POP 4 (1) pp.

113–126 Intellect Limited 2013

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.4.1.113_5

reviewS

Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Peter Osborne

(2013)
London: Verso, 288 pages,
ISBN 9781781680940, p/bk, £19.95.

Reviewed by Blake Stimson, University of California, Davis

‘Contemporary art is badly known’, Peter Osborne declares boldly on the first page of his ambitious
book Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art; indeed, he asserts further on, we suffer
from a ‘dearth of intellectually serious criticism’ (1, 102). The two leading critical approaches govern-
ing our current understanding, he argues, are fundamentally misguided: that which attempts to
broaden our purview – ‘via the new social history of art, feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis and
postcolonial studies, [all reaching] toward the euphoric horizon of studies in “visual culture”’ – and
that which attempts to deepen it historically – an approach ‘dominated by second-generation October
art historians’ – have both failed ‘to grasp contemporary art philosophically in its contemporaneity’
(4, 8). The problem is that each of these now-conventional methods distances itself from the seat of
judgment, one spatially and the other temporally. The first does so by reducing art and judgment
alike to expressions of their respective cultures; the second by falling back on a ‘reconstruction of
critical positions held by artists and critics at the time’ leaving us with the second-hand opinions of
‘criticism by historical proxy’ (4). Neither approach is able to grasp contemporary art philosophically
because it does not reach for the universal bases that sustain criticism. Each in its own way disavows
the project of art criticism by confusing the categories of ‘art’ and ‘aesthetic’ (thus muddying the
philosophical accounts of aesthetic value bequeathed to us by Kant and artistic value given to us

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by Romanticism) and forgoing the project of thinking ‘the concept of art at once philosophically and
historically with … futurity’ (8). Contrary to the conventional wisdom of such contextualist
approaches, Osborne writes, modernism ‘is far from over’ and its foundational questions about
aesthetic and artistic value and about art’s reach towards a better world remain the only viable bases
for restoring ‘to art criticism its central role in constituting the history of art’ (72, 11). Put more
simply, taking such long-sidelined philosophical concerns seriously once again is the only way to
effectively approach the crucial question of how and why contemporary art matters, even if the
answer cannot be the same as it once was.
Such is the considerable challenge posed by Anywhere or Not at All, a challenge that is both far-
reaching in its critical analyses and immediately pressing in its aims. Its own way of taking up that
challenge, however, is in equal parts refreshing and frustrating: it is refreshing because it describes
the problem in such an illuminating way but frustrating because it remains a description – a
‘philosophy of contemporary art’, as the book’s subtitle promises – much more than the criticism
that its philosophy demands. In this sense, the argument, as insightful as it is, often seems stuck in
the same position of disavowal that it diagnoses so well even as it enlightens us to the depth and
extent of the problem at hand.
By Osborne’s own analysis, the root of the disavowal at issue is found not so much in the miss-
ing intellectual seriousness of philosophical or art-historical method as it is in contemporary art
itself. For example, drawing on Terry Smith’s account of contemporary art’s contemporaneity as ‘the
pregnant present of the original meaning of modern, but without its subsequent contract with the
future’, he argues that the ‘concept of the contemporary involves a disavowal – a disavowal of its
own futural, anticipatory or speculative basis’, which at once obliterates historical consciousness and
‘projects a nonexistent unity onto the disjunctive relations between coeval times’ (24, 23). Collapsing
time into an eternal present and thus foregoing the foundational doctrines of our forebears or the
ensuing well-being of our descendants that have traditionally bound us socially to etiological and
teleological lines of development, we convene together, separate but equal, in the anomie and bliss
of fluid but isolated interchangeability. Nothing expresses this better, he argues, than the spectacular
photographic and post-photographic image so prevalent in contemporary art. The same formal rela-
tions can be expressed spatially as well: ‘To each work its own spatiality’, is one way, he suggests,
but even better is the title’s more resolute ‘Anywhere or not at all’ – hence contemporary art’s reli-
ance on the series rather than the ism as its primary organizing principle (151, 86). Osborne labels
this tendency ‘the structural libertarianism of contemporary art’ and attributes it to, on the one
hand, the increasingly pervasive sovereignty of the commodity form that provides ‘the model of
freedom in capitalist societies’, and, on the other, to ‘the absence of new, unalienated social forms of
universality’ (85, 87). In the end, we are told, there is no turning back to the democratic freedom
of the waning universals from the libertarian freedom of the flourishing commodity as this would

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lead only to ‘the false formal coherence of “beauty”’ (166). Contemporary art, the book’s final lines
tell us, will gain nothing from ‘reinvesting in the idea of horizon’; instead, it should look no further
than the commodity’s own work of creative destruction for its model and embrace those ‘practices
of negation that puncture horizons of expectation’ (211). Indeed, it is explained, something like this
was the aim of modernism all along with ‘its rejection of received universals in the name of subjec-
tive freedom’ – hence, contrary to the governing opinion, it being far from over (84).
The historical and philosophical ground of Osborne’s analysis, much like that of the culturalist
and Octoberist schools he critiques, is built up from a repudiation of Kant’s account of aesthetic
experience, a refutation that he attributes to Romanticism and its legacy in modern and contempo-
rary art. The main problem with Kant’s account, he writes, was ‘its principled indifference to …
works of art’ and thus its exclusion of ‘art judgments (such as “this is a beautiful painting”)’ from
aesthetic judgments of taste (42). While it is fair enough to say that Kant ‘had no ontological concept
of the artwork’ (and, indeed, had no interest in having one) it is a much bigger stretch to say that his
was a philosophy of indifference towards works of art or anything else (44). As Kant himself put it,
the ‘determining ground is the feeling of the subject and not a concept of an object’ (Kant 2001: 116).
That is, aesthetic judgments (such as ‘this is a beautiful painting’ just as much as ‘this is a beautiful
flower’) are experiences of pleasure and/or displeasure and, as such, are by definition the opposite of
indifferent. ‘Beautiful art’, he wrote in one characteristic passage, for example, ‘is a kind of represen-
tation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation
of the mental powers for sociable communication’ (Kant 2001: 185). Beautiful art, like beauty in
nature, in other words, pleases in its form, not by its conformity to a concept nor through mere
sensation. ‘[P]ainting properly so called (which does not have the aim, say, of teaching history or
knowledge of nature)’, in other words, ‘is there merely to be viewed, in order to entertain the imag-
ination in free play with ideas and to occupy the power of aesthetic judgment without a determinate
end’ (Kant 2001: 201).
Such accounts of Kant’s principled indifference are the legacy of a doggedly persistent misread-
ing that passed from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to us: in Osborne’s words, that ‘Kant’s transcen-
dental aesthetics established ‘disinterest’ as a condition of possibility of pure aesthetic judgments of
taste’ (177). The problem with such readings, as Heidegger once put it, is that taste ‘is not thought
in terms of the content that remains in aesthetic behaviour when interest in the object falls away’
(Heidegger 1991: 110). What is disavowed, in other words, is the experience of beauty itself by
making the would-be aesthetic response either all body – like the simple sensation of bright colour
or a cool breeze, on the one hand, or the simple desire for blind faith or unbridled freedom, on the
other – or all mind – where experience is reduced to its conformity to an idea. In the process, the
Kantian account of a distinctive pleasure that mediates between mind and body, between under-
standing and desire, between ideas and feelings, between the true and the right, is lost. This was the

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great value that beauty’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’, in Kant’s wording, or, as we might add in
our own, ‘interestedness without interest’, was to provide. The ‘ground for this pleasure’, as he put
it, is the ‘correspondence of an object (be it a product of nature or of art) with the relationship of the
cognitive faculties among themselves’ (Kant 2001: 77). What is lost in accounts that lean too heavily
on the theme of disinterest in Kant’s philosophy, in other words, is the urgency, centrality and
purpose of the interestedness that he insisted remains.
Of course, Osborne and the others may well be right that Kant’s account of a reconciliation
between our conflicted ways of approaching the world found in a distinctive pleasure taken in
objects – in a flower, say, or a painting, or even, we might imagine, a photograph – is a ‘false formal
coherence’ prompting a false horizon of expectation and is thus inadequate philosophically.
Something like this, after all, has been our common sense for a long time now. So too the old social
dream that arose from such pleasures – the dream of a true and right society that integrated moral
purpose with scientific understanding rather than falling back on the false universalism of myth, on
the one hand, or the false particularism of science’s survival-of-the-fittest notion of self-interest, on
the other – may be philosophically and politically obsolete. As Osborne puts it, ‘1917–89 increas-
ingly appears as a parenthesis in a universal history of capital’ (135). We can’t really know one way
or another whether this reconciliation actually exists, or, as we used to imagine, we can’t really know
in the sense of understanding – such knowledge can only be experienced as pleasure or displeasure
and not as knowledge per se, Kant had us believe, because the scientific faculty of understanding
and the moral faculty of reason are irreconcilable with one another on their own terms.
Courage was once the badge of intellectually serious criticism: as the most famous of gambits
had it, ‘“Have courage to use your own reason!” – that is the motto of enlightenment’. For art criti-
cism, this motto can be rephrased as ‘Have courage to use your own taste!’ or ‘Have courage to
make art judgments (such as ‘this is a beautiful painting’)!’ Ultimately, this is why we are no longer
modern: the current state of our criticism – Osborne’s as much as those he critiques – disavows the
courage of conviction necessary to say ‘this is a beautiful painting’ and so, as he says of the artistic
genre institutional critique, ‘appears as a constructed mimesis of the ability of cultural institutions
within developed capitalist societies to sustain and recuperate their own critique’ (159). That is, the
disavowal of the critical exercise of taste in favour of Osborne’s philosophical description, like the
cultural and historical contextualism he sets himself against, anticipates, enacts and commemorates
the failure of institutions like journalism, universities and governments as much as art and its insti-
tutional way in the world, to live up to the foundational Enlightenment ideal of criticism itself. Such
disavowals are always as melancholic over their lost object of beauty as they are exultant about the
freedom from the responsibility that experiences of beauty impose, but it may also be that they are
simply right: our love of the never-ending pregnancy of our contemporaneity without any ‘contract
with the future’ may indeed be the only excitement available to us.

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In the end, Anywhere or Not at All is a brilliant book. It is packed full of far more thoughtful
insight and nuanced argument than can be addressed here and we will be well served if it is widely
read and seriously debated. The foundational question for art about taste, its horizons, and the cour-
age necessary to give birth to a better world, is not one that any single book can resolve on its own –
instead, it can only be a question for our age.

References
Kant, Immanuel (2001), Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1991), Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of
the Same, New York: HarperOne.

On the performativization of action: Discussions around politics and

aesthetics in non-governmental activism

Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism,

Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (eds) (2012)
1st ed., New York: Zone Books, 662 pp.,
ISBN 978-1935408246, h/bk, £25.95.

Reviewed by Josefine Wikström, Kingston University

Arguably, with the publication of Jacques Rancière’s Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique
(2000) – and the broader reception its translation into English enabled – the landscape of contempo-
rary philosophy and aesthetics changed fundamentally. The last few years have seen increased
attention paid to his work in the fields of art theory, cultural- and performance studies. And this has
occurred in ways that seem to confirm Peter Osborne’s analysis of philosophy’s influence on cultural
theory, namely, that the former enters the latter ‘largely through rough elements of the modern
European or “continental” tradition; displaced fragments, patched together in creative bricolages to
suit the needs of the moment’ (2000: iiv).

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One recent attempt to make philosophy fit the needs of the moment in this manner is the
anthology Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (2012), edited by Meg
McLagan and Yates McKee. The main objective of this brick of a book is to analyse, as the subtitle
projects, the visual culture of the work undertaken by NGOs and other political actors working
outside of the governmental frame, such as journalists, artists and film-makers. More specifically, it
wants to do so through appeal to Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’: ‘the system
of self-evident facts of sense perception’ (2006: 12). Based on the Greek idea of democracy, the
distribution of the sensible is conceived as the system through which something is made public,
depending on what can be seen, heard and felt. There is, therefore, Rancière writes, ‘“an aesthetics”
at the core of politics’ (Rancière 2006: 13). Taking this idea into the context of activism and
nongovernmental politics, the question for Sensible Politics becomes: ‘how various orderings of social
relations become “sensible” as viable sites of contestation by non-governmental activists’ (9).
Through analyses of demonstrations, photographs, occupations, performances, films and other
manifestations, Sensible Politics refuses an opposition between the ‘representational world of visual
culture’ (9) and ‘the domain of the political’ (9).
Apart from inscribing itself in a politics of the sensible, the anthology also frames itself theoreti-
cally in relation to a broader idea of ‘visual culture’. In the most general sense, the editors explain,
visual culture ‘conceives “vision” not as a naturally given optical faculty, but rather as an historical,
shifting assemblage of technical and social forces that shape [...] the perceptual, cognitive, and psychic
lives of subjects in their relation to the world’ (12). From this perspective the image is understood as
an ‘image-complex’ – ‘the channels of circulation along which cultural forms travel’ (12) – which
enables the editors ‘to take realms often treated separately – aesthetics, mediation, political move-
ments – and see them as mutually constitutive’ (22). On these bases the various cultural forms in
Sensible Politics are considered in terms of ‘material networks’ (17) and ‘performative platforms’ (23).
Put briefly, the editors of Sensible Politics approach their subject through an expansion of the sensi-
ble via a broad conception of visual culture, additionally employing some Deleuzian and Latourian
terminology that seems oriented to indicate the contemporaneousness of this pursuit. This, the editors
seem to hope, will bring aesthetics in from what they describe as ‘an esoteric philosophical subfield, an
indulgent appreciation of art for art’s sake’ (14) and make it possible ‘to trace a broader image-complex
whereby politics is brought to visibility through the mediation of specific cultural forms’ (23).
If any form of representation is understood, in Sensible Politics, as an ‘image-complex’ and if an
‘image-complex’ accounts for all aspects of meaning production, then the object of investigation
could, by default, include anything. This fact is clearly visible in the variety of topics and styles of
writing represented in the anthology, which includes over 30 texts in the form of essays, interviews
and case studies written by academics, artists, architects, directors of NGOs and independent cine-
matographers.

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As a result, it is difficult to find a single link that connects all of these texts and that would
suggest how they might be read as belonging together in a strong sense. Although Sensible Politics is
divided into five sections, the expectation this encourages – that the contributions thus organized
might bear significant relation to one another – is often disappointed. One example is the first
section, which is supposed to ‘draw attention to the question of the historical legacies and inherit-
ances that mark contemporary nongovernmental activism’ (18). But, of the five texts in this section,
only three are explicitly historical and it is difficult to see how the other two fit into this frame. Also,
the fifth section (rather vaguely titled ‘Multiplying Platforms’) brings together texts as different as
Charles Zerner’s report on the Just Food Campaign to legalize beekeeping in New York and
Liza Johnson’s essay on a putatively ‘socially engaged’ art project: ‘The Market Is the Medium:
Postcyncial Strategies in the Work of Michael Rakowitz’.
If it is difficult to trace a coherent theme, argument or political standpoint in Sensible Politics it
is much easier to distinguish a thread regarding the methodology or theoretical approach that
informs the different contributions to it. Although the concept of an ‘image-complex’ is only
explicitly mentioned in the editors’ introduction, it resonates throughout the anthology as the
perspective from which diverse images, media, protests, demonstrations, strategies and artworks
are viewed. Whatever the object of analysis – whether a tent-city outside a huge congress, jour-
nalistic photos of disasters or the strategies used by so called ‘indigenous media’ – it is analysed
according to an idea of the eye understood ‘not simply as an optical faculty, but as a locus of
reception itself endowed with an interpretative power and implicitly ethical structure of
witnessing’ (19).
For example, both Thomas Keenan and Eduardo Cadava thematize the work of photographers
Trevor Paglen and Fazal Sheikh, respectively, in terms of the relation between what the viewer can
see and what remains invisible, yet pointed at, in their photographs. Sheikh’s photographs of Bengali
widows – depicted in ways that make them difficult to see – is, Cadava writes, ‘a reflection on the
conditions of possibility of the gaze in general and on the conditions of possibility of the gaze of the
camera in particular’ (60). Paglen’s photographs often try to capture things that either aren’t
supposed to be seen, such as secret service operations, or things that are difficult to see unaided,
such as satellites. Reflecting on Paglen’s work Keenan writes that it identifies ‘the mechanisms and
the visual texture of disappearance itself’ (43).
Andrew Herscher takes a similar approach to representation in his essay exploring the positing
of cultural objects in terms of heritage, as undertaken in propaganda campaigns by Kosovo’s provi-
sional government in the early 2000s in order to propagate multiculturalism. Herscher describes his
methodological approach to cultural heritage, ‘not as a preexisting object of visual representation,
but rather as a species of visual culture, a form produced, circulated, and reproduced in spatial,
visual, and textual representations’ (476).

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Linked with this theoretical approach, which necessitates an expansive idea of the image, is a
repeated appeal to the notion of the ‘performative’. Whether photograph, film, architectural struc-
ture, sculpture or an instance of mental imagery, the majority of the texts in Sensible Politics distin-
guish their objects of analysis as performative processes, as utterances that perform things rather
than describing them (see Austin 1962: 5).
This tendency to conceive the activities under analysis as performative actions is, unsurprisingly,
most explicit in Judith Butler’s contribution: ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’.
Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s conception of the polis, Butler argues that human actions in public
space, such as demonstrations and occupations, must be regarded in a double sense. On the one
hand, she asks whether the assembly of crowds – her example being when ‘undocumented workers
gather in the city of Los Angeles to claim their rights of assembly and of citizenship without being
citizens’ (122) – produce an instance of the public through their bodily appearance. On the other
hand, she asks whether ‘those material environments’ are ‘part of the action’ (118). Her point is that
‘[h]uman action’ always is ‘supported action’ (118). Demonstrations and other forms of resistance
‘not only produce a space of appearance’ but ‘seize upon an already established space permeated by
exiting power, seeking to sever the relations between the public space […] and the exiting
regime’ (125).
In its understanding of such embodied action as being both subordinated to and constituted by
an idea of the public, Butler’s essay can be seen as an expansion and elaboration of the conception
of ‘performativity’ as articulated in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
Famously – leaning on a Foucauldian notion of the subject as both subordinated to, and constitutive
of, power relations – she argued in this book that gender is ‘performative – that is, constituting the
identity it is purported to be ...’ (Butler 1990: 34 emphasis added). In her essay for Sensible Politics,
Butler extends this conception of performativity to the production of embodied human action: i.e.
human action is both subordinated to and produced through discourse. People who gather in
assemblies and demonstrations are, she writes, ‘productive and performative’ (124). They are also
able to ‘persist and act only when they are supported’ (124). This expanded use of the performative
allows Butler to conceptualize demonstrations, occupations and other forms of resistance as perfor-
mative processes in which bodies in action lay claim to the public but also have to be supported in
order to make their actions public, for example, through the use of mobile phone cameras that
document their actions and turn them into global media events.
Other contributions to Sensible Politics follow a similar line. Carrie Lambert-Beatty analyses the
Dutch NGO, Women on Waves, and its sister project, Women on Web, which offer, respectively, legal
abortion on international waters and an online information service and medical abortion pills by post.
Arguing that it is impossible to separate out representative and political aspects of these projects,
Lambert-Beatty claims that ‘the “performative quality” of Women on Waves’ (283) lies in the way that

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‘[r]ather than symbolically promoting change, the project’s method is to make it so’ (283). An under-
standing of nongovernmental practices as performative processes also characterizes Yates McKee’s
interview with architect and researcher Laura Kurgan, which, amongst other topics, addresses alterna-
tive readings of data provided by NATO satellite images of conflict territories. Reflecting on the process
of trying to understand such data, McKee suggests ‘[t]hat it is not a matter of just reflecting or commu-
nicating what’s already there, but rather there is a kind of generative or inventive potential there for
politics’ (513–14). He continues: ‘Rather than a matter of truth or falsity, it is almost a question of the
performative – “how to do things with data,” to paraphrase J. L. Austin’ (514).
Above all, Sensible Politics has to be seen as a report on a range of different groups, organizations
and individuals who try to bring about change through their work in areas as different as architec-
ture, art, film-making, NGOs and academia. What this anthology does not do is to evaluate these
different activities from a critical distance, which seems partly to result from the way the book is
edited. Many of the essays and interviews it contains are lengthy and descriptive rather than critical
and argumentative.
On a more fundamental level, the lack of criticality in Sensible Politics might have to do with
questions of methodology arising from theoretical engagement with its topic. The writers in Sensible
Politics conceive of images ‘as coordinated data’ (498), of cultural objects as processes that produce
‘subjects and objects to occupy already-established social positions’ (480) and of NGOs as perfor-
mative platforms that operate through multiplying networks. The cultural objects under scrutiny –
maps, photographies, films, campaigns, etc. – are, in other words, conceived of as inseparable from
the subjects that investigate them. Such a perspective only allows contributors to elaborate, to make
complex and to expand upon the existence of their objects.
This tendency to emphasize the heterogeneity of activist processes at the cost of criticality runs
through much of Sensible Politics. For example, in the interview with Laura Kurgan Google Earth is
described as ‘an emergent interface for activist spatial politics’ (491) that enables ‘new possibilities
for participation, interaction, critique, and dissidence’ (493). In the same vein, Huma Yusuf cele-
brates the use of Twitter and Facebook during the so-called Arab Spring, claiming that it made ‘new
media and political activism synonymous’ (184). What is missing in both texts is the fundamental
question of the structuring logic of capital – that lies behind services like Google Earth, Twitter and
Facebook – and how it changes our ideas of activism, democracy and research.
Many of the texts collected in Sensible Politics describe and give detailed accounts of the events
they address. But, frustratingly, they stop short of locating these within larger structures, tending
not to consider these events as resulting from historical change and thus in terms of the categories
that shape our understanding of them. Treating instances of nongovernmental politics as complex
events and structures to be described rather than taking them as objects of criticism, Sensible
Politics opens itself up to an accusation that Eyal Weizman mentions, but then dismisses, in his

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interview with the editors. Discussing the emphasis on multiplicity and heterogeneity in work on
alternative map readings undertaken by his Research Architecture team in the Israel-occupied
territories Weizman notes that: ‘[s]ome comrades claim that this type of reading makes things
more complicated than necessary – that insisting on this kind of complexity gives credibility to the
system, or even worse, that by according the occupation a level of complexity and sometimes
sophistication, we glamorize it’ (438). Whilst it does not glamorize, Sensible Politics does fail to
attain much that reaches critically beyond it own descriptive bounds. What is missing, one might
say, is what Marx called self-criticism: a dialectical understanding of knowledge that seeks to
comprehend the conditions governing how knowledge is made possible in the first place
(Marx 1973: 106).
That said, there are some fine examples of critical analysis in Sensible Politics. In her essay on
Lewis Hine, Jaleh Mansoor ably demonstrates Hine’s awareness of the photographic frame as a
‘social condition’ (86). His acknowledgement of the historical and social frameworks impending on
photography, Mansoor argues, enables Hine to represent people as historically specific and
constructed subjects rather than to present them as essentialized by their social conditions. Another
important essay is Negar Azimi’s, which revolves around three images from different political events
in Iran: a widely disseminated picture showing the public hanging of two young men, a 1999 cover
of the Economist magazine with a young student ‘holding a blood-stained T-shirt up over his
head’  (219) and film and photos of Neda Agha-Soltan who was shot dead during the Green
Revolution in  2009. Azimi gives an compelling account of how these three pictures – circulated
according to the ‘promiscuity of the Internet’ (241) and filtered through the ideological imperatives
of western media  – were stripped out of their contexts, lost their truth and political meaning and
sometimes came to endanger the subjects they depict.
Mansoor and Azimi, do not immerse themselves in the photographs they analyse. Instead, they
attempt to place them in their historical, social and ideological contexts. Doing so, they not only
achieve some kind of critical articulation of their objects and their own discourse, they also manage
to resist what Azimi calls the ‘romance surrounding the technology’ (238) of blogging, tweeting and
mobile-phone technology.
These and other essays in the anthology are important insofar as they take the question of poli-
tics and aesthetics seriously. Sensible Politics has to be commended for their inclusion. However, the
fact remains that as a whole, this anthology is more interested in approaching politics in roundabout
ways, as put by the editors in their introduction it seeks a ‘form sensitive analysis of the specificity of
differing platforms that chart the imbrication of aesthetic form, medial practice, and political intent
into one assemblage’ (12). And in the end its overemphasis on the heterogenous aspects of political
action means that Sensible Politics runs the risk of drifting far from the shores of what Rancière
would call politics.

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References
Austin, J. L. (1962), How To Do Things With Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York:
Routledge.
Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (trans. M. Nicolaus),
London: Penguin.
McLagan, M. and McKee, Y. (ed.) (2012), Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental
Activism, New York: Zone Books.
Osborne, P. (2000), Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London and New York: Routledge.
Osborne, P. and Segal, L. (1994), ‘Gender as performance: An interview with Judith Butler’, Radical
Philosophy, 67, pp. 32–39.
Rancière, J., (2000), Le Partage du Sensible: Esthétique et Politique/The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible, Paris: La Fabrique.
—— (2006), The Politics of Aesthetics, (trans. G. Rockhill), New York: Continuum.

Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography (2013)

Vancouver Art Gallery/Black Dog Publishing, Vancouver & London, pp. 352,
1907317570, hb, £28.45.

Reviewed by Richard Paul, Arts University Bournemouth

Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography is the catalogue for Ian Wallace’s career
retrospective at Vancouver Art Gallery in late 2012/early 2013. The title of the book is a playfully
literal description of Wallace’s work, and the book is a beautifully produced object in itself, with a
comprehensive selection of high quality reproductions of discreet pieces, and installation images. It
is divided into sections reflecting Wallace’s main interests: the Monochrome, the Cinematic, The
Text, The Street, The Museum and the Studio. There are essays interrogating Wallace’s engagement
with these topics, of which by far the most interesting are by Wallace himself. Like his former

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student, Jeff Wall, Wallace writes uncommonly clear exegeses of his own work, and in the process,
cannily positions his practice as being historically inevitable.
Many of Vancouver’s artists enjoying international success in the last twenty years − names such
as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Stan Douglas – have either been taught by Wallace or
have been influenced by his rigorously theoretical approach to his practice. Also strategically useful
was Wallace’s initiation of a Visiting Artists programme at the Vancouver Art School in the late
1970s. Well-known practitioners from Eastern Canada, Los Angeles and New York, such as Barbara
Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Dan Graham and James Welling (to name but a few) were invited to stay for
five days to share and debate their work and ideas with students and local artists, and – crucially – to
report back on what was happening in Vancouver. The subsequent associations mean that Wallace
et al. were being invited to do international exhibitions, and furthered their careers through articu-
late expositions of their ideas in catalogue essays and magazine articles.
Wallace was, and continues to be, deeply influenced by an engagement with Mallarmé’s Un Coup
de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard/A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance. Already interested in
the possibilities of visual and performative poetry in the late 1960s (he wrote a well-received cata-
logue essay for an exhibition titled ‘Concrete Poetry’ at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts
Gallery), Wallace created collages featuring book pages into which he incised simple geometric
shapes (circles and triangles). He then inverted the shapes, seamlessly replacing them back into the
pages, thus destroying the ‘transparency’ of the text and rendering it opaque. In later works,
Mallarmé’s use of blank spaces and empty pages is reflected in Wallace’s juxtaposition of mono-
chrome canvases with canvases to which photographic images have been laminated; the installation
of the work extending the reflection. As Wallace states: ‘I like to compare the white walls of the exhi-
bition space to a blank white page and my pictures as signs to be read in an almost literary sense’.
This body of work had a long gestation, beginning with an early interest in the monochrome
itself, which Wallace understood as ‘… a space-occupying format, a designed support that merely
provided the referent to a genus of signification, painting as only what it is, and nothing else’. But
such an endgame frustrated him and drew him to photography: ‘Then, as now, it seemed that the
world is much too compelling to bypass for an abstract ideality that only reifies its own presence’.
Early photographic works reflected his interest in avant-garde film, leading to La Mélancholie de la
Rue (1973), a three-panelled and large-scaled photo work. The three panels exude a Tarkovsky-
esque anxiety: a crowd gathered outside a blank concrete building in the first, their bodies occluding
whatever event may be taking place; a VW Beatle perhaps leaving a newly built house in the second;
and a wooden building on stilts, accessible by a rudimentary wooden walkway in the third. The
middle panel, titled ‘Barthes’ Third Meaning’, after the Roland Barthes’ essay of the same name,
features the blurred image of a child in the back of a VW Beetle, that Wallace describes as only
becoming visible in the action of blowing up the image (with the attendant echoes of Antonioni’s

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film Blow Up. For Wallace, the blurred figure expressed ‘a spectral subject that actually contained the
essence of the subject [in this case, “homelessness and the search for security”] that is often over-
looked … [which] for me epitomised Barthes’ Third Meaning’. Barthes had, of course, been influ-
enced by the textual experiments of Mallarmé, learning to pay as much attention to syntax, sound
and other structural devices, as to authorial intention (indeed, Mallarmé spoke of ‘a Text speaking of
and by itself, without the voice of an author’).
In this work, Wallace was one of the first artists to exploit new technological possibilities in
large-format photographic printing, bringing photography into the realm of cinema and painting.
After a range of similar panoramic photographic works, which utilized stills from Wallace’s own
experiments in film and video to continue to explore what Barthes’ termed ‘obtuse’ meanings,
through film-like sequential installations of photo panels.
With the resurgent interest in painting in the late-1970s (amongst other factors), Wallace began
considering strategies of how to integrate photography with painting. Again, the advent of new
technology – the laminating of photographic prints onto canvas – suggested the possibility of
re-engaging with painting in a manner reminiscent of Warhol’s two-panel car-crash disaster paint-
ings. As Wallace himself points out, ‘Certain concepts will only appear when the means for commu-
nicating them becomes available’.
If the post-war appropriation of flâneurism in North America took the form of the cross-country
car ride, with the expressionism of Robert Frank (emotionally flattened out in the systems’ experi-
mentation of Ed Ruscha’s books, such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations), Wallace returns to the pedes-
trian, in his mind recalling the ‘classic flâneurism of the romantic period of Surrealism and the
Situationists’. Wallace’s most recent work, the At the Crosswalk series, in which photo-canvas panels
depicting figures waiting at city intersections are separated by monochrome panels, allows Wallace
to explore the possibility of holding the monochrome and the photograph in a fruitful (and even
political) dialectical tension:

I sought specifically to construct visual analogues between the organisation of the city as an
economy of motion and the geometry of abstract painting, so that the conceptual infrastructure
of my monochrome painting could find a home in the active space of reality; that the liberating
emptiness of the monochrome could interface with the oppressive fullness of the world.

In all of his series, from the late seventies to the present, Wallace avoids the easy spectacularism of
Warhol’s superficially similar work. The photographic images depict the Wallace’s spheres of prac-
tice: the studio as place of production, whether of objects or writing; the Museum, as a frame for the
work (I am a white wall artist); and the street. One problem, however, of reducing painting and
photography to signs of themselves, as Wallace often does in his later works, is that they begin to

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lose both the sensuous aspects of both mediums, and the possibility of generating the ‘obtuse’
meanings that so interested him in his earlier pieces. But this is, perhaps, one of the dangers of
considering the work in representation, particularly (ironically one might say), when the representa-
tions are so vivid, and the articulations of those representations so lucid. For there is a problem, of
course, in reviewing a catalogue of an artist’s work – are you critiquing the catalogue itself: the qual-
ity of its reproductions, the relevance of the accompanying essays (do they avoid hagiography, for
example)? To what extent do you engage with the work itself? This second issue is dangerous, given
the particularity of the materials used, the scale of the work and the specificity of their installation.
Overall, however, this book is an exemplary publication with which to engage with the work of this
under-represented (at least in the United Kingdom) artist and theorist.

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