Kant after Duchamp.

Late in the fall of 1989, week after week on Monday evenings, we sat in a room at the College de Philosophie in Paris, regulars, Catherine David, now curator of Documenta X, and Raymond Bellour, whose writing on film, literature, and video have made him one of the most well-respected critical voices in France; there was Daniel Soutif, the philosopher-critic who edited CNAM Cahiers and is now director of the department of development at the Centre Georges Pompidou; the late artist Philip Thomas; and a steady crowd of others, mainly artists, most of whom I would never know. We came to hear Thierry de Duve present what would become the first chapter of Kant after Duchamp, his summa, the book he has been building toward for the past ten years. It contains all the qualities for which de Duve's criticism has justly been admired, its warmth, vast range of intellectual reference, precision thinking, perverse twists of logic, and great care for the work of living artists. It was written for the likes of us, critics, curators, and artists, and that makes it a book to be read by all who care about, and more important, care to think about art.

The book begins and ends with the question that works the lowest common denominator of such an audience's interest: What is art? It is an old-fashioned question, not to mention the philistine's question, and de Duve will march us back to it at his pace, make us think the query in the old-fashioned way, the layman's way, and the philosopher's way, if possible all at once. His argument, he explains at the beginning, will fly under the twin flags of Clement Greenberg and Michel Foucault. Unions of opposites and winsome paradoxes like these will characterize his argument. But the great flag under which it actually flies bears the colors of Immanuel Kant.

The question is made to take the tour of the disciplines and subdisciplines, all found wanting, in the first chapter; it is a pseudo-Foucauldian tour. For art as de Duve defines it amounts to the philistine's idea of it, the passionate but detached work of a genius aloft in ivoried flight, an Icarus who will seek to outwit a forecast of blanket rejection and difficulty. Art, antithesis of ordinary work, will be the heroic enterprise. As such, it lies beyond the bounds of human knowledge. And yet precisely for this reason, and because of the basic difference (which it embodies) between thought and material form, art is not a concept that illuminates the knowledge disciplines or ties them into a meaningful greater order: it cannot allow one a vantage point from which to see, much less take stock of the modern episteme. Never mind. The disciplinary Cook's tour allows de Duve to return peacefully (in his conceit, as an extraterrestrial) to the place he began - to Kant, and the problem that drives both the question and the book: how to recognize a work of art, which is really to say, how to judge one. This is a problem that de Duve sees to be like the one of love. The question "What is art?" can only be answered by the questioner himself. His answer? "My love is mine."

Hearing such a question and its answer of course deprives the listener of any meaningful response. All of us have had to hear it at some point, know enough of such talk that it is best simply to agree, perhaps venture the only possible reply, the same reply but now referring to the success this time of one's own feelings, "My love is mine," but that is not an exchange of ideas or even much of a conversation. Can it carry a 476-page book? Can it become the founding statement for a consideration of art?

De Duve attaches all this to a proposition, a technical, Kripkean one: art being like a love has the status, linguistically and philosophically, of a proper name - that is, it fixes reference but pronounces no meaning. This definition of art will be subjected to a long, relentless dissection, but it is always already a definition made in response to Greenberg's criticism of the '60s. In many ways de Duve's summa is stuck in the New York debates of that decade, de Duve, the better Kantian, taking the side of Greenberg, correcting him, and seeking once and for all to discredit the opposition, the Minimalists and Conceptualists, here represented by Joseph Kosuth. But for de Duve to make his argument, he must first justify to himself his love for the urinal of Marcel Duchamp. The book is haunted by an insistent rereading of Duchamp's work, by de Duve's obstinate argument that all along, in spite of everything, Duchamp meant his work to be taken as art, and not only as art, but as painting.

These are claims that can only be made by twisting statements, taking them out of context, and writing another narrative over them. De Duve does all of that: the reader must beware. This is true especially for all his discussions of art made before 1960: be warned that the historical understanding of art presented here is extremely thin, full of cliches, and rife with generalizations that are sometimes simply wrong. (What would Alfred Stieglitz think of the idea that the Ashcan School was the only avant-garde in New York in 1913? Who could sustain the argument that Manet worked to contain photographic effects in paint? Who can experience their work and still see New York and Berlin Dada as having the same interests?) But de Duve writes of history with the summariness of Greenberg; perhaps it was Greenberg who gave him the license to think of Duchamp's work as one single, intentional piece. For de Duve writes as if everything Duchamp did or said is related to everything else he did or said, as if Duchamp's later recognition that his work would come to reside in the art world was not a change from his earlier positions, as if he had not been serious when in 1913 he asked himself the question, "Can one make works that are not [works] of 'art'?" His evidence has led de Duve to pose the new problem of Duchamp's relation to painting, an unexpected and telling one, but at the same time he has collapsed all the data into that one idea.

For those who know Duchamp's notes well there is a certain pleasure in having them elided so wittily, but to connect the notes in this way presumes that there was always one story, that the notes were not notes, not efforts to try out a thought before putting it down, not a record of an effort that expected to remain tentative and exploratory. To draw conclusions for Duchamp, as de Duve has done, is tantamount to saying that Duchamp could not think for himself. It would be more accurate to say that Duchamp loved to think, but that he did not abide by thoughts or concepts: for him, no one of them would ever suffice. And that would include this idea of art, the great idea into which de Duve would subsume his work, by which he means the readymades.

De Duve's desire to see Duchamp's work as "art" of the painted kind has led him to make a meal of the ready-made comb, whose title has come to be Peigne in French - the nominative "comb," but also the first- and third-person subjunctive form of the verb peindre ("to paint"). De Duve makes of it a slip of the tongue. But all this is pure assertion: the comb never had a title, only an inscription ("3 ou 4 gouttes d'hauteur n'ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie"); and the Boite-en-Valise, 1941, where Duchamp's own titles were in force, avoids any mention of peigne. However, the readymades in de Duve's reading must always, always, perform an art function, any jeu de mots must always, always, become a Freudian slip of the tongue: ideas searching for something else must be returned to the law of the father. It will then follow that de Duve can only see the urinal from the vantage of its place in a museum - a place no one in 1917 could possibly have imagined for it (Modern art did not have museums then). The urinal was a gesture for a moment in the present, never meant as a permanent public gesture; that would come much later, be the conundrum of the '60s, but that conundrum would in turn have everything to do with the way art had come to be thought by then, and that "art" had much to do with the authority of Greenberg's prose.

De Duve's argument itself is carefully, rhetorically constructed; it takes all of its cases up into logic and asks that its precision thinking be matched by a precision reading. De Duve tends, however, to place all value on given concepts rather than explore the tensions between concepts and contexts, concepts and words, words freighted with changing tones and a wealth of different meanings, words that lose their effect over time, or gain new authority. De Duve grossly mischaracterizes himself as a historian, or, as he says, a "slow critic": historians do not write directly from Kant's or Hegel's propositions. Even Hegel saw the philosophy of history being pushed into existence by ruin. Efforts to keep the notion of the concept unchanging and powerful have animated philosophical discussion and certainly have sustained many an academic phrase, but philosophers have not necessarily relied on either Hegel or Kant for their sense of the concept, and in The Order of Things Foucault notoriously wrote of the modern episteme and its work in the newly emerging disciplines as profoundly mutable, without, by the way, taking the concepts of either Kant or Hegel to be fundamental. But Foucault understood the historical nature of the concept, its vulnerability, and its relation to power. In many ways he wrote philosophy like a historian.

Written history has seen concepts as elements in situations involving objects, actions, bad luck, superior technology, and religious zeal. Historical thought takes it all into its flow, considering (and trying to maintain) the existential complexity, in other words, using concepts as an aid to understanding but not the sum of all understanding. That keeps concepts in relation to all kinds of objects that are not concepts, including the work of art. In fact, the space between the visual work of art and verbal knowledge has put art in the perfect position for the historian's scrutiny, which is perhaps why discussion of art has come to be the subject of a historical discipline, and why attempts to speak of art as if it were purely conceptual in nature have had only temporary value, not a permanent effect.

Concepts, writing, judgments live in the same world where lives and passions are spent. Foucault's work on knowledge would take him to the prison system, not to the art museum, not to the retrospective speculation of what a urinal means. But, unlike de Duve, Foucault came to think the concept as it came forward as power, something Greenberg also knew, but instinctively. For which reason it is most peculiar that there is no real consideration of power in de Duve's summa.

By the '50s and '60s, Greenberg's criticism had shifted toward a kind better suited to a culture being purveyed by a market. His ideas were reduced, repeated, and simplified like a sales pitch: art, in his view, would participate in a progressive perfection of itself, which required everyone, especially artists, to keep up with the latest version. This version of art, Kantian, said Greenberg, worked well in the early '60s for all concerned; it contained the logic of marketplace revolution within itself (Cadillacs were perfected like this too) and had the further advantage of restating the position on painting that the Museum of Modern Art had been promoting for years. When Greenberg's logic was challenged, it was in order to win the same kind of immense cultural authority for the other side, so that it could capture the city's attention, and perhaps have a better chance in the marketplace. Not for nothing were all the more successful adversaries of formalism adopting Brillo boxes or industrially commissioned galvanized boxes, overt forms of the market, and seeing mass culture to have forms too, ones with advantages for art. It was well understood that the terms of art were pragmatic, wordly terms, not Kantian terms, and that the debates of the day would themselves have to involve the logic governing the simplifications Greenberg had made so popular. Initially, for every art argument, there would be an antiart argument. Duchamp's work would be cited by the antiart proponents and recast in their terms. De Duve's mission is to rescue Duchamp's work from them, which is why he must consider the work retrospectively, from the end of Duchamp's life backward, and why he must ask the simplest questions of it: Is it art? Is it painting? That is why he must answer "art," "painting." For he begins his discussion as a knight on Greenberg's side, a bit late to actually participate in the fray. Hindsight gives him little advantage. He writes as if Leo Steinberg had never offered Other Criteria and as if the kinds of discussion on art and critical discourse that arose in the '70s had never taken place. Lateness is no excuse.

If Greenberg's criticism affected how artists spoke about their work, it also engendered an examination of the status of criticism itself. Histories of Modernism began to study the role of critics, their words, and the relative power of both. Criticism was understood to be part of a larger discursive field, whose terms came from debates internal and external to esthetics. Some of the classic work in art history during the '70s, especially that by T. J. Clark, Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Klaus Herding, Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Griselda Pollock, and Fred Orton, was devoted to such considerations. They produced a much more subtle appreciation of the critic's words, found guidance in the models of Barthes and Lacan, Althusser and Foucault, and left a legacy of skepticism about modern art criticism, tending to see its debates as a bit too transparent, and refusing to work on the problem of art's universality or transcendence. American art criticism would seek non-Kantian authorities when it undertook to theorize matters in the '80s, and it too worked the models of Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, adding Derrida and Baudrillard, but it tended to strip out the useful ideas from the models and to overlook the fact that the models were part of a French discussion (with its own skepticism) about the status and authority of the word. It gave concepts like gaze or archive or simulacrum the same status that Greenberg had accorded the word painting. And yet these newly authoritative words never quite carried the same value as market currency; they could not contain the logic of marketplace revolution within themselves, nor did the Museum of Modern Art authorize them. But it is against the writing of the American art critics of the '80s that de Duve is reacting (often with the same French arsenal) in order to return matters back to art, back to the '60s, back to a time when power had not been openly discussed, and before the skepticism about the word had arrived.

His book ends by taking "This is art" to be a Foucauldian statement per The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault had used the word statement to define the unit of knowledge as part of his effort to speak of knowledge without referring to authors, oeuvres, or signature concepts. Foucault's sense of the statement was demonstrated by the string of letters A Z E R T, which form the second row of keys on the French typewriter - in other words, signs that signify without assembling necessarily into a sentence. He had been impelled to think the statement this way because he saw knowledge to be in crisis: "a crisis that concerns that transcendental reflexion with which philosophy since Kant has identified itself; which concerns that theme of the origin, that promise of the return, by which we avoid the difference of our present; which concerns an anthropological thought that orders all these questions around man's being, and allows us to avoid an analysis of practice; which concerns all humanist ideologies; which, above all, concerns the status of the subject."(1) He was writing in 1969. The crisis of which he wrote has only deepened. Even de Duve cannot ignore it. He will end Kant after Duchamp in full recognition of this crisis; he will shadowbox with Lyotard's Postmodern Condition, lamenting the demise of freedom as contained in the Enlightenment's emancipation projects, yet insisting on the existence still of an emancipation maxim, clinging to his twisted view of the readymade, carrying his statement "This is art" under his arm, everready, neatly pressed, like Greenberg's old idea and the logic of Kant, to be brought forward, in spite of Foucault's reformulations and reflexions, saved. Why did he bring Foucault into this at all? Foucault's presence forces us to ask all the questions about the relation of knowledge to power, questions de Duve cannot answer and does not want to see.

One last historical point. Art criticism arose as a form of political discussion in the French Salon; it became a form of promotion of all kinds (let us not quite say advertising). Promotions usually contain a sense of the field they seek to conquer and tailor their concepts to the business of persuasion. Successful criticism masters the honky-tonk parade of rhetoric in which it must be written and uses the conceptual arsenal that will persuade a given audience; it is not a pure, disinterested form of writing, never was, never will be. All of which does not make it false; it simply puts art criticism into an active historical relation to the concept too. By its very nature art criticism must understand how power passes through its words. It has its ethics. Ethics might be a topic for de Duve, but his idea of art is in no position to be practical.

Instead Kant after Duchamp is a rivalrous book. It wants reviews like this one, it asks to be taken to task. It does not name its interlocutors, but it seems to be wanting to be read as part of a particular contemporary critical debate, to be measured against Rosalind Krauss' Optical Unconscious and the essays of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois. While none of their recent essays are considered, at least de Duve has put art criticism back in the position of debating its terms, of having to think rigorously about the nature of those terms, to whose tradition they belong, and what exactly they mean. Whatever we think of his means and his ends, for his Olympian demand that all of us think, we must, all of us, be grateful.

1. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 204. French edition 1969.

Molly Nesbit is a contributing editor of Artforum.