Duchamp Meets TuringArt, Modernism, Posthuman

This work proposes to consider that the actual overcoming of modernism comes along with the advent of the posthuman—tracing its origin to Marcel Duchamp and his invention of the readymade—and not with postmodernism, the theoretical consistency of which, at least in the artistic field, this research questions.

Katherine Hayles analyzed the process through which the conception of the liberal humanist subject led the way to the posthuman subject, a subject who lives in complete entwinement with the digital. This process, however, was not innocuous: It made the (fallacious) perception that information could do without material instantiation pervasive within many fields of knowledge. This research identifies an analogous process within the artistic realm: When Clement Greenberg delineated the concepts of opticality and color field as the main characteristics that defined Modernist painting, he conceived of these in a purely disembodied subject.

Understanding digitalization processes not as representations of some material reality but as ontological repetitions, and analyzing the archive not only as an issue of memory but also of conformation of both the future and subjectivities, this work advances the emergence of a digital subject and theorizes that its constitution happens by assuming a “point of view” in the technological unconscious.

These theorizations, which are part of the posthuman, are presented as the actual overcoming of modernism to show that the readymade as a medium is, at the same time, both one of the points of rupture and the key link to bring back new media and art theory as art at large.

Massimiliano Viel, Cluster_03, digital image, 2014.

(© Massimiliano Viel)