Abstract:Two concurrent understandings of criticality in art assign it as a potential property of artworks themselves, or bemoan it as lacking in art's audiences. This division can be traced to its roots in the Romantic conception of criticality, in which the critical procedure completes an unfinished work. This act of completion, and an accompanying conception of transformatory potential, is generally held to occur in the presence of a primary audience; an idea which is undermined by recent attributions of critical force to non-present secondary audiences. This essay traces these orientations of thought as they structure recent approaches to practice, then offers an example of a mode of practice which refuses to attribute any critical or transformatory capacity to either its original material effects or a primary audience. Any critical or transformatory force is played out as the work propagates and adjusts itself in its afterlife.

This article investigates the idea that sometimes artworks become strange monuments: occasionally to themselves. It begins with an overview of how various artworks have taken on aspects of monumentality, setting up a number of coordinates for thought – energy, appropriation, fiction, resurrection and so on. It then turns to the contested status of Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), paying attention to the ways in which its potential to endure as a conventional public monument was denied, leaving behind a strange set of digital monuments in its afterlife. It goes on to contrast the tomb-like preservation of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure ([2008] 2013) at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park with the rhetoric surrounding its initial staging in Southwark. This logic of preservation is compared with how Thomas Hirschhorn has revisited his early monument works, and his claims regarding their eternal life.

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Abstract