calls“postconceptual art”that takes up the oppositional, avant-gardist stance
of conceptual art under new sociopolitical conditions since 1989. Postconcep-
tual art, Osborne argues, is“premised on the complex historical experiences
and critical legacy of conceptual art broadly construed, which registers its
fundamental mutation of the ontology of the artwork.”^55 This fundamental
mutation is a matter of“the de-bordering of the arts as mediums...and the
de-bordering of the national social spaces of art.”^56 That is to say, the
paradigm work of art for postconceptual art will be an installation, a per-
formance, a video piece or in some way a work that does not respect bound-
aries between flat painted surfaces, three-dimensional sculptures, and verbal
and acoustic presentations, and it will be madefora more or less coterie
subpopulation of the artistically engaged, not on behalf of and for members
of coherent national cultures, which, in fact, do not exist.
Given that this latter strategy eschews and challenges traditional media of
art, it will entail accompanying the work with a significant body of theory in
order to make its aims and point clear. As Daniel Herwitz notes,“the avant-
gardes already relied on words to spell meaning into their reductionist
gestures, their experiments with new materials, technologies, forms,”^57
often coupling abstraction, purity, silence, and refusal, on the one hand,
with manifesto, demonstration, and anti-bourgeois rhetoric, on the other.^58
Hence the successful work of avant-garde, conceptual, or postconceptual art
will necessarily involve the presence of a“theoretical element...as one of
numerous elements (visual, spiritual, historical), none of which completely
rules the others, and all of which together define the art object.”^59 Here it can
be wondered, however, whether features that mark the object as something
to be interpreted in accordance with a theory can successfully dominate or
simply be added on to the work’s other elements. Herwitz worries of the
work of a number of artists from a 1989 Los Angeles Museum of Contempor-
ary Art exhibition–Richard Prina, Mike Kelley, and Robert Longo–that it
variously lacks“the visual focus required by visual art to direct thought”^60 or(^55) Peter Osborne,Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art(London: Verso, 2013),
p. 48.
(^56) Ibid., p. 28.
(^57) Daniel Herwitz,Aesthetics(London: Continuum, 2008), p. 117.
(^58) Ibid., pp. 118–19.
(^59) Herwitz,Making Theory/Constructing Art(University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 16.
(^60) Ibid., p. 295.
270 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art