With this paper I want to carry out a non-philosophical analysis of post-media that aims to bring in its bad object, “analog” sculpture. The process of integrating sculpture into discussions of post-media will involve a Laruellian reduction of the theoretical material of post-media, the latter being typically concerned with virtual, non-object-based or otherwise immaterial practices. While today it tilts toward immaterial practices, post-media in its early form was often thought in terms of or through sculpture — as in a seminal paper by Rosalind Krauss on “sculpture in the expanded field”, which elaborated ideas that were later continued in her seminal work on “the post-medium condition”. Krauss derives the “expanded field” of sculpture through the application of a Klein diagram. For Krauss, the Klein diagram functions as an apparatus to expand sculpture’s field to accommodate the medium’s logical opposites — architecture, landscape, and both their negations. I propose that both Krauss’ “expansion” of the artistic media of sculpture by a certain underdetermination of its morphological limits and Krauss’ generative use of a diagram have some features in common with philosophical procedures of François Laruelle — particularly his use of matrices to carry out a non-philosophical “reduction” of philosophical material that uses philosophy alongside other disciplinary knowledges rather than as a sovereign and overarching orientation.
A key historical consideration to take into account in tracing sculpture’s original position in the post-media formulation is that Krauss’s influential, diagrammatic expansion of the sculptural field¹ seems, according to some theorists, to have ultimately backfired and forced a contraction back onto the more standard “medium”.² Subsequently, a different theory — also called “post-media” — was elaborated to describe the new conditions of art production in the “post-internet” or “information age”. Yet in contrast to the earlier, Kraussian form of post-media, the later information-centered discourse has tended to focus on non-object based practices. Sculptural work that is looped into the new post-media tends to be art that reduces the sculptural to an inert platform or other base onto which images are projected. One exemplary artist of this kind is Kari Altman, whose work focuses on sculpture as an interface or platform. Ceci Moss has written lucidly of Kari’s work in Rhizome, noting “Kari Altmann’s practice, where her website acts as an ever expanding database which establishes an equivalency between produced and potential projects, in which all are presented under the header of ‘content’, in many ways mirror[s] how computers read everything across the board as data. Identifying herself as a ‘cloud-based artist’, Altmann views exhibitions as ‘another software, another medium that you have to export to.”³ She goes on to say that Altman herself acted as a “mutated search algorithm”. Other artists using sculpture whose works have been considered representative of the new post-media paradigm are Cory Arcangel and Harm van dan Dorpel, both of whom exemplify the “projective” character of the new post-media paradigm.
Given what is captured by post-media — its emphasis on immaterial flows of information, on networks that facilitate the flow of information, the integration of data and sense-responsiveness within works, and the post-production application of digital imaging techniques — it is clear why the sculptural object tends to be downgraded to a display element within its framework. Most post-media discourse has emphasized what Moss refers to as “the usurpation of the production of meaning itself”.4 In post-media’s “second wave”, sculpture becomes a platform, something that is overtaken by digital immateriality, by flat and dispersible images, and by informational flows that cancel out the material core of the sculpture. The discourse on post-media essentially turns sculpture into a surface — it ceases to be a volume and instead becomes a composition of planes supporting fleeting immanence. In being transformed into a “host” of digizited content, sculpture in the context of the present discourse of post-media is de-substantiated. By comparison, new sculpture came to be understood in terms of site-specificity, or alternately as what has sometimes been referred to as “post-studio” practices, in which works’ completion is contemporaneous with their public exhibition.
This relative absence of sculpture in post-media speaks less to an ineluctable formation than to the general undertheorization of volume in the context of the new post-media (and “post-internet”) era. There is a further need to consider post-media independent from immaterial notions of the digital and instead within a broader framework of digitality like that proposed by Alexander Galloway, for whom the digital is the ontological support of discrete multiplicity and genericity. Further, there is a need to address the slippage between post-media and “new technologies”, the latter of which can threaten to obscure the fundamentally artistic context of poiesis that would appear to motivate such research considerations within the arts.
I have outlined the way in which the new post-media framework tends to neglect the need to account for volume, material density and objects themselves. In approaching this problem, we confront the question of what post-media might be if it were forced to think the material instead of the immaterial. Basically, how might one re-materialize post-media? Conversely, considering the pertinence of post-media to the particular historical context of contemporary (and “post-internet”) art — we confront the problem of how to conceive of a futural sculpture. How is it possible for there to be a truly contemporary sculpture, rather than just a historically persistent practices recontextualized? Part of such a project involves inquiring into the gap between the Kraussian and contemporary emphases within post-media. For Krauss, objects expanded under the aegis of the “expanded field” that foreshadowed the post-medium condition. By contrast, in newer accounts of the idea, despite a figurative expansion (confined primarily to a sense of immaterial dispersal) — matter itself has collapsed and contracted.
The non-philosophical paradigm of François Laruelle is an apt mode through which to reintroduce these broader problems of artistic materiality into research on post-media. In his book Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, Laruelle achieves for the image what I suggest is needed for the sculpture. He pursues what he describes as an “onto-vectorialization” of aesthetics through the application of a matrix and the use of the non-philosophical concept of the “generic”. Ultimately, it allows for a repositioning of artistic medium that bypasses what are usually seen as the essential constraints of that medium. Laruelle notes: “The passage to the generic profoundly modifies the final mode of expression of this discipline… photo-fiction cannot be a material or visual photo, painting-fiction cannot use colors, music-fiction is made of notes like a partition…”5 Laruelle’s photo-fiction is able to generate an implicit form of the artistic genre/medium — painting without paint, music without notes — such that the form itself is outlined as a composite of its external effects rather than of its internal constitution. Its suitability for a research problem of post-media is then immediately clear. Sculpture-fiction will provide a way to articulate sculpture “without” any theoretical dead space of voluminous mass. In taking to the extreme post-media’s abandonment of objecthood, we can effect a forcing within the post-media framework that will be able to introduce it under another name.
It is through pursuing a non-philosophical reduction of artistic material itself that we can end up with a post-media account that avoids any reductive framing of sculpture as only an inert or dematerialized platform for the projection of (digital) information, or as a kind of data storage valued for its mass but not for its artistic content. At the same time this addresses a broader question of non-philosophy’s capacity to operate on the volumetric. Given its application of ideas from quantum mechanics, non-philosophy might appear most applicable to material that bears something of the infinitesimal. This is not only an analogy but a barrier potentially implied by the Laruellian orientation more broadly. Speaking of the Vision-in-One which orients his work, Laruelle writes in a summary of his philosophy: “The Vision-in-One is the being-given which is without-givenness (without a hybrid of the given and givenness, without a ‘backstage’ or a ‘background’ givenness, without a self-giving).”6
Given the ease with which sculptural objects can stand in as a foil for the traditional philosophical “object” upon which transcendental idealism, materialism, phenomenology and other classical philosophical domains must tread, it should pose an especially strong barrier to non-philosophical mechanics. The notion of the “Vision-in-One” quoted above can seem to fit best with something that is — if not “imagistic” and thus primed for contemplation in terms of immanence — already in some way deterritorialized. Laruelle goes on to write, “Non-philosophy thinks… without being unitary. For example, the subject in accordance with which it is produced (‘the Stranger’) is not something facing me, it is a uniface and is for this reason a stranger to the World.”7 Does non-philosophy suppose an a priori severance of a ‘thing’ from its context in order to achieve the state in which the quantic is theoretically generative? How does Laruelle’s onto-vectorial approach act in reference to something marked by its inertial ‘presence’ and apparent self-containment? Is it necessary to sever something from its volume in order to achieve the state in which the quantic is theoretically generative? Throughout Laruelle’s oeuvre we see non-philosophy deal with the imagistic (photo-fiction) and the sonic (tetralogos), and we will now apply it to the volumetric.
For the onto-vectorialization of sculpture and the formation of sculpture-fiction I would like to propose four vectors for its matrixial representation: (i) contingent and contextual optics of the encounter with sculpture (the ‘installation image’); (ii) choreography of logistical instruments; (iii) absorption of display elements into sculptural form (pedestals, vitrines, interpretative frames); (iv) internalization of instrumental traces, or “historical retentiveness” (sculptural medium’s retention of the trace of the artistic process).
(i) Visual Embeddedness: Contingent and contextual optics of the sculptural encounter
Unlike the image, sculpture experiences a blockage in its optical logistics. Ultimately every image of sculpture is an “installation image” — i.e. the softly contextualized viewpoint according to which the work is always seen in situ. Unlike photography or painting, which can typically be excised from their contexts, visual encounters with sculpture are always context-dependent. Its visual reproduction is at best incomplete, at most impossible. If you “cut out” a picture of it, you get only a symbol. Thus sculpture presupposes a mise-en-scene, a scene, a dramaturgical register of its aesthetic.
(ii) Choreography of Logistical Instruments
At the same time as its optics are always contextual, sculpture exhibits a certain resistance to the dispersal of the object in space that is enabled by its site-specific counterpart, installation art. Sculpture’s relationality is relatively weak; if sculpture is a node in a “network” it is nevertheless always the same incalcitrant object transposed onto new backdrops. Additionally, sculpture’s presence is enabled or limited according to its ability to circulate within the global art system and, more generally, to be installed in a way that is intrinsic to the sculptural object rather than to the site of exhibition. In being independent of site, it embeds, generically, determinate choreography for its exhibition.
The new post-media discourse is also interested in problems of circulation, but the problem of how information circulates in a computational network or a flow of data is different from this “logistical” problem. One difference is obviously that sculpture’s circulation requires that it itself be contained — rather than being constituted by the “flows” of networks, sculpture traverses them and charts their paths. Contemporary sculptural objects’ ability to embody “presence” within the global art system requires them to be able to circulate internationally, to be shipped, to be crated, to be packaged.
A non-philosophical treatment of sculpture must look at these logistical paths and welcome the choreographic overtone they introduce as opposed to the disembodied “expansion” of sites and structures. Attention to this “choreography of logistical instruments” inverts what Krauss assesses in her Klein diagram of the expanded field. The logistical choreography or logistical image of sculpture collapses architecture and its non-, the landscape and non-landscape, through a reverse engineering that substantiates substance by means of an implicit form. This moves us beyond the formalism of Krauss’ expanded field in which, as the scope of a medium disperses, what sutures it into sculptural format is its situation within a field marked by contradictory limits (architecture and non-architecture, landscape and non-landscape).
(iii) Artistic Absorption of Elements of Display or Interpretation (e.g. the pedestal, frame, vitrine)
The next vector captures sculpture’s tendency, particularly in the modernist period leading up to contemporary art, to absorb contingencies of its presentation into the sculptural object itself. Brancusi is a notable example here, introducing elaborate craftsmanship into pedestals, which were once considered purely neutral ways to lift objects to the eyeline of the viewer. Contemporary artists working in sculpture confront this problem as well — Carol Bove often integrates the frame surrounding her objects into their overall sculptural forms; Walead Beshty riffs on the logistical dependence discussed above through a series of sculptures that positions FedEx boxes as miniature bases on which perversely damaged objects are displayed. While on the one hand sculpture creates a logistical choreography, it at the same time contains itself. Contemporary sculpture, hyper-adapted to its conditions of exhibition and display (as though reflexively responding to the first vector of contextual optics) begins to act like a sort of controlled explosion of image.—It throws images back onto the world only to freeze them in a new form. By absorbing its own frames, sculpture is almost like an image seeing itself, turning around to try to understand how its presence is borne out. We should think of the integration of the elements of presentation into the sculptural core of “object-based practices” not in the sense of installation, but rather as an artistic expression of sculpture’s tendency to absorb and metabolize its contexts.
(iv) Historical Retentiveness
Throughout art history, one feature of sculpture has been its tendency to retain the traces of its production. While this was only elevated to an aesthetic element with modernism (for instance, Rodin exposed traces left by his tools and by his work with molds), it is always intrinsic to sculptural practice, even when it is effaced by artists’ attempts to smooth over its surfaces. The key point is that when sculpture is involved, artistic action is in some way irreversible, and the artist’s interventions upon a proto-artistic mass can never be extracted from the final artwork. Sculpture itself, insofar as it deals with mass, has some historical retentiveness. This vector indexes sculpture’s tendency to unravel artistic decision, to limit creative freedom through the resistance of its materials.
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Sculpture as Specularization of Context:
Sculpture can be understood in terms of a superposition of these four vectors. When we understand sculpture in these ways, it also allows us to treat “the sculptural” from a Laruellean generic standpoint. Sculpture is a way of metabolizing context immanently, allowing the organizing structure of artistic decision to fall away, or at the very least be reduced. This formation of “the sculptural” allows us to conceptualize what distinguishes sculpture from construction, architecture, or engineering. The sculptural frustrates and forecloses artistic intention while simultaneously bringing it to the surface and manifesting the will or wish behind the artistic gesture — gesture itself being something that is particularly bound to sculpture, neither disappearing (as it would in a performative medium) nor being subordinated to the content of an image (as in painting or photography).
As suggested at the outset, the onto-vectorialization of sculpture does with artistic decision and with its “real object” — context — what non-philosophy is able to do with philosophy. Ray Brassier has summarized some of Laruelle’s work to identify how non-philosophy operates with and on philosophy. For Laruelle, philosophy is not as a series of axiomatic constraints, conditions or groundings but rather material itself. This reflects what I am suggesting sculpture does with artistic and even curatorial decisions themselves. Sculpture’s historical retentiveness, absorption of its own display, visual embeddedness and logistical choreographies are all ways in which artistic “decision” is operated upon, reflexively — and all of sculpture’s own inertial tendencies here are also the bases by which sculpture-fiction can be said to self-narrate, self-fictionalize, auto-theorize. Brassier writes, describing Laruelle’s approach:
“Besides positing immanence as ultimately determining instance for non-decisional thought, the non-philosophical axiom posits decisional resistance to that positing as something which is also already given non-decisionally as a determinable material; a contingent occasion that can be determined in accordance with immanence’s foreclosure.”8
He adds:
“Instead of using the mirror of philosophy to think the transcendence of ‘real’ objects in the world, non-philosophy uses the immanence of the real to de-specularize those objects which philosophy cocoons in its reflexive transcendence. It follows that the object of non-philosophy is not the real, which is never an object, not even an unthinkable one, but the philosophical specularization of real objects.”9
Furthermore, Laruelle’s method of aesthetic onto-vectorialization also enables us to think of sculpture as a truly contemporary and perhaps even futural medium. Of the contemporary as a historical period, Peter Osborne writes in “Temporalization as Transcendental Aesthetics”:
“The contemporary stands to the modern as the negation of the dialectical logic (and hence spatially developmentalist futurity) of the new by a spatially determined, imaginary co-presencing. This latter thesis is not that of the negation of time by space, as some advocates of the ‘spatial turn’ have imagined (this is an incoherent notion: there is only space-time), but the negation of a specific temporality — a specific futurity — by a specific spatiality.”10
He later expands on this to say:
“this spatializes novelty by making co-presence the condition of the conjunction of the different times it holds together. Furthermore, under the conditions of global capital… this is a primary imaginary, speculative or fictional co-presence.”11
Sculpture under the rubric of the “contemporary” has something to reveal to us about the fictionality of this co-presence — in contrast to the new post-media, which absorbs us in virtual fictiveness such that we can be “within” it but, maybe, not really present with it. The virtual makes presence irrelevant on the pretext of hyper-connectedness and autonomous simulations, whereas sculpture allows us to consider the particular conjunction of (so-called) presences within what is contemporary. In the context of the “new post-media”, “contemporary” sculpture might be said to function as a program for retaining images prior to their dispersion, subordinating their future trajectories and travels to the logic of the site. Because sculpture captures the qualities of every site without being subordinated to it (as “site-specific” work must be), it is uniquely poised to invoke the persistence of presence and the force of conjunctions against flows. The site itself offers an immanent form of “containment” insofar as it needs no mediation to exist — save the ostensive moment of its designation. Lastly, we should also note how sculpture illuminates a subtle aspect of digitality. This is the notion, developed by Alexander Galloway, of the digital as that which splits the one into the two, that which generates multiplicity. If, prior to the post-media era, sculpture was an analog practice, its new formulation in the context of its role in facilitating “conjunction” of distinct spatiotemporal sites situates it firmly within the digital.
In this light one might synthesize the four vectors I have proposed for sculpture by following an additional insight from Osborne that “form is a specularization of time”.12 Context — rather than the completion of a site/structure relation (as in Krauss) — is the contingent material of sculpture, making context visual but by absorbing rather than mirroring it. Sculpture folds within itself various artistic decisions — but as material, rather than as a transcendental determination of the form. Context, understood as co-presencing, also has the quality of a fiction. Sculptures acts as a kind of centripetal force which combines its logistics, its tendency toward artisanal retentiveness, its absorption of elements of display, and its contextual optics into a sculpture-fiction that theorizes sculpture without ever reducing any of these conditions to problems of volume.
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Post-Script: Krauss’s Method, Media Archaeology (Krauss Bringing Sculpture from the Modern to the Postmodern)
In understanding the absence of sculpture from the new post-media, it’s useful to appreciate that, as Krauss writes, at the time of her landmark text on “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, sculpture had “become a kind of ontological absence”. Her diagram of the expanded field is an attempt to elaborate on the critical focus “on the outer limits of those terms of exclusion”. She writes: “Sculpture, it could be said, had ceased being a positivity, and was now the category that resulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture. In this sense sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse logic and had become pure negativity: the combination of exclusions”.13
Krauss deals with spatial “expansion” but she fails to temporalize this, which seems symptomatic of the modernist impulse in general — which Osborne also characterizes as repeating the [new] in a permanently renewed moment of “the present”. The Laruellean diagnosis of the Klein diagram is that while there is the principle of “negation as extension”, there is not “dialysis”, and the analysis remains caught in contraries.14
In a landmark paper, Krauss attempts to formalize what I identified as the metabolization, absorption, or refraction of context immanent to sculpture into a defined category itself. Her reading of this situation, while ostensibly occurring along a continuum with later work on “post-medium”, ultimately undercuts the relevance of sculpture. It’s telling that Krauss’s own post-media project would later culminate in an attempt to “reinvent” medium — which is the focus of a late paper in the journal Critical Inquiry.15 The effect of the Klein diagram was for sculpture to be “expanded” as a category but it was re-concretized and failed to be as dispersed as Krauss’s original text would seem to have promised.
It was this historical failure of Krauss’s sculptural expansion that compelled me to consider how this use of the Klein diagram seemed to fail to render a genuinely “integrative object” — and moreover to argue that it was not just a historical contingency or a recuperation but rather an indication of the limitation of the formalist approach pursued by Krauss in her diagrammatic construction.
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Media Archaeology
If sculpture is a specularization of artistic time, it might also make sense for it to assume the role of an auto-archaeology, for clearly the times it makes visible are not only synchronous and contemporary but also have to do with time’s passage. Sculpture-fiction opens up sculpture to the past and future. The irreversibility of action rendered in sculptural form, as described above, makes it a historically retentive object, a self-historicizing object. As a specularization of context, we can also treat sculpture as a sort of extractive sample (as if an artifact from an archeological dig).
Kristoffer Gansing offers a way of integrating media archaeology into a non-philosophical framework.
“This idea of the cultural ‘genericity’ of media-archaeology will in turn be deployed as a positive force of transformation: ‘Here the generic is the problematic that allows us to reformulate, on the one hand, the event as non-historical occasion or historical-without-history, and on the other hand the True-without-truth as transformation of the history-world.’ (Laruelle, 2011: 254)”16
Moreover, media archaeology offers a way for sculpture to intervene in the post-media framework from the perspectives of the evolution of technologies themselves. Rather than treating networks as immaterial, media archaeology allows us to see how they are embedded within and depend upon matter. Media archaeology identifies “artistic works that engage a transversal circumventing of teleological underpinnings of network culture” (Gansing, 94) and moreover
113: “In [his] understanding of the generic, Laruelle gives us a new understanding of transversality. Transversality no longer stands for an absolute heterogeneity, but for lines always contingent with what they traverse, differing not by default but always in the last instance. Media-archaeology as a generic cultural force embodies such transverality.”17
This is not only past-oriented but one can imagine media from the perspective of its future obsolescences (the exhaustion of an object’s matter by its generating idea, or a medium outlived by its artistic idea. The artistic complex of form and idea can persist materially through a substitute form that replaces the outdated material). This allows for the consideration of the “deep time” of objects.
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Notes.
1. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, 1979.
2. Peter Osborne notes in a discussion of the 1979 paper that “an acknowledgement of the ‘post-media condition'” was followed by “the subsequent project to ‘reinvent’ medium”. Peter Osborne, “October and the Problem of Formalism”, The Postconceptual Condition, 2018.
3. Ceci Moss, “Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu”, December 19, 2013, <https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/19/expanded-internet-art-and-informational-milieu/>.
4. Ibid.
5. François Laruelle, Photo-Fiction: A Non-Standard Aesthetics, 2012.
6. François Laruelle, “A Summary of Non-Philosophy”, 1999.
7. Ibid.
8. Ray Brassier, “–Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle”, Radical Philosophy, 2003.
9. Ibid.
10. Peter Osborne, “Temporalization as Transcendental Aesthetics”, The Post-Conceptual Condition, 2018.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, 1979.
14. This language comes from a presentation by Anne-Françoise Schmid in the New Centre seminar on “The Commons=X”.
15. Peter Osborne, “October and the Problem of Formalism”, The Postconceptual Condition, 2018.
16. Kristoffer Gansing, “FCJ-123 The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture”, Fibreculture Journal, 18, 2011.
17. Ibid.