Art and knowledge after 1900: Interactions between modern art and thought

By James Fox

This ground-breaking new history of modern art explores the relationship between art and knowledge from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Each chapter examines artistic responses to a particular discipline of knowledge, from quantum theory and theosophy to cybernetics and ethnic futurisms. The authors argue that art’s incursion into other intellectual disciplines is a defining characteristic of both modernism and postmodernism. Throughout, the volume poses a series of larger questions: is art a source of knowledge? If so, what kind of knowledge? And, ultimately, can it contribute to our understanding of the world in ways that thinkers from other fields should take seriously?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526164254

Book preview

Introduction

The documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, is one of the world’s most authoritative displays of contemporary art: occurring only every five years, it aims to offer a précis of the principal artistic trends of its time. At the 2017 show, however, the most celebrated exhibit seemed more like a criminal investigation than a work of art. The Murder of Halit Yozgat (2017), created by the London-based interdisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture, explored the racially motivated murder of a young man in Kassel.¹ The 28-minute video and accompanying installation made meticulous and innovative use of forensic methods – audio-visual analysis, 3-D modelling, fluid dynamics, infographics, timelines, and re-enactment techniques – to expose inconsistencies in the official police account of the crime. The work’s impact was all the greater because its mode of address was so unfamiliar to artgoing audiences: far removed from appeals to aesthetic sensibilities and indeterminate emotions, the exhibit was designed to amass evidence and uncover the facts. Here, art was a tool with which to acquire knowledge and expose the truth.²

Since its foundation in 2010, Forensic Architecture – which consists of changing teams of architects, archaeologists, filmmakers, scientists, software developers, investigative journalists, and lawyers – has undertaken many human rights and environmental investigations. It has examined migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, the fatal consequences of drone strikes in the Middle East, the use of torture in Syrian prisons, the causes of ecocide in Indonesia, and the impact of oil and gas pollution in Argentina. Presented in courtrooms and parliamentary inquiries, and used by NGOs and media organisations, its findings have transformed the public’s understanding – and sometimes the legal outcomes – of such cases. Though Forensic Architecture’s motives are ostensibly political, the group – many of whose members are practising artists – roots much of its practice in the visual arts. It has exhibited its research at some of the world’s leading museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2018 the collective was even nominated for a Turner Prize, exhibiting a piece that used a range of visual technologies to reassess a fatal 2017 police raid in Israel.³ Since its foundation, Forensic Architecture has been determined to reimagine the epistemic potentialities of images, as well as the value and agency of art. ‘We were discontent with the way art was reduced to commentary’, Eyal Weizman, the agency’s founding director, has claimed. ‘We were looking for a way in which our practices – in which filmmaking, audio investigation, architecture – could be a way not only to understand the world, but to intervene in it.’⁴

Though the status of Forensic Architecture has inspired a great deal of debate within the art world,⁵ it is in fact part of a much broader cultural tendency. Many contemporary artists are now collaborating with other disciplines and institutions with the goal of making substantive intellectual and social contributions to society. Some can be found working with biologists, physicians, and geneticists in state-of-the-art laboratories to interrogate the nature of life itself, while others have teamed up with botanists, zoologists, and ecologists to devise sustainable technologies or environmentally friendly habitats. Some are cooperating with computer programmers and robotics experts to create machines animated by artificial intelligence, while others are travelling the world with sociologists and anthropologists, conducting ethnographic research in regions or communities under threat. Many of these artists no longer work out of studios and workshops, or even through established gallery systems, but have taken up residencies in universities, research institutes, libraries, government departments, schools, and charities. All this activity seems premised on a common conviction: that art, like the disciplines with which it interacts and the institutions within which it operates, is ultimately a source of knowledge – or at least a tool of knowledge production. Indeed, many no longer even think of themselves as painters, sculptors, or filmmakers, but as interdisciplinary thinkers, capable of offering valuable insights to the world.

Though this might seem to be a recent phenomenon – a product, perhaps, of the theorisation of art education since the 1960s, or the rapid growth of ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the arts and humanities since the 1990s, both of which will be discussed later in this introduction – this volume argues that artists have been learning from, collaborating with, and contributing to other fields of knowledge for many decades. The essays gathered here chart the relationship between visual artists and various disciplines of knowledge from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. They show how scientific and spiritual theories informed the evolution of abstraction; how psychoanalysis influenced the meanings and methods of Surrealism; and how in the second half of the century artists made increasingly frequent and sophisticated incursions into academic practices, including history, philosophy, economics, cybernetics, sociology, ecology, biotechnology, and archival research. These dialogues foreshadowed, and helped form, the now ubiquitous figure of the contemporary interdisciplinary artist, yet they have rarely been connected to each other in art scholarship. This collection argues that a principal characteristic of modernist and postmodernist art has been its claim to be an investigative or intellectual discipline. Throughout, it will ask a series of larger questions: Is art a source of knowledge? If so, what kind of knowledge? And, ultimately, can it contribute to our understanding of the world in ways that other thinkers should take seriously?

* * *

Despite the many ways in which modern art has interacted with other fields of knowledge, their relationship still might seem incongruous. After all, art and knowledge, in the Western tradition at least, have often been thought of as separate, if not contradictory, phenomena. This view has its roots in the old association of ‘knowledge’ with the empirical sciences, and of the arts with the less constricted intellectual spheres of intuition, imagination, or form. And yet such a simplistic binary could hardly capture the various revolutions that the concept ‘knowledge’ has undergone. Instead of definitions, we here survey three philosophical tendencies for understanding the term ‘knowledge’. Any such a broad-brush sketch must be rudimentary, but it should aid us in unpicking the relationship between arts and various disciplines of knowledge.

The first conception of knowledge is what we can call the rationalist-empiricist conception. Here, knowledge is understood as a true justified belief, or, to use the classical formulation of knowledge offered by Plato in the Theaetetus, ‘true belief when accompanied by an account’ (meta logou alêthê doxan).⁶ In this formulation, the knowing subject’s beliefs do not occur by chance or intuition, but are the result of logos broadly conceived: of patient evidence-gathering, argument, or testimony from reliable sources. Later philosophers elaborated on how different parts of this schema should be understood. The justification for such beliefs could be grounded in reason (rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz) or the senses (empiricists such as Locke and Hume). Truth could be understood as a correspondence between beliefs and reality (realists such as Descartes, early Wittgenstein, Popper) or as something wholly or in part structured by human minds (idealists such as Berkeley, Kant, Putnam). Indeed, the great philosophical debates between rationalists and empiricists, or realists and idealists – which have represented the mainstream philosophical tradition from early modernity to the twentieth century – operate under this shared picture of knowledge: knowledge, for most of these philosophers, is the methodical uncovering of truth, of which modern science is an exemplar, and for which philosophy seeks to provide foundations.

Unsurprisingly, the rationalist-empiricist picture of knowledge reserves little prestige for the arts. Plato famously banished the dramatic poets from the ideal city in The Republic, condemning them for lacking expertise, telling untruths, and interfering with citizens’ emotions.⁷ He maintained that artists create mere ‘copies of copies’, imitations twice removed from reality;⁸ in the end, only the philosopher’s method of rational inquiry reveals the essences of things. Similar suspicions have persisted to the present day, when contemporary analytic philosophy has reprised the claim that the arts are ‘cognitively trivial’ because they fall short of the rigorous methods of science and philosophy.⁹ And while we might ridicule such views as philistinism, it is worth noting that they capture what is probably the dominant sentiment in technologically dominated society today: a respect for the ‘hard’ sciences and a prejudice against the ‘soft’ arts.

The aesthetic conception of knowledge, by contrast, reserves a central role for the arts. Here, knowledge is not a methodical collation of facts, but a sudden epiphany: a revelation of the world, often mediated through a powerful work of art. This mode of knowledge can be linked above all to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. We might recall John Keats’s belief that artists possess a ‘negative capability’, the willingness to evade the ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ and to dwell instead in a state of uncertainty, commanded by intuition and beauty.¹⁰ Similar ideas were developed by German Romantic philosophers, for whom art was a means of accessing the realm of the noumena – things as they are in themselves – whether these pertained to human freedom (Schiller), the synthesis of the conscious and unconscious (Schelling), or the spirit (Hegel). The clearest theory of aesthetic knowledge, however, as well as the most influential one as far as artistic production is concerned, belongs to Schopenhauer. He claimed that when we contemplate great art we lay aside our ordinary perspective, our wants and desires, and perceive nature and human form as they truly are:

[W]e relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason [i.e., forms of space, time, causality] merely their relations to one another, whose final goal is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what.¹¹

The aesthetic pleasure of art is ultimately the realisation of how things are in their essence, independently of our petty concerns. Or, as one of Keats’s most-cited lines goes: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.¹²

The aesthetic conception of knowledge is, at its broadest, the idea that understanding can happen by means distinct from the scientific method: by a realignment of our conceptual apparatus or a sudden conversion of our sensibilities. The idea offers useful background for understanding certain forms of spiritual abstraction in the twentieth century (Chapter 1), as well as all forms of artistic knowledge that appear to be in friction with the sciences. In our own time, it has seeped into various philosophical positions. In post-analytic philosophy, philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond have associated the arts with the cultivation of moral sensibilities.¹³ Jacques Rancière has developed the influential idea of the aesthetic experience as a new ‘distribution of the sensible’: a reorganisation of the political hierarchies of the visual world.¹⁴ At least as popular in the art world has been speculative realism, such as Graham Harman’s suggestion that aesthetic experiences allow us to sense the ‘inner life’ of inanimate objects such as rocks or bits of dirt.¹⁵ For all their appeal, however, both historically and in the present day, aesthetic accounts of knowledge must always contend with the charge of mysticism.

The third conception of knowledge is what we might call the critical conception of knowledge. While the classic and aesthetic conceptions of knowledge offer a positive picture of how truth can become graspable, the critical conception is deflationary: it argues that systems of knowledge are intertwined with systems of power. This formulation, which has had perhaps the greatest influence on contemporary artists’ work processes, might include Nietzsche’s genealogical project, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, French poststructuralism, feminist standpoint theory in philosophy of science, critical race theory, and other critical movements. Arguably the most influential idea within this tendency is Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge (le savoir-pouvoir), as developed in Discipline and Punish.¹⁶ Foucault argued that all knowledge systems were inextricably linked with an exercise of power. Accordingly, the development of seemingly autonomous academic disciplines (for example, psychology) is in fact merely an extension of an attempt to control others (for example, by establishing ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ psychologies). Claims to objectivity, universal concepts, taxonomical divisions all become legitimate targets of critique, revealing disguised ideological flaws; indeed, even the claims of empirical science itself could no longer be taken as self-evidently true, as claimed by Jean-François Lyotard.¹⁷ In the second half of the twentieth century, the critical conception of knowledge has arguably displaced the aesthetic conception as the main alternative to the rationalist-empiricist paradigm. Within art practice, it casts the artist not so much as a collaborator with established academic disciplines, but as their interrogator or even antagonist. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson have critiqued the organisation of knowledge in institutions such as museums and art galleries. Others have questioned knowledge systems outside of the art world, as several chapters in this book demonstrate: in relation to economics (Chapter 6), through Afrofuturistic reappropriations of colonial archives (Chapter 11), or through witnessing to ecological destruction (Chapter 13).

As we shall see in the chapters that follow, artists working with different disciplinary fields have assumed varied philosophical conceptions of knowledge, drawing on all three formulations presented here. Each approach, however, has presented them with its own difficulties. The rationalist-empiricist view judges art by the standard of academic sciences, which only the most conceptually rigorous art practices withstand. Artists following the aesthetic conception of knowledge must defend themselves against accusations of mysticism. And artists working under the critical conception must decide whether the critique of the dominant ideology might not be better performed by activists or academics. The creative task of artistic practices of the twentieth century has been, in part, to find answers to such challenges.

* * *

Art – despite, as we have seen, some philosophers’ claims to the contrary – has long-established epistemic functions. From prehistoric cave paintings to the botanical drawings of the Enlightenment, images have been used to store and communicate non-artistic information for millennia. The modern period, however, brought about a number of changes that intensified this tendency dramatically. The first was what we might call ‘the democratisation of knowledge’. The twentieth century brought with it the birth of new media, the reinvention of old ones, and a reorganisation of social structures, which together made diverse sources of information more accessible than ever to the public. As a result, it became easier for artists to learn about other disciplines and, conversely, for other disciplines to learn about art. The huge influence, for instance, of the French philosopher Henri Bergson in the first two decades of the century owed not just to the wide-ranging implications of his ideas, but to a cocktail of specifically modern circumstances that helped them spread. These included the widespread publication of his writings in journals and books; the rapid translation of those works into other languages; the increasingly compressed avant-garde ecosystems through which they were exchanged and discussed; the ease of international travel, which allowed Bergson himself to tour the world; and of course the vast amounts of publicity that made him famous. When Bergson visited the United States in early 1913 – a trip that received extensive coverage in the New York Times – one of his public lectures is said to have caused the first traffic jam in the history of Broadway.¹⁸

This process accelerated as the century progressed. One important development, in the anglophone world at least, was the emergence and extraordinary success of mass-market serious non-fiction, which brought an ever-expanding body of academic writing – in classics, history, philosophy, physics, and mathematics, as well as newer disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology – into ordinary people’s hands.¹⁹ Many British Surrealists became first acquainted (or at least reacquainted) with Freud’s theories through a cheap Pelican paperback of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which appeared in 1938 and sold out a print run of 70,000 copies within a week.²⁰ In the second half of the century, electronic media such as radio (which had been broadcasting documentaries since the 1930s) and television made these ideas even more accessible, while the digitisation of data and its mass distribution through the internet in the twenty-first century gave the public unfettered access to information that would have been unavailable – and often unimaginable – to predecessors. In 2019 British sculptor Antony Gormley and Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan used freely accessible mapping data collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to create a virtual reality artwork that took its audience on a geologically accurate trip to the moon.²¹

The second reason for the intensification of art–knowledge interactions was a change in modern art itself, which increasingly defined itself not as the mastery of a specific physical medium but as an intellectual act. For instance, it is often said that when Marcel Duchamp relocated a urinal to an art gallery in 1917 and renamed it Fountain, he helped redefine the creative act itself. One contemporary critic expressed the revolution as follows:

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.²²

What was being articulated here was a shift from making to thinking, from a practical to a conceptual notion of creativity – a transition that, as Duchamp himself later said of his larger oeuvre, aimed to put art ‘back in the service of the mind’.²³ That aspiration became the dominant feature of conceptual art in the 1960s. Indeed, by the end of the decade many conceptual artists thought their practice was primarily, if not exclusively, an intellectual or epistemological exercise. The Art & Language group’s exhibitions often consisted solely of explanatory text, thus collapsing the distinction between artist and theorist. ‘Inside the framework of conceptual art’, wrote Terry Atkinson in the Art-Language journal in May 1969, ‘the making of art and the making of a certain kind of art theory are often the same procedure.’²⁴

It did not take long for the intellectual ambitions of conceptual art to find their way into art schools – the location of the third large-scale change that has driven art’s reorientation towards other disciplines of knowledge in the modern period. The structure of art education changed dramatically in the 1960s, when in many places it was brought into line with academic degrees; some art schools even merged with universities or polytechnics. At around the same time, art education underwent a process common to modernism as a whole – that of ‘deskilling’ – which in this case involved a reduced emphasis on technical skills connected to drawing, painting, and sculpture.²⁵ Art students increasingly rejected such practical competencies in favour of intellectual ones. They were encouraged to produce written work, contextualising their output within the social movements of their own times as well as the history of art. In the late 1960s and 1970s art schools became enamoured of newly translated continental theory, as well as Marxist and feminist critiques. By the 1980s many art schools on both sides of the Atlantic had already set up postgraduate courses, with the number of MFA and PhD programmes proliferating thereafter. This is one of the most concrete reasons why so many contemporary artists now consider themselves also to be academics, and are often referred to as ‘artist-researchers’.²⁶

This brings us to the fourth and most recent cause of the phenomenon examined in this book. Cross-disciplinary thinking within both the arts and the humanities is one of the decisive academic trends of the second half of the twentieth century, famously described by the groundbreaking Interdisciplinarity report, published by the OECD in 1972.²⁷ By the 1990s this tendency could also be found in exhibition-based art. If the prevalence of interdisciplinarity has waxed and waned within academia in recent decades, its hold on the visual arts has grown ever stronger. This has led to a series of so-called artistic ‘turns’, such as the site-specific turn, the social turn, the archival turn, the curatorial turn, and the pedagogical turn, and has prompted various ‘artist as …’ locutions: artist as ethnographer, as sociologist, as scientist, as environmentalist, and so on.²⁸ Though each incursion might appear niche by itself, they together amount to a major artistic development – and one rooted in an older assumption that artists can learn from, work with, and contribute to other fields of knowledge.

Of the many critical terms related to interdisciplinarity in contemporary art, ‘site-specificity’ is perhaps the best established. The label was initially used to denote sculptural work that responded to the physical space in which it was exhibited. But, as art historian Miwon Kwon has argued in her important study One Place after Another, ‘site-specificity’ also came to denote a practice that responded to the social and institutional characteristics of a given site or location.²⁹ For Kwon, ‘site-specificity’ thereby included works of institutional critique that made interventions into larger discourses. The American artist Fred Wilson’s project Mining the Museum (1992) is one such example. He created no new art objects for the show, but rather rearranged the existing collection of the Maryland Historical Society in order to allow new histories and meanings to emerge. Wilson, for instance, placed a model of a slave ship next to a baby carriage containing a Ku Klux Klan hood and a sedan chair used by the governor of Maryland, labelling the arrangement ‘Modes of Transport 1770–1910’.³⁰ What is relevant for our purposes is that Wilson achieved his chilling effects not through the customary methods of an artist, but those of a historian or curator.

Other recent ‘turns’ in contemporary art exhibit a comparable pattern. The ‘social turn’, which became increasingly visible in the 1990s, describes artworks made of methodologies drawn from activism, pedagogy, community organising, and sociology.³¹ Artists belonging to the ‘ethnographic turn’ rely on fieldwork, interviews, and documentary filmmaking traditions.³² ‘Bio artists’ are splicing genes and manipulating bioluminescent organisms while ecologically minded artists are making use of practices normally employed by environmental engineers.³³ Many of these artists are now conducting their work in residencies at institutions associated with other disciplines, such as schools, archives, hospitals, laboratories, or even through collaboration with the practitioners of those institutions.³⁴ But, while interdisciplinarity has undoubtedly become one of the defining features of contemporary art, it is by no means a new phenomenon. This volume contends that similar, though less formal, interactions were taking place at the very beginning of the twentieth century, and are in fact a defining characteristic of modernism as well.

* * *

This book consists of thirteen chapters spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with each offering an in-depth case study of the relationship between modern and contemporary art and a specific field of knowledge. Chapter 1, ‘Modern art and spiritual knowledge’ by Lucy Kent, explores the surging popularity of new religious philosophies at the start of the twentieth century. These beliefs, which included Christian Science, Theosophy, Zen Buddhism, and the Baha’i Faith, all claimed that a spiritual reality existed beyond the world of appearances. Kent shows how many of the century’s most innovative and influential artists (from Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian to Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston), critics (Roger Fry and Clive Bell), and collectors (Baroness Hilla von Rebay) not only subscribed to such beliefs but viewed art as a tool to understand them. She argues that many artists rejected conventional forms of representation and embraced abstraction as part of a larger quest to see through the ‘veil’ of appearances. Some of them became convinced that non-objective art could be a crucial point of contact with a transcendental order, imparting to humans the sacred knowledge essential for progress.

Many modern artists were more interested in the empirical disciplines of science than the baseless claims of spirituality (though in the first half of the century these two very different fields were sometimes conflated). Gavin Parkinson’s chapter, ‘Twentieth-century revolutions in art and science’, examines the ways in which artists perceived the major scientific discoveries of the period – notably the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics – and how historians have chronicled the epistemic relationships between art and science in general. Parkinson shows how the novel and multi-dimensional realities implied by science inspired Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp, to abandon traditional means of representation in favour of more experimental renderings of space and time. He also shows how, in the 1930s, Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Roberto Matta created a new imagery when the significance of relativity and quantum mechanics was becoming more fully understood by philosophers in Europe. The chapter concludes with new research on the impact of modern science for abstract artists in the US in the 1940s.

In Chapter 3, Margaret Iversen tackles the field of knowledge that had perhaps the greatest influence not only on modern art but also on twentieth-century art criticism. ‘Psychoanalysis and art: a new theory of objects’ explores the close and often reciprocal relationship between psychoanalysis and art. Iversen organises the chapter around three conceptions of the ‘object’ in psychoanalysis. ‘Found objects’ relates a Freudian maxim, ‘the finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it’, to the Surrealist objet trouvé.³⁵ ‘Part-objects’ describes Melanie Klein’s theories of the pre-Oedipal infant’s attacks on and repairs to the object in fantasy, linking it to the art criticism of Adrian Stokes. ‘Transitional objects’ is concerned with the theories of Donald Winnicott and Marion Milner, whose ideas informed thinking about Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document and some works by Cornelia Parker, a few of which are actually titled Transitional Object. Although Iversen focuses on the ways in which psychoanalytic texts have informed artists, she also shows how many theorists were themselves informed by artistic and literary precedents (with Freud writing about Leonardo and Michelangelo, Lacan collaborating with the Surrealists, and Marion Milner making her own free drawings). In doing so, she proves that visual art was not simply a passive receptor of psychoanalytic theory but a distinct mode of exploring our relationship to both physical and psychical objects.

Other disciplines likewise learned from the visual arts. In Chapter 4, ‘Before the visual turn: twentieth-century historians and the uses of art’, Tom Stammers describes how a series of influential post-war historians embraced art as a source of historical knowledge. He uses Hugh Trevor-Roper’s work on the Habsburg rulers, Carl Schorske’s account of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the wide-ranging studies of the Annales historians, and the cultural analyses of Eric Hobsbawm as lenses through which to examine four different historiographical approaches to art in the twentieth century, relating to the history of ideas, psychoanalysis, the history of collective mentalités, and Marxist class struggles respectively. Despite their different approaches, these historians all viewed visual art as an invaluable tool for understanding earlier eras as well as their own. In doing so, they anticipated the ‘visual turn’ that washed over the humanities in the 1980s, and placed visual culture at the centre of historical understanding.

Returning to art and art theory, Peter Osborne’s chapter, ‘Knowledge, truth, history: contemporary art and the problem of art-historical periodisation’, offers a philosophical confrontation with some of the central categories of the book: knowledge, truth, and conceptual art. To understand the place of knowledge within contemporary art practice, argues Osborne, we need to take stock of the complex relations between the three main modern Western discourses on art – the philosophy of art, the history of art, and art criticism – in their historical and conceptual interconnections. The chapter provides a critical outline of different periodising schemas of twentieth-century art produced by, first, the mainstream aesthetic tradition (especially Clement Greenberg) and, secondly, its ‘postformalist’ and ‘postmodernist’ successors (for example, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois). Osborne offers an alternative, historical-ontological periodising schema of contemporary art, based on the primacy of conceptual art. Instead of art as a form of knowledge, the philosophical picture proposed by Osborne conceives of art as an ontologically distinctive form of truth.

The next three chapters explore the interactions between art and knowledge in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of ‘conceptual art’ broadly conceived, which has structured our understanding of contemporary art in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period, painting and sculpture retreated before the neo-avant-gardes of Fluxus, minimalism, performance, and conceptual art. As the next three chapters explore, this great rearrangement crucially involved artists interacting with varied new spheres of knowledge, from philosophy to economics, from sociology to cybernetics.

In his chapter, ‘Art/Economics’, Allan Antliff investigates the ways in which artists of the period attempted to disrupt the capitalist status quo by evoking alternative economic theories. While certain well-known artists have engaged in the practice of institutional critique by interrogating the relationship between art and capital (for example, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke), and others have parodied capitalism (for example, Sylvie Fleury, Brian Donnelly), Antliff’s interest here is in a third group: artists who interact with the discipline of experimental economics, offering modes of economic thinking and theories of value that go beyond the hegemonic, neoliberal economic system. The case studies include the anarchist-inflected concept of value in the ‘modified’ art of the painter Asger Jorn in the 1950s; Joseph Beuys’s lecture-actions on alternative economic systems in the 1970s and 1980s; and Richard Mock’s critique of capitalist economic assumptions through both sculpture and activist work, in a period stretching up to the early 1990s. Against a fatalistic acceptance of capitalism, these artists participated in the radical rethinking of economic theory through the lens of anarchism.

Art’s interactions with cybernetics in roughly the same period were, by contrast, more ambiguously related to the dominant capitalist intellectual framework, as Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra explains in her chapter, ‘Art and cybernetics: a new ontology for art’. By the late 1960s, cybernetics was at the height of its popularity as a new, all-encompassing discipline of knowledge. An interdisciplinary mix of engineering, psychology, mathematics, and early computer science, cybernetics promised to explain human, biological, and economic phenomena as self-regulating feedback systems, thereby removing human intentionality from scientific explanations. While cybernetics fell into obsolescence in the following decades, its anti-humanist postulates have deeply influenced the digital technologies of today, from workplace automation to social media. As Polgovsky Ezcurra argues, artistic interactions with cybernetics in part embraced this technophilic vision, but at other times they created more playful and subversive emphases: on serendipity, interactivity, and chance. The cybernetic interaction with art therefore did not merely signal the artistic use of computers and machines, but rather enabled the beginnings of a new ontology for art: here, artistic processes became as important as objects, and participatory audiences as important as creators. The key case study in the chapter is the legendary exhibition ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, organised by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968.

In the 1970s the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London also played an important role in the intersection between art and politically engaged sociology. As Catherine Spencer shows in her chapter, ‘Art into society: organised labour, workplace sociology, and artmaking in 1970s Britain’, conceptualist practices only gradually came to acknowledge the way in which class, gender, and race interacted within society. Beginning with the ICA exhibition ‘Art into Society – Society into Art’ (1974), in which conceptual artists such as Joseph Beuys explored social knowledge in a metaphorical register, Spencer’s next three case studies show how the work of certain British artists promised more immediate social relevance. Conrad Atkinson’s ‘Strike at Brannan’s’ in 1972 conceived of an exhibition as a two-way discourse between artists and striking workers at a thermometer factory; ‘Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–75’ (1975), developed by Margaret Harrison, Mary Kelly, and Kay Fido Hunt, grappled explicitly with the gendered division of labour; and Rasheed Araeen’s performances, such as Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person (1977), drew attention to racist workplace inequalities. These art practices incorporated sociological documentation and social impact into art. As Spencer demonstrates, art’s concern with gender and race paralleled the slow coming to terms with these topics in left-wing unionist politics.

The conceptual practices explored in Antliff’s, Polgovsky Ezcurra’s, and Spencer’s chapters often dislocate the visual elements of exhibition-based art, replacing them with writing, performance, and technology. Meanwhile, however, the elevation of documentary photography within art institutions represented another possible exploration of the relationship between art, knowledge, and truth. Julian Stallabrass, in his chapter ‘Knowledge, nation, and colour in documentary photography’, explores how the use of colour enabled photographers to offer new models of documenting social change. Stallabrass’s case studies here are Luigi Ghirri, whose photography in the 1970s and 1980s protested against the incursion of consumer culture into Italy; Raghubir Singh, whose photographs of India from the 1970s to the 1990s mirrored the nation’s diverse society and attempted to strengthen its democratic project; and Susan Meiselas’s photo book Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979 (1981), a riposte to the insistent lies of the Somoza dictatorship in that country. Stallabrass interrogates the different forms of photographic knowledge incipient in these practices. Against the bias towards black-and-white photography in photojournalism, the use of colour is here linked to a renewed humanism, which found forms of visual connection across the divides of nation, race, religion, and culture.

Moving into the 1990s and 2000s, Vid Simoniti’s chapter, ‘Art and biotechnology: on the limits and potential of interdisciplinary arts’, returns us to the theme of artists’ interactions with new technologies. Just as cybernetics stoked imaginations in the 1960s, biotechnology stimulated debate and cultural production at the turn of the millennium. Through such events as the cloning of Dolly the sheep (1996) and the completion of the Human Genome Project (2003), it seemed that humans could rewrite the code of life for the first time, with unprecedented ethical dilemmas in sight. Against this background, ‘bio art’ emerged as an intertwining of the visual arts and the laboratory-based sciences, with artists not only portraying biotechnological developments but using the new methodologies in their art. Eduardo Kac’s presentation of genetically modified animals (GFP Bunny, 2001), Stelarc’s body modifications (Ear on Arm, 2011), and Maja Smrekar’s merging of human and animal genetic material (K-9_topology series, 2014–17) are some examples of artworks that courted ethical controversy as much as they sought to critically reflect on the potential abuses of biotech. Simoniti’s chapter explores two challenges that such interdisciplinary art necessarily encountered: the problem of absorption, whereby bio art became almost indistinguishable from non-art biotechnology, and the problem of virality, whereby art’s meaning was flattened through media controversy. It is via a reorientation towards narrative and visual metaphor, Simoniti suggests, that some bio art practices have managed to retain their critical function against such difficulties.

The final three chapters bring the relationship between art and knowledge into the present day, thinking through artistic practices of the 2010s and 2020s. While recent developments offer many topics to discuss, these essays focus on artists engaged with fields that seem most pressing today: the interlinked areas of social justice and climate change.

In ‘Ethnic futurisms and contemporary art’, Alice Ming Wai Jim writes on artistic practices such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and Asian futurism: artworks that imagine ethnically diverse communities thriving in technologically advanced futures. As Jim explains, the movement retrospectively called ‘Afrofuturism’ has provided an important counterweight to mostly white-centric science fiction since at least the 1960s, but both Afrofuturism and other identity-based futurisms have received renewed interest from artists in the last few decades. Taking the work of artists Camille Turner, Skawennati, and Astria Suparak as her key case studies, Jim theorises the relationship between ethnic futurisms and socially situated knowledge, such as historical archives and digital worlds. First, these practices often include practical knowledge of resistance, such as Skawennati’s designs for clothing to be worn at protests. Secondly, while often employing a broadly futuristic setting, these artists are regularly more concerned with reinterpreting the past, such as in Camille Turner’s series of works in which a fictional time-travelling heroine unearths real stories of enslaved persons during the settler-colonial era. The sites of ethnic futurisms therefore often reach beyond the art gallery into protest culture, virtual worlds, public parks, or historical archives. Jim borrows Charles W. Mills’s term ‘chronopolitics’, the strategic creation of counter-histories, to help us understand how such projects both offer an anti-colonialist understanding of history and help us imagine a better future.

T. J. Demos’s ‘The politics and aesthetics of climate emergency’ likewise requires us to widen our focus from institutionally confined art to aesthetic practices broadly conceived: the aesthetic practices that now unfold in the streets and in the digital public sphere, and that include innovative blurrings of art and activism. As Demos writes, the visual cultures of climate change are complex: they include infographic representations of atmospheric carbon levels, nongovernmental organisations’ footage of global warming’s sociopolitical impacts, environmentalist memes, performative demonstrations, as well as conceptual artistic contributions. What knowledge of the climate emergency is available to the receivers of such visual information? Demos’s chapter reflects on disparate creative practices from the late 2010s – such as those of Extinction Rebellion, Decolonize This Place, and Forensic Architecture – which all disrupt the usual information flows. Some of these artistic practices, Demos claims, play the important epistemic function of revealing the links between the climate emergency and the need for decolonial social justice. For example, the American collective Decolonize This Place elucidates how the institutional funding of the arts, the climate emergency, and the state-corporate-military nexus are connected. The role of such interdisciplinary arts, for Demos, is to generate new contexts, create collective subjects, and aid activist organisation, which can begin to address the climate emergency more effectively than rarefied artworks in the gallery context can.

Like Demos’s chapter, Shela Sheikh’s contribution, ‘Art and witnessing: the poetics and politics of testifying to environmental violence’, also tackles connections between contemporary art and ecology, but focuses on the artist’s role as a witness to the global climate catastrophe, rather than on activist art. As Sheikh suggests, artists today query both whose testimonies of ecological violence are listened to, and what mode of testimony is taken into account. The artist Susan Schuppli, for instance, is concerned to include the testimonies of the Indigenous people in the Arctic North; while Amar Kanwar, in his vast artistic archive Sovereign Forest (2011–ongoing), amplifies the voices of farmers in the Indian region of Odisha. As Sheikh argues, what is at stake here is the choice between the largely non-subjective, distanced, forensic approach to witnessing (exemplified by Forensic Architecture) and the more subjective, poetic approach of artists such as Kanwar. The admissibility of art as testimony in the legal context is explicitly explored in Zuleikha Chaudhari’s performance of a fictional legal case in Landscape as Evidence: Artist as Witness (2017). To uncover the structural conditions and colonial legacies that underscore our climate catastrophe, Sheikh argues, both poetic and forensic forms of knowledge are needed.

* * *

The essays collected in this volume are a sample of dialogues from a vast matrix of interdisciplinary connections. As the variety of artistic approaches attests, no grand narrative or unifying thesis can be imposed on art’s complex relationship with knowledge over the last century or so. Nevertheless, if a broader trajectory emerges from these chapters, it is one in which modern artists increasingly understood their practice as an intellectual or investigative activity. These aspirations have informed not just the content of modern art, but its form. Though the other arts, including film, literature, poetry, and classical music, have likewise often found their inspiration within the social and natural sciences, it is arguably only in the exhibition-based arts that even artistic methods and procedures were reshaped by disciplines of knowledge-production. Conceptual art of the 1960s mimicked the actual appearance of logical formulae, sociological treatises, and cybernetic machines in a way that few philosophical novels attempted. Bio artists in the 1990s employed bioengineering in ways that were never found in cinematic science fiction. These methodological changes are so fundamental that they have challenged conventional definitions of ‘art’ and ‘artist’.

And yet artists’ appropriations of other knowledge-producing disciplines have often been misappropriations – a twisting of theories, discoveries, and methodologies to new ends. In Surrealist painting, psychoanalysis was divorced from its therapeutic purpose; in cybernetic art, free play replaced principles of control; in artistic explorations of economics, anarchy rather than self-interest became the underlying axiom. If we may understand ‘modernity’ as the era in which instrumental and technological rationality comes to progressively (and destructively) dominate what humanity understands as ‘knowledge’, then ‘modern art’, broadly conceived, arises not simply as a question of style or medium, but as a question of how that rationalistic picture of knowledge could be disturbed. This is not to say that artists’ claims to knowledge were hollow. If art, as Picasso famously claimed, ‘is a lie that tells a truth’, then artists’ borrowings from other disciplines have made significant contributions to those very disciplines, and by extension to a larger understanding of our place in the world.

Notes

1The work is documented on the Forensic Architecture website, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-murder-of-halit-yozgat (accessed 10 December 2021). For some responses to the work’s showing at documenta , see, for instance, Hili Perlson, ‘The Most Important Piece at documenta 14 in Kassel is not an Artwork. It’s Evidence’, Artnet News , 8 June 2017, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/documenta-14-kassel-forensic-nsu-trial-984701 (accessed 10 December 2021).

2For a recent introduction to the group’s approach, see Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2021).

3Forensic Architecture, The Long Duration of a Split Second (2018–19), https://forensic-architecture.org/programme/exhibitions/long-duration-split-second (accessed 10 December 2021).

4Goldsmiths University, ‘Truth Has to be Made Public in Order to Operate – 10 Years of Forensic Architecture’, accessed 1 December 2021, https://www.gold.ac.uk/news/10-years-of-forensic-architecture/ (accessed 1 December 2021). For further insight into Forensic Architecture and evidence-based practices, see also Chapters 12 and 13 of this volume.

5See, for example, Yves-Alain Bois et al., ‘On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman’, October 156 (2016): 116–40.

6Plato, ‘Thaetetus’, in Thaetetus and Sophist , trans. C. Rowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201c5-d1. As ‘justified true belief’, Plato’s formula is the starting point of analytic epistemology in the twentieth century; see Edmund Gettier, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis 23, no. 6 (1963): 121–23.

7Plato, The Republic , trans. T. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), III.398a.

8Ibid., X.595–602. See also 604–607d.

9Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 32, no. 3 (1992): 191–200.

10 John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Thomas Keats’ (1817), in H. Forman (ed.), The Letters of John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 57.

11 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , vol. I, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 178.

12 John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819), in The Complete Poems , 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), 147.

13 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Cora Diamond, ‘Having a Rough Story about what Moral Philosophy Is’, in Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 369–81.

14 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible , trans. G. Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), especially 12–19, 42–44.

15 Graham Harman, ‘On Vicarious Causation’, Collapse 2 (2007): 171–205.

16 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish , trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 184ff.

17 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

18 For more on his American trip, and the supposed traffic jam, see Larry McGrath, ‘Bergson Comes to America’, Journal of the History of Ideas 74, no. 4 (2013): 599–620.

19 Peter Mandler, ‘Good Reading for the Million: The Paperback Revolution and the Co-Production of Academic Knowledge in Mid Twentieth-Century Britain and America’, Past & Present 244, no. 1 (2019): 235–69.

20 Alexander Neil Hutton, ‘A Repository, a Switchboard, a Dynamo: H. L. Beales, a Historian in a Mass Media Age’, Contemporary British History 30, no. 3 (2016), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13619462.2016.1162156 (accessed 14 December 2021).

21 Antony Gormley and Priyamvada Natarajan, ‘About Lunatick’ (2019), Acute Art , https://acuteart.com/artist/antony-gormley-dr-priyamvada-natarajan/ (accessed 14 December 2021).

22 ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, The Blind