Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art

by Peter Osborne

Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

Genres: Art, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Research

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2013

About the author

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London and was appointed Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at Yale in 2017. From 1983 to 2016, he was an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy. He has contributed to a range of international journals (including Art History, Cultural Studies, New German Critique, New Left Review, October, Telos and Texte zur Kunst) and to the catalogues of major art institutions (including Manifesta 5, Tate Modern, Biennale of Sydney, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo, CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.)
He has recently held Visiting International Chairs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris 8 (2012 & 2014) and in ‘Philosophy in the Context of Art’ at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2015).
His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2005), El arte mas alla de la estetica: ensayos filosoficos sobre el arte contemporaneo (2010), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013) and The Postconceptual Condition (2018).

Reviews

[James Lavender · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some defects here characteristic of this being a "book of fragments," and which the affirmation of this fragmentary nature (via a fascinating reconstruction of the "distributive unity" of the fragment in Jena romanticism) does not fully exculpate - in particular, there are some redundancies across chapters and, more significantly, some unremarked or under-thematised correspondences which on certain points read as arguments not fully pursued to their conclusions. Ultimately, however, the book successfully positions itself as the outline of a problematic field opened up by its fundamental premise, that contemporary art is postconceptual art, and in doing so the book is an inestimably significant intervention into a range of debates in the history, theory, criticism, and philosophy of contemporary art and its various genealogies and lineages. For the range of thought-provoking and suggestive insights offered, it has few competitors in the field.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting treatment of the contemporary as a unique concept, differing from the modern and the post-modern in its apprehension of space, time, and (perhaps this is already implied) modality. Among the surprising elements to be found are an argument in favor of Jena Romanticism as the true ground for conceptualizing the contemporary, a constant undercurrent of the criticism of present-day capitalism, and a will toward radical critique with only a slight interest in materialism, new or otherwise. That this book is ostensibly a philosophy of contemporary art can, at times, be easy to forget, as Osborne does quick flips between philosophers/philosophies as historically (and conceptually) different as Augustine, Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno. Also hard not to notice is the overbearing European character of the philosophy considered, even as Osborne makes claims for the "transnational" condition of the contemporary, and even as he references contemporary artists from elsewhere, such as Lebanon and India. In this sense, there is something radical missing from the radical nature of the work. Throughout, I was tempted to try to reconsider Osborne's argument in light of the philosophy of Manuel De Landa, among others. This didn't and doesn't seem impossible. And so while I keep a degree of wariness in mind while taking on Osborne's rendering of the contemporary, I think it will serve me in the future. That is my pragmatic philosophy, even if I'm vulgarizing the term.

[Rafael Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Osborne charts the complex social, economic, and temporal shifts resulting from the advent of modernity that govern what we perceive and interact with as art. While by no means illegible, there is still a certain intractability to some of the portions that closely involve continental and Romantic philosophy such as the writing of Heidegger on boredom in the final chapter that I can still recognize as a result of the complexity of the subject matter. Overall, the book doesn’t deal directly with contemporary art as a survey of many artists/works so much as it deals with the concepts of the Contemporary and contemporaneity as exemplified through specific pivotal works. This concern with key, exemplary works could be its shortcoming, as others reviews have noted, but I’m also a fan of a lot the artists/works discussed so I can’t complain that much. The final two chapters are worth the price of admission alone.

[Margaret Hamilton-Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cool take on the synthesis of Heidegger and Adorno’s art theory as it relates to the impact that time and space have on the way art is understood as a concept, as an applied practice, and as an object.