The Disappearance of the Artwork

These days the disappearance of the work increasingly haunts art. This unique thing to be venerated, to reflect upon, or to contemplate belongs less and less to our artistic practices. However, is this necessarily the same as saying that there is no art left? In a certain way art is done with art, in terms of what we have come to call art. We keep the name—art—yet, fundamentally, its content has changed. We can therefore no longer think through discourses on art, either aesthetic or historical, that unite notions of art and artwork to the extent of making us believe in the necessity of the latter as an absolute creation and of asserting the complete independence of the art field. Art practices themselves have abandoned the notion of artwork and the idea of art that accompanied it. Twentieth-century art has thus unceasingly been haunted by ­minority- becomings, those of “artists without artworks,” to borrow a phrase ­coined by Jean-Yves Jouannais,1 1  - Jean-Yves Jouannais, Artistes sans œuvres (Paris : Hazan, 1997). who have radically chosen non-creation and have assumed the status of artist, the living for one’s self, outside of all artistic production (Dadaism is a fitting example). Moreover, in this century other artistic practices have come into being that make the word “work” difficult to use with respect to them, and the term “artwork” even more so: performances, actions, happenings, ephemeral art, ­certain installations and videos, and so forth. Finally, we know very well that we must not examine art as a series of incontestable objects to be ­preserved. Art does not deploy itself only as a succession of ­productions offered to the veneration of the public in museums or in galleries, but equally as an artistic path or trajectory. 

I will therefore begin with a critique of the philosophy of art ­insofar as it assigns it a place based on a reflection that focuses exclusively on the work. What must we understand by the term work? In French, œuvre, which is derived from the Latin word opera, work and care, has ­increasingly taken on the meaning of the term opus: work, but also the result of work, something fabricated. It is in this latter sense that it has become a ­commonplace term in philosophical thinking on art. The work is ­understood as a material thing that exists objectively, that is received through the intermediary of the senses. Aesthetics has thus found in the study of works a factor of objectivity; Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics ­considers such a relation to works to ensure the objectivity of artistic beauty. It has also ­permitted a reflection on the truth or the being of the work. Nevertheless, such ­thinking proves to be polysemic since it also enriches itself, albeit in a more marginal way, by taking into account the work as the result of a ­productive activity, which presupposes that we must deal with the following problem: what does it mean to create or to produce? From that moment on the work is the result of an activity that is both material and immaterial. The painter operates with his hands and produces an object, yet in the artwork he is at the same time guided by a thought process. La pittura è cosa mentale, the picture is a mental thing, said Leonardo da Vinci. What role does the artist’s intention—that which does not appear directly in the thing produced—then play? Is the ­spectator the ­interlocutor of the work, capable of recognizing and appreciating its double, material and immaterial, dimension?