of the artist’s brother who was killed in 1974. The work highlights the transitory nature of all grave markers which eventually disappear into the earth, albeit much more slowly than Rojas’s clay whale. Once again we find transience the subject of a work of memory. Often today, when a work is an object, it calls upon the temporal and conceptual. What will remain of such works will be the image, perhaps several images of the life of the object’s ruination up to the point of disappearance. In each case these are works which long for the virtual. Conceptual art has proven to be a vital enervating force for a time which tends to be understood in neo-apocalyptic terms. Perhaps this is with good reason as it is anyone’s guess how long the human can survive in the age of computerized genetic experimentation and the onset of genetic terrorism. Conceptualism may well have been an early signal that we soon planned to disappear – the dematerialization of the human.

A work which understands the problem of human transience, if not outright disappearance, is Jamie Eisenstein’s Rug rug rug rug rug (2009) – a performance the artist enacts in the gallery. When she is absent a small plastic sign – the kind which we see on shop doors – telling visitors that the artist “will return” at a time indicated by a pair of plastic clock hands – hangs from the tooth of the bear’s head. It is a work concerning both presence and absence and will one day, after she is dead, point to the absence of the artist. When Eisenstein is present our brief place in the natural history of the earth is brought home in a very immediate way. When visitors to the gallery where the performance takes place have the opportunity to view the work without Eisenstein as part of it, then later with her installed in her place in it, the temporary condition of all of humanity is emphasized. We, like all the other species who have ever inhabited this planet, are going to disappear. It is interesting that the work evokes a feeling of sadness when the artist herself is not present and all we see is the human-made rug and the other animal skins.

11. Jamie Eisenstein. Rug Rug Rug Rug Rug (2009)

These works by Farmer, Rojas, Auad, and Eisenstein expand the category of “neo-conceptual” art in an intelligent manner. As such, conceptualism and neo-conceptualism – as much as we even need to think of them as separate anymore – are all signs of our poststructural times. As these times have no end in sight (is poststructuralism forever?) it is unlikely that the presence or the impact of conceptualism are likely to wane in the art world any time soon. The art object as object will continue to have its place and so too will conceptual works – including objects dematerializing and /or sliding into the virtual – in slow motion and otherwise. Such works sit well alongside of those of Beshty, Cesarco, and Ebner in the single room in the museum of the poststructural imagination which is this illustrated article.

IX. Conclusion

Neo-conceptualists and conceptualists point to the complexities of our poststructural relation to reality and the image. The works presented here signal a very complex condition for contemporary art. With the dematerialized image and talk of a mutual longing of objects and images one might think that we are seeking a return to romanticism – that we are romantics out of time. But I think it is more likely that we are merely inhabit a neo-romantic time. Then again, perhaps it is all the not very surprising outcome of Westerners trying to come to grips with one of the major sicknesses of our time – object fatigue. Whatever you can say about the dizzying artificiality of Western cultures today – as sick as they may be or the the banality of the official art world – we still have not run out of interesting ideas in art. Conceptualism and all that which intersects with it is an important part of our (poststructural) times – indeed without conceptualism poststructuralism would lack a significant visual component – as surely as conceptualism itself would not have thrived in any time before the advent of poststructuralism. Both, whether they like it or not, are creatures of the age of the virtual which Baudrillard has helped us to describe so well.

Perhaps Duchamp is smiling in more photographs near the end of his life (but rarely in younger images) because near the end he was happy to see so many people coming to understand some of the implications of the act of terror he wrought upon art. Baudrillard certainly saw him as a terrorist:

Duchamp’s act was not conceptual, it was a real challenge, it was pure
terrorism, afterwards it became conceptual... (Baudrillard, 2005b:78).

It is through a Baudrillardian lens that we can see that Duchamp’s act of terror set in motion a series of artistic events and responses that today coincide with the ultimate dematerialization of the object. Here conceptualism is best understood as part of a rapidly expanding virtuality.

Nothing is the same after Baudrillard. Art, despite itself, seems somehow better when viewed through a Baudrillardian lens. It is the ultimate trick he played on a corrupt art world which recognizes so much garbage as art. The Baudrillardian lens restores to art a very high standard but not one the art world recognizes. No one loved irony more than Jean Baudrillard and the irony of this was certainly not lost on him. If it were recognized by the arbiters of the official art world much of what he said about it would not be true. There is art after Baudrillard – much less of it – but there is art.

References

Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Jean Baudrillard ([1991] 1995). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington, University of Indiana Press.

Jean Baudrillard (1993a). Baudrillard Live – Selected Interviews. London: Routledge (Edited by Mike Gane).

Jean Baudrillard ([1995a] 1996). The Perfect Crime. New York: Verso. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard (with Jean Nouvel) ([2000c] 2002). The Singular Objects Of Architecture. University of Minnesota Press.

Jean Baudrillard (2005b). The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e) / MIT.

Michael Baxandall (1985). Patterns of Intention. London.

Daniel Buren et. al., 1989). “Working With Shadows, Working With Words” in Art Monthly, Number 12 (December – January): 3-6.

Gerry Coulter (2009). “Photography By Other Means: Gerhard Richter’s Challenge to the Real”. In Euro Art Online Magazine, Number 10: Photography (Fall): http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=17&page=1&content=209

Joseph Kosuth (1996). “Intention”. Art Bulletin, Volume 78, Number 3 (September).

Lucy Lippard and John Chandler (1968). “The Dematerialization of Art”. Art International, Volume 12, Number 2 (February): 31-36.

Gerhard Richter (1993). The Daily Practice of Painting – Writings and Interviews: 1962-1993. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. New York: MIT Press.

Thomas Struth (2002). Cited in Rosalind Krauss et. al. “Painting Richter: Gerhard Richter – Critical Essay, Artforum, (Summer) available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_10_40/ai_8745042/