After Art by David Joselit (review)

In addition to the rewards of reading David Joselit’s After Art comes an appreciation of its links with his previous work, including the much-earlier Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (1997). Although the scope of After Art is generic rather than monographic, the ideas it contains, dealing with the potential for image proliferation and their developing redefinition, can be traced back to the earlier work.

The difference of course is that After Art deals with digital values, which, through a capacity for recursive proliferation, morph, multiply and transform—accruing power and influence in an exponential array. After Art, therefore, deals with the manifold effects of image proliferation as characters shift into different forms of settlement in the proliferating phases beyond image inception. Joselit points out a stimulating journey through recent art and architecture where his discourse functions as a sort of guide, complete with images and diagrams, within the illuminating text. Nevertheless, questions generated by the title of the work create an ambiguity for the reader that never quite disappears. Joselit, in recognizing this, wastes no time in addressing the uncertainty generated by his choice of After Art as a title. He recommends this prefix above the typical prepositions that emerged in the aftermath of Modernism that seem to coalesce, whether intentionally or not, around the lonely termination of post; post-modern, post-object, post-medium and so on, and Joselit’s contention is that all of these imply some sort of rupture and stasis. If he had chosen the title “Post Art,” might it also not come too close to this disruptive endpoint? Instead, After Art is predicated on a capacity for continuation and proliferation—but it is a slippery distinction and both terms seem to resonate well in either state.

Within its conditional “after” effect, the digital image’s rich possibilities of repetition begin to develop and multiply, extending the reach and status of the artwork, shifting it into new enhanced value with the fluency normally associated with global capital. The economics of this monetary system based on artworks is, needless to say, brokered by the major museums, which become the banking houses of this alternative economy. In the early stages of the essay, Joselit shows how international art competes in a market with global currency, with the same ease as “the dollar, the euro, the yen and the renminbi”; and by orientating himself with this global economy the author skirts the territory marked out by the signature movement of the late 20th/early 21st century that unified around après-Situationist artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Pierre Huyghe, both associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhibition Traffic in Bordeaux (1996) and therefore enfolded into the rubric of relational aesthetics, first promulgated there. Although several of these artists feature and are illustrated in this essay, it is not really with their relaxed communautaire strategies and specifically local scale that Joselit’s thesis really lies. In fact scale and scalability is one of the key terms in Joselit’s requirement for an art that will negotiate and migrate through borders, and these artists, involved with communicative strategies, are disadvantaged within the specifics and the actual scale of their convivial outreach. They are quite evidently impervious to further interference and do not find themselves within the reach of Joselit’s thinking. In stressing the cumulative power of image proliferation, he dispenses also with the conundrum of Walter Benjamin’s “aura,” which for Joselit functions as a “roadblock” and one that is too reliant on locale for its effect and therefore a stumbling block to be bypassed. Works of art that possess “aura” tend to be dependent on a specific locale to frame them, becoming “fundamentalist,” a startling term adopted by Joselit to describe a work’s over-dependence on its context. In an early exegesis of this point Joselit discusses the situation of the Parthenon Frieze in light of the argument made by the groups who seek to re-situate it, claiming that the real...