Art Lies, Volume 68, Spring/Summer 2011 Page: Front Cover

                                
744 70"2 2 62 9'

A Contemporary Art Journal

No. 68  Spring/

US $7 CAN $8

Architecture Is Not Art

Recently I read Bruno Latour's We Have Never
Been Modern, from 1991. I'd gotten the sense
from talking to my more intellectually
conscientious friends that Latour had a lot to say
about the current moment, which feels generally
transitional; in particular, in art it seems an
in-between time descended after the economic
collapse, drawing to a close a period dominated
in my mind by, on the one hand, salable
neoformalist work (however intellectually
justified, however imbricated in considerations of
process, however good) and, on the other,

F'      attempts to (re)vivify political action in art
(including the obsession with utopia and the
4-       obsession with pedagogy). The book's aim is to
find a way beyond the impasse that became clear
by the late 1980s/early '90s between obviously
faltering modernity and a seemingly dead-end
postmodernism. Given the passage of twenty
years, one would think we had moved beyond this
problem. But in fact the last decade's
reinvestigations of modernism in art have merely
served to reinscribe its visual lexicon. And I was
intrigued to find parallels between Latour's 1991
and our (the art world's) 2011, since the livelier
artwork I have seen people making in attempts to
move forward recalls to me the late '80s/early
'90s, with focuses on technology, the body and
their interactions-the fate of personhood
overall, in a mediatized age.
Latour seems to love breaking down knowledge
E        into visual formats; We Have Never Been Modern
E
features numerous tables and diagrams. While
Sperusing them I realized that some of the
 =centrally important diagrams resembled those in
E        Rosalind Krauss' in "Sculpture in the Expanded
a Field" (1979), produced in her now-canonical
attempt to account for the efforts of artists
ranging from Sol LeWitt to Robert Smithson who
were developing work with new relationships to
Architecture Is Not Art
Mary Ellen Carroll
Berend Strik
Paula Hayes & Florian Idenburg

art and nature. Krauss explicitly cites the source
for her diagramming method as the Klein group,
common in the "human sciences." Presumably,
Latour, who is a "human scientist," is familiar
with the Klein group, so familiar as to have
incorporated it into his own methodology. In both
Krauss and Latour, the goal is to deconstruct and
expand upon a binary, and logically enough, the
way to move beyond the pair of binary opposites
is to triangulate. (The Klein group pursues this
tack to form four triangles, whereas Latour stops
at one.) It's obvious when you think about it in
terms of simple geometry, and it invokes a
baseline metaphor about the development of
ideas. Two points in opposition form one axis. To
get beyond them one adds a second dimension,
the simplest structure of which is a triangle.

The methodology of this essay obeys the
following geometry: a circle with tangents
from every point along its edge where the
adduces a new source. Metaphorically the
implies motion while, of course, literally
remaining static.

issuing
author
figure

So then, today in art we face a crisis: how to
emerge beyond a neomodernism (strangely
abetted by the Octoberite art history Krauss
helped launch) while avoiding a repetition of the
pitfalls of postmodernism, per se, as Latour
enumerates them-cynicism, despair, rejection of
empirical fact, a subjection of the human to/by
the technological, a play of surfaces and
simulacra without depth or being, a play of
language without meaning, an overreliance on
collage as a mode of facture.
But crises in art come and go; the art world
always seems to be carrying on in the shadow of
one crisis or another. To revisit the last forty
years in roughly chronological order, there's been
the death of modernism to which Krauss
responded, the growth of feminist and activist
art, any of a number of deaths of painting or
corrupt reigns of painting, the inflammation of

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