In Crisis as Form (Verso, 2022) Peter Osborne argues that the contemporary artwork is defined by a “constitutive crisis of form.” After the 1960s, art underwent what he calls an “expansion to infinity,” as the boundaries between art and non-art dissolved and everything from industrial scrap and documentary footage to performance and ambient context became admissible artistic material. The expansion also transformed the concept of form itself, since the work has to absorb its new elements while keeping them recognizable as the empirical objects they were before. A newspaper clipping in a collage stays newspaper for as long as the work exists, even as it serves the composition, and Osborne calls this doubled status “ontological double-coding.” The friction between the element’s identity inside the work and its identity outside it is what gives the work its critical force.
Osborne treats form as a “self-moving activity,” meaning that form is not fixed in advance but develops as the work develops. The tensions and contradictions of a historical moment (what Adorno calls “the unresolved antagonisms of reality”) do not stay outside the artwork. They “return in artworks as immanent problems of form,” which is to say that the social and historical conflicts of an era show up in the formal difficulties the work has to negotiate. For a work to be critical, its coherence has to carry those conflicts within itself.
Drawing on Adorno, Osborne describes form as a “posited unity,” a wholeness that emerges through artistic labor responsive to the conditions of its materials. The labor is one of “selecting, trimming, [and] renouncing.” Materials carry their own properties, histories, and what Adorno calls their “critique,” the constraints they impose on what can be done with them. A piece of industrial steel, a found photograph, or a stretch of recorded audio pushes back against the form the artist tries to give it. If the organization went too smoothly, if form covered over the gaps and tensions between its elements, the materials would lose their double-coding and the work would become “affirmative of actuality,” a pleasing object whose composition no longer registers any friction with the world its materials came from.
This is why form “constantly suspends itself,” since the artwork must let itself be “interrupted by its other,” which is its own materials, and this interruption belongs to the work’s truth. As Adorno puts in, “the essence of its coherence is that it does not [ultimately] cohere.” The work still organizes its elements into a posited unity, but at the level of ultimate reconciliation with actuality it withholds itself, since to cohere ultimately would be to become affirmative of a world that is not in fact reconciled. The unity is posited, set down by the artist as a structural condition of the work, and it carries its own self-suspension within it. In remaining non-reconciled in this sense, the work registers the broken state of the world.
This suspension is required by art’s relation to “actuality,” the world as it exists under the pressures of global capital. Osborne sees that world as one of “permanent crisis.” Crisis, strictly understood, names a moment of decision within a transitional process and so cannot be permanent. When it becomes permanent, it turns into a new form of social reproduction, and the alienated social forms it produces take on a life independent of the individuals who sustain them. A perfectly reconciled artwork would lie about this world, presenting as whole and free what is in fact fractured and unfree.
Adorno called art the “promise of happiness,” the promise that fulfillment is possible. Capitalism makes its own version of the promise through consumption and market freedom. Both promises remain unmet, and Osborne argues that contemporary art is the “mimesis of the broken promise of happiness” in both domains. The work imitates this brokenness in its very form, through the appropriation of “crisis as form.” Crisis enters the work as the structure of its form, through the inside/outside doubling of its materials, and in doing so the work stands as a “material fragment” of a collective subjectivity, a future “we,” that does not yet exist.
The artwork’s “failure” to achieve seamless coherence becomes its critical power, staging the problem of freedom as the “becoming otherwise” of an element of the real.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory (1970). Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Osborne, Peter. Crisis as Form. London: Verso, 2022.