Art and Emancipation

John Roberts

Author: John Roberts
Across a powerfully wide-ranging set of themes, theoretical registers and historical examples, John Roberts analyses the key problems that continue to confront art after conceptual art, in the light of art’s longstanding relationship to market and institution the commodity and mass culture: namely, artistic labour and technology, modernity and the ‘new’, art and negation, identity and subjectivity, agency and audience, form and value. In these terms, the book provides a rigorous and ambitious, examination of the limits and possibilities of art’s contribution to emancipatory discourse and practice.

Biographical Note

John Roberts, PhD (University of Wolverhampton, 2005), is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton and author of numerous books including The Intangibilities of Form (Verso, 2006), The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011), Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015), and Capitalism and the Limits of Desire (Bloomsbury 2022).

Readership

Art and Emancipation would be of value to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying contemporary art theory, art history, art and politics, cultural theory, the avant-garde, and the philosophy of art.

Table of Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: Emancipatory Technique, the Avant-Garde and
‘Alter-Realism’ 1
Kim Charnley
Part 1
Value
1 Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill 23
2 Art After Deskilling 45
3 The ‘Incomplete’ Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory 64
4 After the Crisis of Value: Some Further Reflections on Skill, Deskilling
and Art 77
5 Notes on Craft: Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Leach and the Vessel
Tradition 89
Part 2
Technique
6 The Amateur’s Retort 103
7 The Practice of Failure 115
8 Trickster: Performativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson’s
Crop-Circles 125
9 Roy Bhaskar, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory 143
10 The Antinomies of Iconoclasm 156

11 Writerly Artists: Conceptual Art, Bildung and the Intellectual
Division of Labour 168
12 The ‘Black Debt’: Art & Language’s Writing 188
Part 3
Praxis
13 Productivism and Its Contradictions 203
14 After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Centre and
Periphery and Cultural Belatedness 215
15 Art After Art in the Expanded Field 225
16 Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons 241
17 Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Communist Imaginary 254
18 Postconceptualism and Anti-Pathos 274
19 Race, Black Modernism and the Critique of Identity 283
Part 4
Image
20 The Political Economy of the Image 305
21 Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility 315
22 Ideation and Photography: A Critique of François Laruelle’s Concept
of Abstraction 333
23 Philosophy, Culture, Image: Jacques Rancière’s Constructivism 353
24 Some Reflections on the Image and the Early Avant-Garde: Victor
Shklovsky, Error and The End of Saint Petersburg 366

25 After Lefebvre: The Everyday, the Image and Cultural Theory 377
26 Tár, Tarr and Tarr, and Other Sticky Things 384
Part 5
History
27 Memories, History, Mnemotechnics 407
28 Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again): Žižek, Bhaskar,
Badiou 419
29 On Error: Hegel and Spinoza 445
30 Art and the Politics of Time-as-Substance 456
31 ‘The Newest in What Is Oldest’: History, Historicism and the
Temporality of the Avant-Garde 465
Bibliography 483
Index 510