Attempts to Escape Anthropocentrism

“The desire to escape anthropocentrism, having budded on the philosophical stage, appears to have been producing fruit on the art scene too for the last several years. There’s hardly a single exhibition that doesn’t echo this posthumanist desire, even when it isn’t the main focus. Exhibitions that still lean on notions like viewer experience and discursivity are starting to look almost quaint.”1

Documenta 13, held in Kassel, Germany in 2012, was one of the turning points where contemporary art intersected with object-oriented philosophy. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the exhibition concentrated on non-anthropocentric methodologies. It reworked the relation among humans, objects, and environment, and emphasized the “decentering” of the human observer in favor of material, ecological, and systemic interactions.

One of the exhibition’s central frames was “flat ontology,” the view that all objects, human or otherwise, exist independently of human perception and on equal footing. Many of the works on view brought the agency of materials, processes, and systems to the foreground.

Tue Greenfort’s The Worldly House, sited in a former black-swan habitat and built around an archive exploring Donna Haraway’s theories on the relations between humans and nonhumans, and Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg’s El Chaco Project, centered on the El Chaco meteorite, come to mind in this context.

Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, widely regarded as one of the most important works of our era, also surfaced at Documenta 13. The piece brought together living and non-living elements on a terrain where the boundary between natural and artificial could not be traced. Located in Karlsaue Park, the work included plants, insects, and animals, along with remains of other artworks, a dog named Human with one painted leg, and a reclining sculpture of a woman with a beehive for a head. Humans were positioned not as central participants but as peripheral observers who could perceive the work only from certain angles.

From a realist perspective, Untilled can be read as a work that decenters human agency by foregrounding material and biological processes that run independently of human intent. Bees, for instance, can interact with a sculpture without regard for its cultural or aesthetic significance, unlike us. Similar cases turn up across Huyghe’s work. In Zoodram 5 (2011), a crab uses as its shell a face modeled on a Brancusi sculpture. What comes to the fore in such works are physical (indexical) signs, rather than the interpretation-based, convention-dependent symbolic elements I criticized in the first two parts of this series. These signs generate interactions among nonhumans that humans often cannot join (bees, for example, exchange scents we can’t register, and so on).

No One Escapes Kant

Suhail Malik argues that, despite their best efforts, events like Documenta 13 end up reinforcing correlationist structures rather than dismantling them.2 Shifting attention away from how humans think about objects and toward how objects relate to each other is, without question, an important advance. But those relations still rest on human experience in the end, because they are defined within the categories of “human and nonhuman.” We viewers, meanwhile, continue to interpret these object relations and keep pulling the human perspective back into the process. This does not resolve the problem posed by experience; it only broadens its perspective. The field of experience now stretches to include both human and nonhuman actors. Artists and viewers alike inevitably set about interpreting and perceiving these object interactions. In Huyghe’s Untilled, for example, the ecosystem is autonomous, but the human gaze that observes, contextualizes, and narrates the interactions among objects remains indispensable for the work’s reception. The result is a distributed subjectivity in which the human observer’s role is restructured rather than erased. The stress on the “agency” of objects paradoxically depends on viewers noticing and contextualizing that agency.

There’s a spatial dimension to all this as well. Although Documenta 13 ventured beyond the white cube with site-specific installations, and despite its emphasis on nonhumans, Malik finds it unsatisfying within the frame of realist philosophy. In spaces like galleries, built entirely for human visitation, it seems to me impossible to overcome the problem. This makes the simultaneous effort to leave anthropocentrism behind while also “putting on exhibitions” inherently contradictory. Gesturing toward agency and enacting agency are two different things. How much agency can an object really have in a gallery or museum?

Humanizing

Another problem that runs through attempts to move past anthropocentrism is the ascription of human-like intentions, desires, and even consciousness to nonhuman objects. This attribution of agency, contradictorily, springs from anthropocentric views that load nonhuman entities (think “plant intelligence”) with human-like qualities, so that in trying to draw eyebrows one ends up poking out an eye. Such postures reinforce correlationism, because they assume that objects are meaningful “only insofar as they are related to human concepts and experiences.”

The tendency to humanize nonhuman beings doesn’t stop at art; it has also spurred debate inside philosophy. Christoph Cox and Suhail Malik, in their dialogue in October’s “A Questionnaire on Materialisms” issue,3 criticize certain varieties of new materialism for “humanizing nature” by ascribing human-like properties to nonhumans. These philosophies may look as if they acknowledge the importance of the nonhuman, but they continue to project human categories and values onto the world. To quote Malik:

“Given the evident incongruity and even incompatibility between SR and poststructuralism, what has been perplexing is how and why some strands of SR, primarily object-oriented ontology, have been assimilated to developments of poststructuralism from the mid-2000s, particularly materialist feminism, affect theory, some queer theory, and performativity theory. These theories certainly share with SR an interest in breaking up the centrality of the human actor and extending the world of relationality beyond its historically privileged agents (from all kinds of subjects to objects); but their other basic commitments are wholly incompatible with SR. It’s this confused hybrid of theoretical stances that the word ‘neo-materialism’ now predominantly signifies in contemporary art, defanging and, worse yet, expropriating SR’s most challenging demands on the orthodoxies of both contemporary art and theoretical-academic hegemons.”

Rationalist Speculative Realist Art as an Alternative

Malik holds that the problems specific to correlationism stem from interpretation and aesthetic experience. For that reason, he asks us to imagine a new art that abandons aesthetic experience altogether: an art concerned with what is real, independent of subjective interpretation or experiential engagement.

This new art will prioritize “rational knowledge” over “feeling” and will be “indifferent” to the viewer. It will be an art that requires no subjective validation or meaning-making and presents itself instead as an objectively, rationally constituted entity.

Speculative realism is an intellectual movement that claims reality can be grasped without relying on human-centered frameworks such as perception, feeling, or aesthetic judgment. Unlike approaches that investigate the interactions between objects and their relative autonomies, speculative realism seeks to construct a form of knowledge that bypasses those dynamics.

In this context, art should aim to express systems, processes, or truths that do not depend on experiential validation. It should give priority to conceptual clarity, logical consistency, and systematic inquiry over sensory or emotional states. More importantly, for this kind of art to hold, it does not need to be experienced or appreciated aesthetically.

Malik doesn’t give explicit examples of this art, because such an art doesn’t yet exist. He does, however, highlight some precursors. Early conceptual works such as Sol LeWitt’s instruction art can be considered in this light. These works consist of written instructions for the construction of artworks that could, in principle, be realized by anyone, and they push the physical object behind the conceptual structure. A speculative realist art would go further still and be indifferent to whether the instructions are followed or experienced at all. What matters is the rational and systematic organization of the process.

Another example Malik cites is Robert Morris’s “Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal,” published in 1963. The work consists of a signed document in which Morris declares that one of his own pieces, a metal sculpture titled Litanies, has been stripped of all aesthetic qualities and content. Once again, the statement reduces the artwork to a purely conceptual entity. To quote Malik again:

“the demand upon contemporary art is strictly nontrivial: it removes subjective interpretation or experience as a condition or telos of the artwork, and therewith collapses the entire edifice of the contemporary art paradigm. While this need not be a direct concern for contemporary art, since rationalist SR need have no bearing on art (and should in fact rightly disregard or dismiss contemporary art as a lost cause), such a rationalism puts firmly destructive pressure on the current operating, artistic, intellectual, and ideological paradigm of art, pressure that is much needed as contemporary art now all-too-happily continues to recycle standard tropes of anti-foundationalist critique, ethical piety, apolitical politicality, and cultural hegemonization.”

The rationalist speculative realist art Malik proposes calls not only for the rejection of aesthetic experience but also for the development of a mode of production that moves beyond art’s historical dependence on human perception. Even so, whether anthropocentrism can be avoided altogether in this framework remains an open question.

Besides, every project to purge art of aesthetics, conceptual art included, has ended in failure. This is more than a methodological difficulty. Imagining a universe without aesthetics, whether or not humans are in it, is very hard, perhaps impossible. In the next piece I’ll take up this relation between aesthetics and realism.

Footnotes

  1. Oğuz Karayemiş, “Maddenin Hâlleri: Maddenin Şiddeti,” Art Unlimited 85 (January–February 2025). [Translated from the Turkish.] ↩

  2. Suhail Malik, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 185–190. ↩

  3. Christoph Cox and Suhail Malik, contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” October 155 (Winter 2016): 26–27. ↩