If, as Peter Osborne suggests, contemporary art is both a generic and trans-medial concept, then the question of music becomes problematic. So much so, that it begs one to ask whether or not ‘music’, in its medium-specificity, can ever be considered contemporary? The answer to this question may seem clear, as ‘contemporary music’ is a phrase attached to a number of institutions, events, ensembles, and has been since at least the latter half of the twentieth century. The use of the term in these instances, however, serves a historicizing function and addresses tropes such as ‘music of its time’, or as a differential marker to distinguish the ‘newest modern music’. In this talk, I will consider the dual relationship between music and contemporary art from the perspective of historical contemporaneity. From this perspective, the historical present is considered as the relational product of increasingly complex temporal processes and historical trajectories. Under the rubric of what Osborne terms the ‘postconceptual condition’ of contemporary art, I will argue that ‘music’ must be ontologically retheorized, or at least radically repositioned within a historical philosophy of art if it is to contribute meaningfully to a generic and critical understanding of contemporary art. What is at stake is either the concept of ‘music’ itself, as it has been historically received; or a notion of ‘art’, theorized by Osborne in the collective singular, that does not include within it specific artistic forms and practices

Nolan, Ryan

Falmouth University Research Repository (FURR)

1final versionTime, History and MaterialsOrpheus Institute seminar, Canterbury Christ Church University, Jan 26th 2019Can music be contemporary?Ryan NolanThe answer to the question Can music be contemporary? at first appears to be quitesimple. However, the answer might not be so straightforward. It depends how the term“contemporary” is defined. What I’m referring to in this context follows recent attemptsby a number of artists, critics, and philosophers to add criticality to the concept of“contemporary art”. In particular, the question is posed in response to the philosopherPeter Osborne’s claim that “contemporary art is postconceptual art” (2013, 2). Properlyspeaking, I am asking whether or not “music” can be ontologically conceived aspostconceptual art. What is at stake is either the concept of “music” itself, as it has beenhistorically received as one specific art among others; or, as we shall see, a genericsystem of contemporary art that is exclusionary of certain forms and practices.In Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Osborne (2013, 2) arguesthat the phrase “contemporary art” lacks a critical meaning or clear referent, which isproblematic. His argument is that contemporary art needs to be rendered “criticallyintelligible” if we are to gain any critical knowledge of it – that is, in opposing a colloquialdefinition of contemporary art that refers to the empirical totality of all art that is beingproduced now, which is to some degree an anti-historical notion. (This “renderingcritical” is what he sets out to do in the book).Rather than functioning as a category of historical periodization (as is the case with theacademic subject Contemporary History), historical contemporaneity “stops [or at veryleast, problematizes] telling the sequence of events like the beads on a rosary”, to use2Benjamin’s words from his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1968, 263). In hisfamous essay, of course, Walter Benjamin criticised what he identified as the tendencyof historicism to treat the past as a sequence of isolated, homogeneous events. Thehistorical materialist, in contrast, sees history as heterogenous and malleable, a sitewhere elements of the past and present combine to actively construct a future.For Osborne and others, the contemporary describes: 1) a subjective mode of being in1time through a particular relationship to the present; and 2) a historical present that isthe product of a temporally complex historical situation or layering of multipletemporalities and histories. This is what Osborne describes as a “disjunctive unity ofpresent times” (2013, 14). That is, the disjunctive (spatially distributed) times ortemporalities that constitute our historical present are brought together, or “unified”under the conditions of global capitalism.As Osborne identifies, within contemporaneity’s new temporal logic of (negative)inclusivity, there are no overriding historical narratives, nor aggressive breaks with thepast, as if history (and historical time) is a series of isolated and empty eventsconsidered at a distance. Rather, the temporalities of the modern and the contemporarycoexist, albeit, as Osborne states, “in fiendishly complicated ways.” (2014, 23) Thepresent (or the contemporary), in this respect, extends in all directions: it retroactivelyincorporates the times of the past and is futural in orientation. Again, echoingBenjamin’s historical materialism through an acknowledgment of the messianic qualitiesof the past and its potential for reactivation in the present.getting to postconceptual artBefore discussing the stakes of trying to consider music from the perspective of ageneric category of contemporary art, if indeed it can be, it’s worth spending some timeto retrace why, for Osborne, contemporary art is “postconceptual” art.1 Notably Giorgio Agamben, Juliane Rebentisch, Terry Smith, and Lionel Ruffel.3Postconceptual art is what Osborne claims to be the most reasonable classificationwhen one attempts to grasp contemporary art’s critical conceptuality from “the dualstandpoint of a historico-philosophical conception of contemporaneity and a rereading ofthe history of twentieth-century art” (Osborne 2014, 25). It is a historically determinedcondition of art that stands in opposition to “aesthetics” in any standard philosophical(and consequently, art historical) sense of the term.Osborne’s contention (and philosophical motivation) is that “aesthetics”, which hascome to be known as the philosophy of art since Kant, does not account for theconceptual character of much contemporary art. In this respect, Osborne’s “historicalontology of art” (2013) is a counterfactual argument that aims to describe an alternativeto the received progression modern, postmodern, contemporary, to critically register theimpact of the anti-aesthetic practices of the 1960s and 70s. Instead, what is proposed isa progression that reads formalist modernism, conceptual art, postconceptual art.It is worth noting that the negation of the postmodern as an aesthetic (even historical)category is a necessary outcome in a philosophical system of art that does criticallyregister the anti-aesthetic art of the 60s and 70s. In Osborne’s (2013, 43) words, theperiodisation of the postmodern is misguided because itfails to endow the complexly interacting set of what were initially conceived as‘post-formalist’, anti-Greenbergian artistic strategies of the 1960s with eithersufficient conceptual determinacy and distinctness or adequate historicaleffectivity. In particular, it fails to register both the critical priority of conceptual artwithin this field and the historical and critical significance of its postconceptuallegacy.This failure to comprehend the postconceptual legacy of conceptual art is ontologicallysignificant for contemporary art and must be reconciled if “contemporary art” is, in fact,to be an epistemologically meaningful referent or art-critical category.4To be brief – necessarily so, as there is much to say about postconceptual art and itsrelationship to time and history, and I would like to get on to the problems posed bymusical material – it is necessary to outline what Osborne identifies as the main factorsthat determine postconceptual art: 1) Art’s necessary conceptuality; 2) Art’s ineliminable– but radically insufficient – aesthetic dimension; 3) The critical necessity of ananti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials; 4) An expansion to infinity of the possiblematerial forms of art; 5) A radically distributive – that is, irreducibly relational – unity ofthe individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at anyparticular time; and 6) A historical malleability of the borders of this unity. 2The first three of these points (which are the rereading of the conceptual art project fromthe standpoint of the present), I would suggest, have been demonstrated in music longbefore the anti-aesthetic practices of the Conceptual visual art of the 60s whichemphasised the aesthetic-conceptual dialectic internal to the modern artwork: in thework of the Italian Futurists at the turn of the 20th century, Russolo’s 1913 Art of Noisesfor example; serialism and 12-tone, etc. This is demonstrated by the sensuous nature ofmusic’s materiality – what is objectively heard and what is subjectively perceived – onthe one hand, and a reliance on scores, compositional practice, textual analysis,performance instruction, technical/practical production and dissemination on the other.At this stage it is tempting to consider music as a prime example of the postconceptualcondition of art’s inescapable conceptual and aesthetic nature. Osborne himselfconcedes this in a chapter on New Music in his most recent book, The PostconceptualCondition (2018). Problematically, however, appealing to the generic category of art, hesets up something of a straw man by conflating medium specific instances of NewMusic in non-musical spaces with sonic art (Osborne 2018, CITE).Greuny’s contention - “music” is not postconceptual2 Reproduced from Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All, 48.5However, in the latter half of Osborne’s postconceptual ontology we find a problem forthis medium specific category of music (or, for that matter, the possibility of any mediumspecific form of “contemporary art” that could be deemed critically intelligible inOsborne’s sense). I refer to the fourth and fifth points: that postconceptual artwithstands “An expansion to infinity of the possible material forms of art” and “Aradically distributive – that is, irreducibly relational – unity of the individual artworkacross the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time.” This iswhat led the philosopher of music, Christian Greuny, to announce that “music doesn’tappear to be in a postconceptual state at all” (2017). Under these terms, “music”, in itshistorically determined condition as a specific medium that deals in specific materialsand forms, and confronts musical problems, cannot be considered “contemporary art”.Critically speaking, “music” cannot be contemporary in Osborne’s philosophy:postconceptual music is a misnomer.In rebuttal, Greuny suggests that what Osborne is referring to as “material” istheoretically shallow and essentially reaffirms the point that artists are free to realisetheir conceptual ideas across any number of media. In any case, he argues, the blurringof medial boundaries in postconceptual artworks is not case-in-point for a generic,singular “art” as such. Nor, even, are shared problems, such as the tension between theaesthetic and conceptual character of all art which lies at the centre of Osborne’spostconceptual ontology. While it is accepted that artists can and do work across anynumber of media (sometimes at the same time), issues posed by each specific mediumproblematise the notion of a generic artistic material, from which a unified (andpostconceptual) “art” could emerge (Greuny 2017, 4).6Greuny’s attempt at reconciliation is to substitute “material” for “place”, both3geographical and institutional, nuanced by Umberto Eco’s notion of the semiotic codeand its impact upon the early 20th century trope that language “was a systematicallystructured whole.” (Greuny 2017, 5) The replacement of “material” with “place” stemsfrom his scepticism towards Osborne's claim that what art counts as “contemporary” canbe entirely divided between philosophical and empirical questions. In regard to place,Greuny writes: “When related to material, place primarily denotes the situatedness ofthe artist, which is never universal…. What is possible and necessary at one placemight be possible but not convincing in another and impossible in a third.” (pp. 4-5) Thisis the spatial – and perhaps we could say contemporary? – equivalent to what Adornodescribes as modernist artistic material’s law of movement, according to which “noteverything is possible in every age” (Adorno 1949, 31). “Contemporary art” in thisrespect would never be a vacuous reference to an empirical totality of “new” artworks,because artistic material that is spatially determined is critically contemporary in itsrelation “to one’s place in the artistic field in all its dimensions.” (Greuny 2017, 5)Though Greuny’s argument is compelling, Osborne is enough of an Adornian toconcede that the artwork is determined by the available material (which is not given apriori, but is historically determined). And, perhaps overlooked by Greuny as there is no4reference in his paper, is Osborne’s conception of the contemporary as a geopoliticalfiction, meaning any designation of what is “contemporary” is relative to one’sgeographic and institutional location (Osborne 2013, 22). Here they seemingly agree.However, the next step in Greuny’s theory of contemporary art diverts from Osborne,and points toward a dynamic system of the arts where “musical work” can be rightlycalled contemporary music.4 See the chapter “Art, Society and Aesthetics” in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970).3 Georgina Born’s recent research project is an example of this: Music, Digitization, Mediation(2010-2015) examined the wide-ranging changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitizationand digital media (historical significance) through emerging scenes and formations of genre across anumber of Global locations (spatial significance). Born is also in agreeance with Osborne that culturalforms must be considered “within the framework of competing philosophies and politics of time.” (Born2015, 374)7Rather than appealing to semiotics per se, Greuny’s invocation of Eco’s notion of codeserves as a structural model for what he terms the “global artistic universe”: this isGreuny’s answer to the question of what contemporary art might be. In semiotics, acode refers to a set of sub-structures within the system of language, the global semanticuniverse, which was once perceived as more or less a wholly unified structure. Eco, onthe other hand, sees the ability to isolate specific codes within the language system asproof that the apparent “unified structure” is but a regulative fiction, which is necessarilyaltered every time sub-structures are described or modified, and proves that there is nocomprehensive, all-encompassing structure as such (p.5).Applied to the current situation of the arts, the the global artistic universe is similarly adynamic yet fictitious structure that, in reality, points less to a unified and universal “art”and towards a complex system of ever-changing and interacting codes, or a system ofarts in the plural. As Greuny maintains, “A survey of the world of the arts does notreveal a uniformly ordered structure nor a center with an enormous periphery withfrayed edges.” (2017, 6) Within this universe, Greuny contends, some boundaries areeasily dissolved while others remain hard to cross. What is made clear is thatpostconceptual work is one of many potential forms of contemporary art. To accept this,5of course, would be to refute Osborne’s speculative proposition that “contemporary artis postconceptual art”, in which subject and predicate are interchangeable. Ifpostconceptual art does not account for all art that is considered critically contemporary,the proposition enters into a more traditional form of limited movement: the distinctionbetween subject and predicate would therefore not be interchangeable. I.e.,postconceptual art may be contemporary but not all contemporary art would bepostconceptual in the way Osborne has conceived it.5 Terry Smith (2015) has also argued that Osborne’s philosophy of contemporary art is ambitious, and thatpostconceptuality does not account for an entire philosophy of art. It is instead an aspect of contemporaryart.8My question for Greuny would be one of periodisation, as in: if contemporary art doesnot refer to an empirical but undoubtedly unquantifiable totality of work made nowbecause of a critical conception of spatially determined artistic material, does“contemporary art” stop being contemporary? This is what Osborne refers to as the“afterlife” (2013, 31) of the work, which must retain a certain historical malleability.ConclusionThere are clear tensions in these competing theories of contemporary art, and Greuny’snominalism, his doubt that artistic material can be universal, will never allow for thegeneric contemporary art Osborne advocates. The two share certain similarities,however, in that the definition of the contemporary itself is spatially determined andvaries widely depending on where one’s analysis begins. Both throw up their ownproblems in the answer to my question, Can music be contemporary?, which leads onto my wider PhD project. For Osborne, music as “music” cannot properly adhere to thetransmedial and generic character of the postconceptual, leaving the phrase“contemporary music” without any corresponding reality in an art-critical sense.Within Greuny’s global artistic universe, music can exist as music alongsidepostconceptual practices and be contemporary given that the material with which artistscreate is not given a priori, but is continually constructed and spatially determinedamong an interacting system of equally constructed practices, regulated by the fiction of“art as such”. But does then contemporary music (or dance, or literature) remaincontemporary, or does it lose its contemporaneity as it succumbs to the continuum ofhistory? The temporal aspect of the global artistic universe needs to be clarified tobecome more than the global artistic present. The futural orientation he adopts byappropriating Eco’s dynamic system accounts for some, but, taking inspiration fromOsborne, a historical ontology of the arts must be developed to explain what happens in9the afterlife of contemporary art. Afterall, the temporal logic of contemporaneity extendsin all directions and excludes none.I agree with certain aspects of both systems and disagree with others. In reference toOsborne, I think there is something to be rescued in the specific arts (without theGreenbergian connotations of that term) and that music in certain respects foreshadowsthe postconceptuality he advocates. Greuny seemingly agrees here, but his view ofwhat is contemporary fails to account for any retroactive classification or historicalresistance. While this is an ambitious undertaking, my PhD intends to make a modestcontribution by developing a historical ontology of music from the perspective of thepresent hoping to begin working out some of these problems. Perhaps in this way,granted not in Osborne’s sense, “music” can be contemporary and at leastepistemologically post-conceptual.ReferencesChristian Greuny, “The Fiction of the Global Artistic Universe: Arts, Institutions,and Material.” Paper presented at The Contemporary Contemporary, ARoS, Aarhus,Denmark, 16-18 June 2017.http://contemporaneity.au.dk/fileadmin/Contemporaneity/Gru__ny_Global_Artistic_Universe.pdfJuliane Rebentisch, “The Contemporaneity of Contemporary Art.” New GermanCritique, no. 1, 124 (February 2015), 223–237.Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art(London: Verso, 2013).Peter Osborne, “The Postconceptual Condition: Or the cultural logic of highcapitalism today.” Radical Philosophy, no. 184 (Mar/Apr 2014), 19–27.10Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2006).Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations (London:Pimlico, 1999).

Can Music be Contemporary?

http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4571/7/%23Orpheuspaper.pdf

Can Music be Contemporary?

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Falmouth University Research Repository (FURR)