On how art can be understood as a space within which the project of
reason is pursued.
Modern and contemporary art have often defined themselves against the
conceptual and linguistic mediations of reason, claiming that their
practices offer a different and more direct access to the real or the
material.
Employing a unique configuration of philosophy, art theory, and a
consideration of specific artworks together with analysis of popular
culture, current political events, and Hollywood cinema, artist, and
theorist Amanda Beech challenges this deep-seated orthodoxy, asking how
art can instead be understood as a space within which the project of
reason is pursued.
Developing out of the idealism of theological-sacral art, sustained in
Romanticism and entrenched by poststructural antirealist critiques, the
notion that art is opposed to reason defined the political and social
hopes of the avant-garde, was manifested in the crisis of a
self-conscious conceptualism, and remains implicit in the ontologies of
immanence, anti-representationalism, and new materialist theories of
affect championed in contemporary works today.
But the grounds for art's autonomy as nonreason have never been secure,
Beech argues, and are associated with a tragic sensibility and
ultimately with naive and conservative beliefs about the nature of the
image.
Worse still, while it asserts its natural right to the field of unreason
and its access to a real that language cannot touch, contemporary art in
fact continues to be of service to persistent and dominant ideologies.
Considering the various possible relationships between reason and
realism, Beech asks what kinds of "picturing" they involve, and what
forms of epistemology they mobilise. When we can no longer maintain the
assumption that it necessarily exceeds the normative linguistic
practices of reason and is more "real" than other ways of addressing the
world, what might the practice of art become?
