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Art After Metaphysics
Contemporary art is a very different kind of art from anything that has ever been practiced in the past. It is an art that takes place after the age of metaphysics, when all the imaginary significations that once used to anchor art in traditional meaning systems have disintegrated. Today's artist, consequently, is left with a rubble heap of broken meaning systems, discarded signifiers and semiotic vacancies that must be sifted through in a quest for new meanings appropriate to an age that has been reshaped by globalization. Through discussions of the works of artists such as Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski and many others, John David Ebert attempts to fathom the nature of what it means to be an artist in a post-metaphysical age in which all certainties of meaning have collapsed.
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First published November 16, 2013
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About the author
John David Ebert
37 books61 followersJohn David Ebert is a cultural critic and the author of 26 books. He has a series of videos and audio albums on various philosophers posted on YouTube, Google Play and two websites: cinemadiscourse.com and cultural-discourse.com.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 28, 2014
I hate that the first (and possibly only) review of this book is a negative one. Hopefully others will find more appreciation than I did. Ebert's entire enterprise just feels a bit too quasi-philosophical for my taste.
It would be an understatement to claim that this book is a bit light on the art history side (e.g. Why does Ebert insist that the rupture of contemporary art from Modernism begins with 1945 New York school of Abstract Expressionism, as opposed to Pop art?), but to critique it on those grounds would be a bit like critiquing a painting for not being a sculpture, or probably a more appropriate analogy: like reading Foucault as a bad historian (which he most certainly would have been!) In Ebert's defense, I don't think he is at all attempting to pass as a decent art historian. To get too bogged down by the veracity of the art historical details would bar readers from enjoying the overall description of the progression of the underlying narrative in the arts. In this regard it is a fun story when you ignore the facts, just not a very compelling or edifying one.
Ebert's take on art history is more on a fundamental level of ontological development of cultural ideas, that may or may not have been consciously perceived by the artists (much less the critics) in the creation of their art. E.g. I doubt Pollock had in mind the trajectory of the satellite over the gravitational arc of the Earth as he hovered over his drip canvases. It's a beautiful metaphor, but difficult to take seriously. Ebert is clearly a thematic thinker, who speaks in terms of sweeping, overarching metanarratives, tropes, and metaphors that he has gleaned from his readings of Virilio, Deleuze & Guatarri, Sloterdijk, Heiddeger, Geber, etc. His themes usually are echoed in many other social structures as well, as evinced in his many other books. The crux of his grand metanarrative seems to take place in Part One: Chronological Divisions, where he constructs his thesis based on the Peter Sloterdijk's three historical epochs of Western civilization. But he does not support or expand upon Sloterdijk's classification enough for me to be convinced that we really live in a "post-metaphysical" age, devoid of metaphysical "transcendental signifieds" that once held the world together.
Beyond that point his thesis begins diverge to a selection of artists that feel somewhat arbitrary (Zdzislaw Beksinski and Odd Nerdrum especially feel like gratuitous throw-ins), or contrived to conveniently fit the author's grand agenda. In page 28, Ebert confesses that the artists he chose are his personal favorites and impact him on the deepest levels personally, but it's pretty clear that he also chose them because they best fit the narrative of his overall progression of thought. He tries to order them in a loose chronology but does not do such a great job here.
If Ebert wishes to avoid seeming self-gratulatory, I think his book would benefit from a more thorough and rigorous elaboration of key terms like "metaphysical," "post-metaphysical," "ontology," "ontological," "signifier," "transcendental signified," and "semiotic vacancy." I believe he is sometimes incorrect in his liberal usage of these terms, but his vagueness allows room for very loose interpretation. Furthermore, he seems to be missing some of the seminal books that have already been written (most in the 1990s) about ”post-metaphysical” art — some of which he’s synthesizing or rehashing. Is it simply another case of under-researched inspiration? Lastly, I could go on for pages writing about how his assessment of various artists seem myopic or even utterly incorrect. He ends up conflating the blackness in Rothko's later paintings with the "cartooniness" of Basquiat's later compositions, with Richter's turn from photorealism to abstraction, with Beuys's erasure of the human form, with Nietzsche's Dionysian, with D+G's plane of consistency, and so on. It's a very extreme, sweeping conflation that glosses over a lot of other valid readings of the artists' careers.
It would be an understatement to claim that this book is a bit light on the art history side (e.g. Why does Ebert insist that the rupture of contemporary art from Modernism begins with 1945 New York school of Abstract Expressionism, as opposed to Pop art?), but to critique it on those grounds would be a bit like critiquing a painting for not being a sculpture, or probably a more appropriate analogy: like reading Foucault as a bad historian (which he most certainly would have been!) In Ebert's defense, I don't think he is at all attempting to pass as a decent art historian. To get too bogged down by the veracity of the art historical details would bar readers from enjoying the overall description of the progression of the underlying narrative in the arts. In this regard it is a fun story when you ignore the facts, just not a very compelling or edifying one.
Ebert's take on art history is more on a fundamental level of ontological development of cultural ideas, that may or may not have been consciously perceived by the artists (much less the critics) in the creation of their art. E.g. I doubt Pollock had in mind the trajectory of the satellite over the gravitational arc of the Earth as he hovered over his drip canvases. It's a beautiful metaphor, but difficult to take seriously. Ebert is clearly a thematic thinker, who speaks in terms of sweeping, overarching metanarratives, tropes, and metaphors that he has gleaned from his readings of Virilio, Deleuze & Guatarri, Sloterdijk, Heiddeger, Geber, etc. His themes usually are echoed in many other social structures as well, as evinced in his many other books. The crux of his grand metanarrative seems to take place in Part One: Chronological Divisions, where he constructs his thesis based on the Peter Sloterdijk's three historical epochs of Western civilization. But he does not support or expand upon Sloterdijk's classification enough for me to be convinced that we really live in a "post-metaphysical" age, devoid of metaphysical "transcendental signifieds" that once held the world together.
Beyond that point his thesis begins diverge to a selection of artists that feel somewhat arbitrary (Zdzislaw Beksinski and Odd Nerdrum especially feel like gratuitous throw-ins), or contrived to conveniently fit the author's grand agenda. In page 28, Ebert confesses that the artists he chose are his personal favorites and impact him on the deepest levels personally, but it's pretty clear that he also chose them because they best fit the narrative of his overall progression of thought. He tries to order them in a loose chronology but does not do such a great job here.
If Ebert wishes to avoid seeming self-gratulatory, I think his book would benefit from a more thorough and rigorous elaboration of key terms like "metaphysical," "post-metaphysical," "ontology," "ontological," "signifier," "transcendental signified," and "semiotic vacancy." I believe he is sometimes incorrect in his liberal usage of these terms, but his vagueness allows room for very loose interpretation. Furthermore, he seems to be missing some of the seminal books that have already been written (most in the 1990s) about ”post-metaphysical” art — some of which he’s synthesizing or rehashing. Is it simply another case of under-researched inspiration? Lastly, I could go on for pages writing about how his assessment of various artists seem myopic or even utterly incorrect. He ends up conflating the blackness in Rothko's later paintings with the "cartooniness" of Basquiat's later compositions, with Richter's turn from photorealism to abstraction, with Beuys's erasure of the human form, with Nietzsche's Dionysian, with D+G's plane of consistency, and so on. It's a very extreme, sweeping conflation that glosses over a lot of other valid readings of the artists' careers.
July 18, 2014
THE ARTIST: FROM TRIBAL SHAMAN TO GAIATIC MONADOLOGIST
I got very excited when I saw some extracts of this book and the promotional videos on youtube, so I ordered it on Amazon. As I was very eager to begin, I did not want to wait, so I also bought the audiobook version, read by the author, available on Google Drive, and so was able to start reading immediately. The book has two parts: the first part is a general introduction to the four world ages of European art, and the second is composed of specific analyses of individual artists of the post-modern epoch. Ebert points out that there is no single center or capital of art in the contemporary world, and that the major artists are geographically dispersed, so one can call the two parts Chronos and Gaia.
1) Chronos. The book begins with a very interesting synthesis of the typology of historical periods proposed by Jean Gebser and of that proposed by Peter Sloterdijk in the SPHERES trilogy. His synthesis includes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Marshall Mcluhan, Hans Belting, Martin Heidegger, Arthur Danto, Cornelius Castoriadis, Vilem Flusser, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and many more thinkers. Ebert distinguishes 4 major epochs in the semiotics of art, and more generally of our relation to being: the pre-metaphysical period - the artist is a shaman, the metaphysical or perspectival period - the artist is an optician in Euclidean visual space, the modernist or aperspectival period - the artist is an archetypologist of geometric or anthroplological forms in multi-dimensional space, the contemporary or post-aperspectival period - the artist is a monadologist in a liquefied quantized fom-space.
2) Gaia. Ebert argues that the contemporary period began not in 1962 with Andy Warhol's "Brillo Boxes", but in the period immeditely after World War II with the Abstract Expressionists. Pollock and Rothko correspond to a moment of effacing and liquefying the modernist "iconotypes", and dissolving the shared multi-dimensional macrosphere of modernity. They herald in the contemporary period, where the artist can no longer presuppose a universal organised semiotic system, and is obliged to select and combine the signifiers of the present and the past, and hybridise them with new signifiers, into idiosyncratic, temporary, partial, multiple organisations, with no universal legitimacy. Initially the living center of art moves from Paris to New York, only to be disseminated into a mobile polycentric dispersive phenomenon spread over the whole planet. From Parisian art has become Gaiatic. Ebert devotes chapters also to Basquiat, Beuys, Richter, Kieffer, Beksinski, Nerdrum, Bacon, Hirst, Kapoor, Kounellis, Boltanski and situates their singular work within the general episteme of the contemporary world.
This is an ambitious work taking in a vast period of history, from the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians to the contemporary world. Geographically Ebert moves from New York through the German artists to London, Rome, and Paris. The artists examined are very diverse, and allow Ebert to fill in his general frame with many more fine-grained analyses. Further, his categories are interdisciplinary or transversal, in that they apply to much more than artists and art works. To be sure, art has become a proliferation of singular semiotic processes, but frequenting the diverse art works that are elucidated with the help of Ebert's categories we find that our own lives are elucidated too. This is more than an academic manual, it is allso a useful guide to our own individuation in the pluralist ocean of foam that constitutes the semiotic and ontological background of our contemporary world.
I got very excited when I saw some extracts of this book and the promotional videos on youtube, so I ordered it on Amazon. As I was very eager to begin, I did not want to wait, so I also bought the audiobook version, read by the author, available on Google Drive, and so was able to start reading immediately. The book has two parts: the first part is a general introduction to the four world ages of European art, and the second is composed of specific analyses of individual artists of the post-modern epoch. Ebert points out that there is no single center or capital of art in the contemporary world, and that the major artists are geographically dispersed, so one can call the two parts Chronos and Gaia.
1) Chronos. The book begins with a very interesting synthesis of the typology of historical periods proposed by Jean Gebser and of that proposed by Peter Sloterdijk in the SPHERES trilogy. His synthesis includes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Marshall Mcluhan, Hans Belting, Martin Heidegger, Arthur Danto, Cornelius Castoriadis, Vilem Flusser, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and many more thinkers. Ebert distinguishes 4 major epochs in the semiotics of art, and more generally of our relation to being: the pre-metaphysical period - the artist is a shaman, the metaphysical or perspectival period - the artist is an optician in Euclidean visual space, the modernist or aperspectival period - the artist is an archetypologist of geometric or anthroplological forms in multi-dimensional space, the contemporary or post-aperspectival period - the artist is a monadologist in a liquefied quantized fom-space.
2) Gaia. Ebert argues that the contemporary period began not in 1962 with Andy Warhol's "Brillo Boxes", but in the period immeditely after World War II with the Abstract Expressionists. Pollock and Rothko correspond to a moment of effacing and liquefying the modernist "iconotypes", and dissolving the shared multi-dimensional macrosphere of modernity. They herald in the contemporary period, where the artist can no longer presuppose a universal organised semiotic system, and is obliged to select and combine the signifiers of the present and the past, and hybridise them with new signifiers, into idiosyncratic, temporary, partial, multiple organisations, with no universal legitimacy. Initially the living center of art moves from Paris to New York, only to be disseminated into a mobile polycentric dispersive phenomenon spread over the whole planet. From Parisian art has become Gaiatic. Ebert devotes chapters also to Basquiat, Beuys, Richter, Kieffer, Beksinski, Nerdrum, Bacon, Hirst, Kapoor, Kounellis, Boltanski and situates their singular work within the general episteme of the contemporary world.
This is an ambitious work taking in a vast period of history, from the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians to the contemporary world. Geographically Ebert moves from New York through the German artists to London, Rome, and Paris. The artists examined are very diverse, and allow Ebert to fill in his general frame with many more fine-grained analyses. Further, his categories are interdisciplinary or transversal, in that they apply to much more than artists and art works. To be sure, art has become a proliferation of singular semiotic processes, but frequenting the diverse art works that are elucidated with the help of Ebert's categories we find that our own lives are elucidated too. This is more than an academic manual, it is allso a useful guide to our own individuation in the pluralist ocean of foam that constitutes the semiotic and ontological background of our contemporary world.
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