Kaiak (Jan 2021)
Pocket-Calls: Point(s) of Contact between art Practice and Philosophy
Abstract
Written as the first lockdowns of the COVID pandemic forced us to confront the practical realities ofwithdrawing from the world, this essay responds to the apparent ‘ontological softening’ of Object OrientedOntology (OOO) set out by Graham Harman in Art + Object (2020). It aims to return the ‘complement’ paidby Harman and considering how contemporary art can be useful to philosophy rather than how OOO canbe useful to contemporary art?Following Harman’s analysis of art critics Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg work, the essay sustainsthe metaphorical narrative of the telephone-call drawn from Jospeh Beuy’s sculpture Telefon S – – – – Ǝ,1974,as means of un-packing the weird aesthetic of absorptive beholder-artwork theatrics that Harman sets out insupport of OOO’s quadruple object. While outlining salient points raised by Art + Objects, there is, in thecontext of this journal, an assumption that the reader has sufficient familiarity with the key principles ofOOO to allow meaningful comparison with philosophies of relation, represented here via the work ofBarbara Bolt, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, as a socialising superposition. However, rather thanenflame extant ontological hostilities the essay focuses on the handability of practice as a mode of knowingor revealing.This comparison serves to highlight key methodological differences between the contortions of Harman’s arthistorical reading of Real Objects of art as being withdrawn behind the surface of representation, and thepractices of Post-object artists Jim Allen and Bruce Barber in which the artist doubles as a performerimmersed in their own psychic experience. The point being made that Harman’s vicarious method of allureis predicated in a violent resistant to presence, whereas art is premised on a practice of care that is held presentin theatrical contact: an aesthetic distinction regarding the proximity of substances though which Harmanargues for aesthetics as first philosophy. The intended ‘complement’ is thus returned by suggesting that oneway in which contemporary art can to prove useful to philosophy is by asserting that in as much as care is anaesthetic that takes form in practice, philosophy might resist the violence of representation upon which thewithdraw of OOO object is based in deference to the aesthetic practice of care as the foundation of metaphysics.
