In advance of a broken attestant, or where is art’s critical subject?

Abstract

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.