This article was downloaded by: [University of Technology Sydney] On: 28 September 2012, At: 01:32 Publisher: Routledge

Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Journal of Architecture

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

Non-places and the spaces of art

Peter Osborne Version of record first published: 18 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Peter Osborne (2001): Non-places and the spaces of art, The Journal of Architecture, 6:2, 183-194 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360110048203

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

183
The Journal of Architecture Volume 6 Summer 2001

Non-places and the spaces of art

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

1111 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111 1111

Peter Osborne

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London N17 8HR, UK

Introduction
This is a paper about cultural form. More speci cally, it is a paper about the transformation of a particular Western cultural form, art (in its modern, generic, post-Romantic, institutionalised sense as autonomous), under the conditions of an emergent global capitalist modernity. It moves in four parts from 1) a clari cation of the notion of global capitalist modernity, via 2) discussion of the significance of space to the understanding of art as cultural form, to 3) a critical exposition of the concept of non-place, as the spatial correlate of the temporal form of the modern, and 4) a characterisation of art-space as a distinctive indeed, exemplary type of non-place, current transformations of which need to be understood in terms of developments in the spatial logic of modernity itself.1

1. A global capitalist modernity?

For all its ubiquity and apparent simplicity, modernity remains at times a confusing term. It is understood here to refer to a culture of temporal abstraction centred on that restless logic of negation that makes up the temporal dialectic of the new. As such, it de nes a distinctive structure of historical experience. Nonetheless, the unity of this structure notwithstanding, its concrete meanings are open to signi cant historical variation, relative to the speci c terms and boundaries of the various elds of experience that are subjected to its
2001 The Journal of Architecture

temporal logic, and to the speci c modes of negation that are employed. Such negations give determinate content to the modern in any particular instance, in each speci c time and place. The modern, in other words, is primarily a schema, in Kants sense: a rule of pure synthesis or transcendental determination of time that mediates the pure givenness of appearances with categorial or intelligible forms. It is only secondarily or derivatively a mode of historical periodisation (with various beginnings, but no end) and a culturalhistorical project. Modernity is the name for an actually existing, or socially realised, temporal formalism that is constitutive of certain formations of subjectivity. It is in this sense that it is a distinctively cultural category: the fundamental form of time-consciousness in capitalist societies.2 Within the terms of this analysis, art is modern to the extent to which it is dependent for its intelligibility upon the temporal logic of negation characteristic of the dialectic of the new, in a qualitatively historical (rather than a merely fashionbased) sense of the term. That is, it is modern to the extent to which it makes its claim on the present, through its negation of past forms, in the name of a particular, qualitatively different future. Furthermore, as the art of a present which is itself modern (in the sense of understanding itself within the terms of the dialectic of the new), modern art is inherently engaged with the issue of abstraction
13602365 / DOI: 10.1080/13602360110048203

184
Non-places and the spaces of art Peter Osborne

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

at the level of its social content, as well as those of both its own historical logic and, more concretely, its relation to guration this more immediate sense in which art is conceived as being abstract being but a particular artistic means for the expression of the other two. Indeed one might say, from this point of view, that art is the privileged social site or at the least, the catalytic trigger for the experience of abstraction, in and for itself, as an historical form. Modern art extracts abstraction from its various social sites and re ects upon it as form. Hence the danger, but by no means the necessity, of aestheticisation, which involves a forgetting of the social bases of abstraction as a form of experience. Such are the presuppositions about modernity and art that govern what follows. However, if the modern is a temporal concept, it nonetheless has certain spatial speci cally, certain geo-political conditions of existence. These conditions are currently undergoing radical transformation in the process of the globalisation of capitalism as an economic and cultural form. It is for this reason, in my view, that the global capitalist modernity that is currently emerging must be considered a distinctively new historical form of modernity itself. For the fundamental change in its spatial conditions alters the distribution and dynamics of its temporal form. This is not late modernity (it shows no signs of ending), let alone postmodernity (an idea that appears more preposterous by the day), but, more simply, another, more generalised form of modernity itself: supermodernity, perhaps, in the light of the intensi cation of its temporal immanence, although personally I do not favour the term.

This process may be summed up in three theses: 1111 2 1. We live in an emergent global modernity. 3 2. At the same time, there are many modernities; 4 but the logic of multiplicity of these moderni- 5 ties is different has a different conceptual 6 shape from the multiplicity of previous 7 forms. 8 3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, geo- 9 politically, about the hegemony of the West, 10111 but about the hegemony of capital. 1 2 Let me explain these, very brie y, in turn. 3 1. We live in a global modernity. This is to 4 say, the globalisation of certain socio-economic 5 processes currently constitutive of modernity as a 6 form of historical experience (overwhelmingly but 7 not exclusively, capitalist relations of production and 8 exchange) means that, for the rst time historically, 9 as a result of the collapse of the Soviet system (the 20111 dream of a socialist modernity), and at a certain 1 level of abstraction and possible experience, moder- 2 nity is everywhere. Modernity has become spatially 3 one. There is a single spatial ground to the de ni- 4 tion of the historical present. In particular, within 5 the current form of capitalist globalisation, the two 6 main geo-political conditions of the previous form 7 of modernity (colonialism and the Cold War) are no 8 longer the primary spatial basis for the temporal 9 differentiation of the new. The temporal differen- 30111 tial of the modern is no longer primarily derived 1 from historically xed or enduring socially coded 2 spatial differences; it is immanent to a single plan- 3 etary space of which all places are a part, albeit in 4 radically uneven ways. This temporal differential is 5111

185
The Journal of Architecture Volume 6 Summer 2001

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

distributed across global social space in new, more complex and often rapidly changing ways. 2. At the same time, there are many modernities : distinct forms of experience of the modern. However, these are either socio-spatially speci c forms of experience of (the one) global modernity (socio-spatially embedded perspectives on its globality, if you like), or the result of social processes and practices at lower levels of spatial organisation: within regions, for example, or within historically received patterns of inter-national domination. The modern temporal coding of such historically received relations of domination (colonialism, imperialism, Cold War) subsists within global modernity, but it conditions, rather than in itself determining, the distribution of temporal differentiations at a global level. This multiplicity of modernities has a new conceptual shape, to which the idea of alternative modernities is inadequate. For as Harry Harootunian has argued, the notion of alternative modernities tends to reinscribe the historically received geo-political particularisms of the modernity/tradition binary of colonial difference, within its generalisation (through simple quantitative multiplication) of the rst term.3 The multiplication of modernities within global modernity has, rather, a more complex, distributional logic. 3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, about the hegemony of the West, so much as about the hegemony of capital. Capital is not in itself tied to any territorial principle (this is the distinctive mode of abstraction of the value form), although different regimes of accumulation may have particular geopolitical conditions of existence at particular historical times. The West has been the geo-political

carrier of the principle of capitalism, historically, but capitalism is increasingly generalised, residing immanently in the global economic system, following a territorial logic that may enter into con ict with the geo-political interests of its primary hosts. Global modernity (one, internally differential, historical present) is as much, if not more, about the historical effects of the relations between different forms of capital, as about the relations between capitalist and non-capitalist social forms. Different forms of capital refunction (appropriate and transform but also preserve) a variety of noncapitalist social forms, producing historically ambiguous identities and contradictory experiences of abstraction.4 This emergent global capitalist modernity has two additional spatial features to which I would like to draw attention: 1) an intensi cation of the primacy of temporal over spatial relations to the point of the immanent negation of place as a spatial variable which is not the same thing as the negation of space, since space is not reducible to place; 2) a focusing or concentration of this process on changes in the spatial determinations of metropolitan centres, giving rise to what Saskia Sassen has called global cities or, more broadly, what Manuel Castells describes as informational cities.5 These changes derive from changes in the spatial logic of economic and communicational relations and have de nite implications for the development, or fundamental determinations, of art as a cultural form; implications with direct relevance to ongoing debates about the autonomy of art, institutionalisation, and avant-gardes. It is thus through this spatial lens that I shall approach these debates.

186
Non-places and the spaces of art Peter Osborne

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

2. Art and space

This is hardly a new move. It was fashionable in the 1980s and early 1990s to distinguish postmodernist from modernist theory by a turn (or return) to space and spatial relations, against the supposedly onesided obsession with time and history constitutive of the problematic of modernity. That any such move from time to space is simple-minded (like the af rmative conception of postmodernism itself, or indeed, the idea of a temporal problematic without spatial presuppositions and implications) hardly needs restating today. When we speak independently of time and space we always deal only with aspects of integral sets of time-space relations. Nonetheless, the spatial conditions of various temporal relations were undoubtedly neglected, theoretically, in earlier debates about modernity, in part because of the relative historical stability during that period of their implicitly assumed basic form: the territoriality of the nation-state. The new focus on space within Anglophone theory during the 1980s and 1990s, at the intersection of disciplinary transformations in geography, urban sociology, political economy, anthropology, architecture, and cultural theory, recti ed this neglect, to a great extent, rst at the level of the local (especially, the urban), second at the level of regions (both within and beyond nation states), and more recently, at the global level. However, in the main, this literature has remained isolated from the (post-postmodernism) renewal and complication of debates about modernity, in large part because of its development within the self-enclosed and increasingly implausible problematic of postmodernism. It has, though, connected up with both post-minimalist

debates in art theory (especially around the notion of public art)6 and critical writing about the architectural schemes of various post-conceptual artists (such as Dan Graham) and the gradual architecturalisation of art with which such art may be associated.7 This is a tendency that goes far beyond the increased importance of architectural design to museum development and display, and the insistent presence of architectural projects in art spaces (plans, models, diagrams, computer-simulated buildings, etc), to include gallery-alteration and building-modi cation as not merely institutionally recognised, but increasingly dominant, art forms.8 Minimalism effaced the boundary between painting and sculpture, drawing attention to the art objects relations to its institutional space; post-minimalist art often moved outside the physical locality of the gallery altogether. This new type of work situates itself at the boundaries between architectural space and its environment at a time when the distinction between architecture and infrastructure is itself being challenged by newly integrated forms of urban planning, made possible by new design technologies and building processes and materials.9 It points back to the prescient signi cance of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, although it tends to de-politicise and aestheticise his legacy. It points forward to a new stage in the development of the post-conceptual art culture of installation or spatial instantiation. (Installation, on my understanding, is the spatial instantiation of art ideas.) These are developments to which the still powerful Situationist problematic of commodi cation and technological mediation (spectacle) remains

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

187
The Journal of Architecture Volume 6 Summer 2001

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

relevant, but to which it increasingly appears, in crucial respects, inadequate. They also mark a certain historical redundancy in existing forms of the artistic project of institutional critique, insofar as they presuppose the art museum and gallery as the prevailing physical sites of contemporary art. I shall take a conceptual approach to these developments, starting at the highest level of abstraction: the negation of place.

3. Non-place
The idea of non-places derives from the French historian Michel de Certeaus Invention of the Everyday. Volume One (1974), but it is from the short but powerful text by the French anthropologist Marc Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992), which in certain respects inverts de Certeaus use of the term, that I shall take my cue. Augs book is concerned to rede ne the object of an anthropological study of the contemporary world. It introduces the idea of non-places as the spatial dimension of a general conception of supermodernity as a culture of excess, de ned by an overabundance of events, in which the very idea of individuated culture, localised in time and space, has become redundant. As the spatial consequence of changes of scale,. . . the proliferation of imaged and imaginary references, and . . . the spectacular acceleration of means of transport, Augs idea of non-places embraces: the installations needed for the accelerated circulation of passengers and goods (high-speed roads and railways, interchanges, airports) . . . just as much . . . as the means of transport

themselves . . . [the proliferating] transit points and temporary abodes . . . under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty towns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity) . . . the great commercial centres . . . where the habitu of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce . . . and nally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilise extraterrestria l space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of him [or her]self. 10 As its syntax suggests, non-place is conceived negatively, as a space which cannot be de ned as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity. As such, it is a form of space characterised by abstraction, in which its passing inhabitants locate themselves rst and foremost through relations with words. This invasion of space by text, as Aug puts it, is understood to produce a solitary contractuality as the distinctive mode of social existence of its (temporary) inhabitants. Alone, but one of many, the user of a non-place is in contractual relations with it (or with powers that govern it) . . . [and] is reminded, when necessary, that the contract exists. Such instructions for use may be prescriptive, prohibitive or informative (Take righthand lane and You are now entering the Beaujolais region are Augs distinctively French examples); they may be in ordinary language or in more, or less, explicitly codi ed ideograms; and

188
Non-places and the spaces of art Peter Osborne

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

their proponents are not individuals but institutions of various sorts, the presence of which is at times explicitly stated (Metropolitan Transport Authority), at others only vaguely discernible.11 Augs nonplaces are thus the dialectical residue of the dual negation of place by itineracy and textuality. However, productive as I hope this idea will be shown to be, Augs presentation of the concept of non-place is both theoretically ambiguous and critically ambivalent. Theoretically, it equivocates between an abstract and a dialectical conception of negation. Critically, it oscillates between a backward-looking romanticisation of the anthropological conception of place and a forward-looking positive ethnology of solitude. This is the result of the restrictions of the anthropological perspective. Thus, Aug writes: The non-place . . . never exists in a pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it; the millennial ruses of the invention of the everyday and the arts of doing, so subtly analysed by Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and deploy their strategies. Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the rst is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.12 This is in many ways a plausible indeed convincing even poetic, scenario. However, if the nonplace never exists in a pure form (that is, as an absolute negation or annihilation of place), this is surely because it can only be coherently construed, conceptually (and not just as an accident

of existence), as itself intrinsically a special type of place , constituted as a place by its dialectical negation of place in the anthropological sense of a space that generates identity-forming meanings out of the permanence and generational continuity of the physical contiguity of its boundaries. That is, I want to argue, all non-places are places qua non-places, not only in addition or palimpsestically; since their meaning derives from their determinate negation of the relation between locale and meaning, internal to the boundaries of physical contiguity which de ne what Manual Castells calls the space of places, which is the terrain of Augs analysis. (In Castellss words: A place is a locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity.)13 Hence Augs various lists of non-places. Yet this form of dialectical interiority to place tempers the radicalism of the idea of non-place, reducing its challenge to the spatial logic of places to the blocked passage of a negative dialectic. Hence its critical ambivalence only poetically resolved. Despite his implicit account of the social basis of non-places in the revolution in transport and communications technologies in market societies, and his understanding of their tendency to generalisation, as all places increasingly become places through which people travel for Aug, traveller s space is the archetype of non-place14 Aug fails to press the concept of non-place beyond its abstractly negative determination, towards the idea of a new spatial logic. He leaves the concept of place in place. For Aug, the only positive content of the concept of non-place resides in the idea of solitary contractuality, an associated emptying

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

189
The Journal of Architecture Volume 6 Summer 2001

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

of individuality,15 and its necessarily being overwritten by conventional relations of place by the actors within it. In particular, the concept of place fails to register within itself the spatial dimension of the new forms of interdependence that exceed the logic of place (whether by transport or communication) and which render the notion of non-place necessary. Such new forms of interdependence exceed the anthropological sense of place, not by virtue of their failure to generate a certain identityforming type of meaning, but by their negation of the purely spatial dimension of place as physical contiguity. (The anthropological imagination fails to conceive of the possibility of an identity-forming generation of meaning outside the con nes of place in the speci c sense of a place de ned by boundaries of physical contiguity. In this respect, the conceptual destruction of anthropology is a condition for thinking the structure of experience under the conditions of a global capitalist modernity. Critical anthropology can never, in principle, be critical enough.) However, if one conceives Augs non-places in the context of such networks of relations, they appear less as empty or solitary versions of traditional places and more as radically new ontological types of place, constituted qua places through their relations to another spatiality, which Castells calls the space of ows. This space of ows is a purported new spatial logic grounded in the transformation of location patterns of core economic activities under the new technological system . . . the rise of the electronic home and the . . . evolution of urban forms. It governs ows of capital, ows of information, ows of technology, ows of organisational interaction, ows of images,

sounds and symbols not exclusively, according to Castells, but nonetheless already dominantly.16 (This is an economic-technological version of the globalisation thesis.) The international art world is a space of ows. What Aug calls non-places, it would seem, are more properly conceived as the product of the dialectic of the space of places and the space of ows. In this sense that is, critically reconceived the idea of non-place may be developed into a genuinely post-anthropological conception of place, which moves beyond Augs self-understanding. In fact, it promises to move beyond Castellss own still abstractly oppositional sense of what he nonetheless acknowledges to be a dialectical relation between places and ows, in which the contradictions between their different logics appear, in his words, as a structural schizophrenia . . . that threatens to break down communication channels in society.17 (It should be noted that the two sides of this supposed schizophrenia are actually mainly distributed between different, hierarchically related, social groups. In this respect, the oppositional element in the structure represents a con ict of interests and forms of identity, rather than a split within a single social subject: the emergence of a new spatial elite. There is a con ict here, not over space as such, so much as over spatialisation.) Finally, such a rethinking of Aug in relation to Castells raises the possibility of giving analytical substance to what Hardt and Negri have recently called a new place in the non-place or (better) a new place of the non-place, which would be the site of ontologically new determinations of the human, an alternative (for them,

190
Non-places and the spaces of art Peter Osborne

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

republican) global form of non-place opposed to the non-place of the currently emerging power they call Empire.18 It is the prophetic hope of this idea that it will resolve the contradiction (stoically endured by Aug, with a certain melancholy) between the fact that, in Augs words, never before have individual histories been so explicitly affected by collective history, but never before, either, have reference points for collective identi cation been so unstable. 19 Whether or not this might be any more than a prophetic idea depends in large part upon the relations between place and non-place, places and ows; and in particular upon the constitution of places qua non-places by ows. This happens at all levels of place-based spatial organisation: from the human body all the way up to what Hardt and Negri treat as the (politically) ultimate non-place, the planet, or at least the physical contiguity of its surface layers. (There are other places to which humans, or their crafts, have travelled or might be imagined to travel other planets central to the political imaginaries of the last century. But they do not as yet bear on the question of the actual spatial form of political subjectivisation, which is the issue here.) Most important of all, perhaps, is the mediating level of global/informational cities, at which we may also locate the network of the international artworld. Global/informational cities are spaces of contemporeity, in the literal sense of a coming together of times nodal points of multiple temporalities and the prime mediating sites of the dialectic of places and ows, the spatial register of interacting temporal forms.20

4. Art-space as non-place
The institutional spaces of art are related to the new global/informational metropolitan non-places through the network character of the international artworld, but also, more fundamentally, via the deeprooted immanence of metropolitan spatial experience to modern art itself, both in its formal structure and context of reception. As Brian ODoherty has put it, with reference to Schwitterss Merzbau , but the point holds for modern art more generally: The city provided the materials, models of process, and primitive esthetic of juxtaposition congruity forced by mixed needs and intentions. The city is the indispensible context of collage and of the gallery space. Modern art needs the sound of traf c outside to authenticate it.21 The organising principle of collage is the mythos of a city; and collage is at the core of a generic (nonmedium-based) modernism. But modern art still needs the sound of traf c outside to authenticate it, to refer it back to this principle, because of the self-enclosed, self-insulating character of gallery space. It is in its speci c character as a self-enclosed and specialised place that the gallery appears as an exemplary or pure non-place: constituted as a non-place by its dual negation of place-based social functions by itinerary and textuality: the itinerary of the viewer, the textuality of the work a form of itinerary that mediates the universality of the works address with the individuality of relations of private property. In ODohertys words, the empty gallery . . . [is] modernisms greatest invention because the white cube is the single major convention through which art is passed:

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

191
The Journal of Architecture Volume 6 Summer 2001

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

If art has any cultural reference (apart from being culture) surely it is in the de nition of our space and time. The ow of energy between concepts of space articulated through the artwork and the space we occupy is one of the basic and least understood forces in modernism. Modernism space rede nes the observers status, tinkers with his [/her] selfimage. Modernisms conception of space, not its subject matter, may be what the public rightly conceives as threatening. Now, of course, [it is 1976] space contains no threats, has no hierarchies. Its mythologies are drained, its rhetoric collapsed. It is simply a kind of undifferentiated potency. This is not a degeneration of space but the sophisticated convention of an advanced culture which has cancelled its values in the name of an abstraction called freedom. Space now is not just where things happen; things make space happen.22 A familiar minimalist insight, you might say. Indeed it is, and it led rapidly to the transgression of literal (or empirical) gallery space, and the proliferation of site-based work, since things make space happen and not the other way around. However, and this is my point here, it is nave to believe that this transgression of literal or empirical gallery space constitutes a violation of the ontological character of art-space as instituted by the gallery and the modern art museum. Rather, the space that art-things/relations make happen remains artspace, wherever it is, insofar as the contextual art character or function of the things/relations remains tied up with the (much misunderstood)

notion of autonomy. In this sense, art-space is selfinstituting, once historically established through what ODoherty calls the placelessness and timelessness of the gallerys hysterical cell: art turns space into art-space. Non-place is the spatial dimension of arts autonomy, and thus, its continuing modernity. What keeps this space stable, ODoherty argues, is the lack of alternatives. A rich constellation of projects comments on matters of location, but they do not so much suggest alternatives as enlist . . . the gallery space as a unit of esthetic discourse.23 My claim is stronger: not only is gallery-space a unit of aesthetic discourse in postminimalist art, it establishes the ontological structure of art-space which must subsequently be recreated by the work in each instance wherever it is. The architecturalisation of art is in this respect also a reduction of architecture to art. The idea that everything is architecture, in Charles Eamess famous words, is a particular in ection of the idea that anything can become art. Indeed, it is this latter principle viewed from the standpoint of construction. Taken literally, such architectural imperialism presages the end of architecture. For the principle is unstable. Everything and anything quickly become nothing in particular and then nothing. That anything can become art marks the destruction of medium speci city, conventionally associated with neo-Dada and minimalism, but it is more fundamentally realised in conceptual art, as the condition of possibility of the main transformation in the ontological status of art over the last three decades: namely, the replacement of the primacy of the object by the installation or

192
Non-places and the spaces of art Peter Osborne

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

instantiation of the art idea. Fundamentally, it is not objects that are installed here (although they may be the literal medium), or even works, but art ideas. Works are the product of the installation. Installation has been transformed from a technical to an ontological category. In the process, art is becoming co-extensive with the material articulation of art-space. This is a process belatedly recognised by the major art institutions and recently symbolically sealed by the acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (cathedral of pre-conceptual modernism), of PS1 in Brooklyn. Painting is itself subject to this condition. That is, just as during the 1960s, the status of painting as an art, sui generis, gave way to the requirement that paintings legitimate themselves directly as art (painters had to become artists, they were no longer artists simply by virtue of being painters), so the use of paint to make art now increasingly requires the painting (no longer an ontological category) to make a claim on the broader art-space. One can see Schnabel struggling with this, I think, and it is perhaps the more interesting aspect of certain 1980s neo-expressionist works by Baselitz and Kiefer. However, the art-character of the architecture of contemporary museums supervenes, insistently, on the objects within them. The rst, New York Guggenheim, was the forerunner here, now franchised internationally on the back of the success of Gehrys Bilbao building and one can see a similar process at work in the great turbine hall of the Tate Modern, in London. A peculiar reversal is occurring: it is now only outside these spaces (allegedly dedicated to it) that contemporary art can live critically on its own terms. This was always

true of the museum as mausoleum, but it is becoming true of the contemporary art museum and gallery too. However, and this is my main point, paradoxically, art can only live there, outside the gallery, by recreating the ontological character of gallery space (art-space) in various ways, trans guring the social character of the space it occupies. Contemporary art produces (or fails to produce) the non-place of art-space as the condition of its autonomy and hence its functioning as art. That is, autonomy is not an external condition of art, but must be produced anew, on the basis of its external conditions, in each instance, by each work, by its immanent negation of place. Art cannot live, qua art, within the everyday as the everyday. Rather, qua art, it necessarily interrupts the everyday, from within, on the basis of the fact that it is always both autonomous and social fact.24 It is the continued search for a productive form of this duality that has driven art beyond the literal physical space of museum and gallery into other social spaces. It is in this sense that the internal space of the gallery has become, in ODohertys words, an emptiness gravid with the content art once had: a negative image of the content art still seeks outside the gallery, compensated by the architectural art-space of the gallery itself. Ironically, under these conditions, it is perhaps works of institutional critique alone that are currently keeping the contemporary art museum alive as a space for art other than the architecture of the buildings themselves.

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 Notes and references 1. This is the text of a talk to the conference Returns 4 of the Avant-Garde: Post-War Movements, organised 5111

193
The Journal of Architecture Volume 6 Summer 2001

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

by the Centre for Arts Research, Technology and Education (CARTE) and the School of Architecture, University of Westminster, 2425 November 2000. It draws on materials from a larger project on art as a cultural form, Art or Aesthetic?, for which I am grateful for support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the British Academy. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, London, 1995), ch. 1. H.D. Harootunian, Ghostly Comparisons, paper for the Traces conference The Impacts of Modernities, Ewha University, Seoul, 2324 September 2000; forthcoming in Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation, no.3 (2002). tienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Class, Nation: Ambiguous Identities , trans. Chris Turner (Verso, London and New York, 1991). Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991); Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the UrbanRegional Process (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989). See, for example, Rosalyn Deutsches Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996). See, for example, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, edited by Alexander Alberro (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1999), Pts III and VI, and Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000), Pt II. For example, Jorge Pardos current (year 2000) Project on the ground oor of the Dia Centre in Manhatten; or Richard Wilsons 1997 modi cation of the Serpentine Gallery, London. See, for example, the plans submitted by the nalists for New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture Competition for the Design of Cities, which asked

10.

11. 12 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

participants to redesign the area of the West Side of Manhatten from around Penn Station to the Hudson River, exhibited at the CCA, Montreal, 15 November 2000 15 April 2001. The prize was won by Peter Eisenman, but the most impressively infrastructural submission was the one by Jesse Reiser and Naako Umemoto. Marc Aug, Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (Verso, London, 1995), pp. 2832, 789. Ibid., pp. 778, 83, 99, 94, 101, 96. Ibid., pp. 87, 789. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume 1. The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), p. 423. Non-Places , op. cit ., p. 86. Ibid., p. 87. The Rise of the Network Society, op. cit ., pp. 377, 412. See also pp. 41018. Ibid., p. 428. Michael Herdt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000), pp. 2167, 208, 18890. Ibid., p. 37. On Castellss analysis, space is crystallised time or the material support of time sharing social practices. The Rise of Network Society, op. cit., p. 411. This is the socially dominant aspect of the space-time dialectic because it is through time that we are constituted as nite that is, mortal beings. It is the ontological signi cance of the constitution of nitude through mortality that is the element crucially lacking from Marxs materialism. Brian ODoherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space (1976, 1981, 1986) (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999), p. 44. Returning to this text today one is struck by both its radicalism and incisiveness so different from most of todays

194
Non-places and the spaces of art Peter Osborne

Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 01:32 28 September 2012

writings in the purportedly critical, but largely merely rhetorical, genre of museum studies. 22. Ibid., pp. 389. 23. Ibid., pp. 107, 80.

24. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. 1111 Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 2 Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 2259. 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5111