Leuven University Press

Chapter Title: Abandoning Art in the Name of Art: Transpositional Logic in Artistic
Research
Chapter Author(s): Esa Kirkkopelto

Book Title: Transpositions

Book Subtitle: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research
Book Editor(s): Michael Schwab
Published by: Leuven University Press. (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4s7k96.5

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 Abandoning Art
in the Name of Art:
Transpositional Logic
in Artistic Research
Esa Kirkkopelto
University of the Arts Helsinki

The aim of this essay is to imagine how transposition could be conceived of

as a method of artistic research practice. The topic is speculative. It models
processes before they are explicitly tried out. In other words, I consider trans-
position here to be a methodological hypothesis. Given that the intended
use of the model is as both a heuristic and an analytical tool for planning and
assessing concrete research projects, it is based not on practical examples but
on descriptions of certain generally recognisable features in different kinds
of practices, insofar as they coincide with artistic practices. As in speculative
realism, the aim is to understand the logic of the real regardless of a human
viewpoint. In my previous writings, I have analysed how artistic research can be
seen as a continuation of institutional critique (Kirkkopelto 2015). Here I will
consider how research in the arts relates to its avant-gardist legacy, and espe-
cially to the tendencies that today are considered “anti-art” (McEvilley 2005) or
“nonart” (Kaprow 2003).
As Peter Bürger and many others after him have analysed, avant-garde art
was born as a contestation of the gap reigning between the prevailing art insti-
tutions of bourgeois society and “the praxis of life” (Bürger 1984, 49–50; Foster
1996, 8–15). The “anti-” in “anti-art” meant simultaneously a protest “against”
the dominant system and an attempt to make art in a totally different way, by
introducing alternative models of art-making that resigned from the values and
objectives of bourgeois modernism. Within the field of the visual arts, this hap-
pened first in Dadaism, as opposed to in cubism, and second in conceptual
art and in performance art, as opposed to in abstract expressionism (McEvilley
2005, 37–51). The relation of anti-art to its adversary was from the very begin-
ning a double bind, a fact that makes understandable its later recuperation as
a part of the culture industry it was meant to challenge. Whereas, as many have
argued, the avant-garde thus failed in its attempt to overcome the difference
between art and life, it nevertheless managed worldwide to revolutionise ways
of art-making, to the point that our common understanding of contemporary

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DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662538.ch02

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 Esa Kirkkopelto

art is today saturated by ideas born initially among avant-gardists (Bürger 1984,
59; McEvilley 2005, 351).
A classical way to formulate the double bind in question is to focus on the
question of representation. One of the major goals of the avant-garde has
been to liberate art from representation—from replication and repetition of
so-called reality. It is true that many modernists struggled with the same prob-
lem in relation to the tradition, but this struggle mainly concerned the con-
tents of works, the way they were or were not permitted to present things, or
what kind of things could be used as components of compositions, and so on.
In other words, the disagreement within modernism concerned the redefini-
tion of “taste” (see McEvilley 2005, 26), but such arguments did not consider
the most basic aesthetic criteria for what could be considered an artwork or
how an object of exhibition could be defined. To put it in Jacques Rancière’s
terms, either the shift from “representative” to “aesthetic regime” did not
finally succeed, or the aesthetic regime itself became occupied and controlled
by the markets (Rancière 2004; Tanke 2011). The avant-gardists’ critique of
modernism often radicalised the tendencies that were already detectable in the
object of their criticism. A modernist artwork that could be considered “non-
representational” might remain representational in another sense, namely in
relation to its artistic genre. Works represented themselves as works, artists as
artists, regardless of how experimental, radical, or iconoclastic the practice that
gave them their existence ultimately was. A painting wanted to be a “painting”;
a piece of sculpture, a “piece of sculpture”; a movie, a “movie”; a composition,
a “composition”; a video, a “video”; an installation, an “installation”; a perfor-
mance, a “performance”; and so on, repetitively and identically. The same held
true for their producers, the “artists.” From the point of view of anti-art, the
aspiration of art and artists to again be identified as “art” and “artists” simul-
taneously fostered anti-art’s extra-artistic appropriation and exploitation: art-
works were controlled, marketed, and evaluated as cultural products, and art-
ists were subjected to the same as the producers of artworks. Instead of works
serving as the means for people to reach the freedom the works attest by their
existence, they become instruments for an opposing purpose. Art has become
an integral part of people’s everyday lives in present-day bourgeois societies in
the form of commodity culture, entertainment, social media, and subcultures,
but not in the emancipatory sense meant by the avant-gardists (Foster 1996, 21).
Today, museums of contemporary art can still be viewed as documenting
art’s struggle with itself. This struggle may have been commodified to a certain
extent, and it may suffer from a certain exhaustion, but basically it has remained
unresolved. “Avant-garde art” or “anti-art” is an oxymoron, which persists as
long as something within arts practice resists its cultural appropriation and
artists themselves want to escape their cultural positions. Simultaneously, the
debate concerning the way art should be transformed continues—should it
be transformed according to the logic somehow implicit to artistic practices
themselves, or to a logic external to them?

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 Abandoning Art in the Name of Art

Liberating art from art may sound paradoxical or like a sophism to some
ears but, as I would argue here, it has always been a fundamental ethical and
personal option among artists. Art-making is something that can constitu-
tively and for good reason be abandoned or sacrificed by those who master it.
Attitudes such as “I do not know whether what I am doing is art and I do not
care” are recurrent even among practising artists. The latter sentiment could
easily be dismissed as merely psychological, but traditionally it is connected to
the question of artistic authorship and related debates on ingenuity. What if, as
Allan Kaprow (2003, 97–109) has described it, an artist started to see ingenuity
everywhere other than in his own or his colleagues’ workings, and what if even-
tually that started to interest the artist more than his own artistic ambitions?
In extreme cases this has amounted to the abandonment of an artistic career
altogether. The history of artistic modernism and postmodernism abounds
with famous examples of artists who have given up their successfully begun
artistic practices. We could begin with Arthur Rimbaud, who apparently set
an example for later retirements, such as those of Marcel Duchamp or Hugo
Ball (McEvilley 2005, 30, 371). Retirement may also mean the transformation
of one’s former artistic practice, as in the case of Alexander Rodchenko, who
in the late 1920s abandoned his already quite anti-artistic career as a construc-
tivist to devote himself to photographic documentation of the projects of the
young socialist nation, or the case of Lygia Clark, who in the late 1970s changed
her artistic practice into a therapeutic one. Every artist knows “former col-
leagues,” whose fate is not necessarily less important to our topic than those
mentioned. If we exclude cases where artistic practice is applied straightfor-
wardly for some extra-artistic social, pedagogical, or commercial purpose, for
instance, or where an art practice has been abandoned because of a changed
vision of reality, disease, or political oppression, what remains? As Kaprow con-
cluded in 2001, “leaving art is the art”. But, as he nevertheless immediately adds,
“you must have it to leave it” (Kaprow 2003, xxix). What is that “it” an artist
carries with or in him- or herself into the new field when leaving a previous
artistic activity behind?
The reason why this question may interest us today particularly, and with a
new acuteness, is that it relates directly to the ongoing discussion on artistic
research: how are artistic research and its makers (i.e., artist-researchers) to be
distinguished from traditional and institutional modes of art-making? When
professional artists start to make research in institutional academic settings,
respecting at least to some extent the corresponding criteria of knowledge pro-
duction and entering into an explicit dialogue with non-artistic discourses and
disciplines, they clearly abandon something of their former status and practice,
whether they admit it or not. Their endeavours are often also motivated by an
explicit attempt to transform their practice to make it more “real” and effi-
cient—for instance, socially, politically, or ecologically significant. But they also
pay a price for this move, the nature of which is hard to define. This creates an
interesting parallel between artistic research and the avant-garde as discussed
here. Would it be possible to conceive artistic research as a logical continua-
tion of avant-gardist tendencies of the past century? The institutional context

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 Esa Kirkkopelto

would not necessarily contradict this continuity, if we suppose, like Hal Foster
had suggested, that the post-war “neo-avant-garde” actually institutionalised
the “historical avant-garde” and thereby opened it for an institutional critique
the latter was lacking (Foster 1996, 20). If it were so, would we be ready and
willing to face its consequences for artistic practices in general, which, through
research, become articulated and transparent in a historically unparalleled
way?
Significantly, the logic of these practices—how does an artist work?—does
not necessarily even become conscious, let alone become problematised,
before it has been shifted from one (artistic) context to another (non-artistic)
context. As I will argue, performing this shift is distinctive for artistic research.
Here, instead of reasoning dialectically (and paradoxically) with the art and its
opposite (which in the next turn can change into “art” as well), I would focus
on the actual logic of that shift itself, which from now on I will call transposition.
When an artistic procedure, technique, device, or concept is shifted from the
arts field in which it was conceived and developed—and where its use has been
acknowledged—into another field in which it does not have a similar insti-
tutional and practical status, it does not necessarily or automatically lose its
capacity to operate in its new surroundings or be assimilated by it. The same
shift concerns the practitioner, “the artist” him- or herself, who carries out the
transposition and thereby puts his or her institutional identity in play. What is
interesting in transposition, and what interests artists who have accomplished
it in their works or careers, is the nature of the new kind of afterlife it initiates.
The same principle may, of course, apply also to other human practices. The
question of what artistic transposition can reveal about such practices neverthe-
less remains. If we acknowledge, at least hypothetically as we do in this book,
that transposition could be considered a specific artistic operation applica-
ble in artistic research, then we first need to consider it according to its most
general features in order to distinguish what is particularly “artistic” in it. It is
important to understand this if we are planning to abandon art-making, par-
ticularly if we want to abandon it properly!
If we consider transposition on a general level, regardless of the practice in
question, as an event taking place between two relatively autonomous fields
or levels that, at the outset, are mutually independent or indifferent, we might
discern in it three temporally and rhythmically subsequent phases: (1) the state
preceding transposition in which the fields or levels do not influence each
other; (2) the act of transposition in which an element belonging to one field is
suddenly shifted into another without disturbing the previous balance between
the two; (3) the process of transposition started by the shift, which creates an
indirect and asymmetric influence between the fields. An entity or instance
belonging to one field has been transposed into another without breaking the
barrier between the fields. It may be possible to observe the described dynam-
ics at any level of organisation, but here and henceforth I will delimit my obser-
vations to human practices, and artistic practices in particular.
The initiator of the shift needs to be the expert in the initial field. He or she
foresees the possibility of transposition in relation to the other field, or recog-

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 Abandoning Art in the Name of Art

nises it by accident or coincidence. In any case, someone has to prepare this

exceptional and unexpected move. Such a move does not necessarily mean a
transgression, given that in most cases the generic borders are not transcenden-
tal; in other words, their violation does not automatically transform or abol-
ish the violator. The borders may be institutionally very regulated, but so are
the consequences that follow their violation. From the artistic point of view
these kinds of risks are now secondary. What matters in transposition is not
to break the limits but to discover new kinds of similarities and continuities,
affinities that are not based on identity. When this kind of affinity is novel it does
not lean on representation but lies in other kinds of similarities, concerning
for instance their material, compositional, and medial aspects; in other words,
in their way of producing and reproducing their own reality and capacity to
encounter and translate other realities. What is of most significance, therefore,
is what remains: the new kind of continuity between heterogeneous fields.
Transposition constitutes a gesture of invention (in-venere) with its own rhythm
and logic.
However, as the act of transposition has taken place, nothing essential has
happened yet. Mere provocation or intervention seldom changes anything. If
the transposition is not actively repeated or held up, the transposed entity easily
returns to its original field. Thanks to the active maintenance of the transpos­-
ition the transposed element is charged with energy (i.e., a liberty of action) that
makes it operative in its new surroundings. The sustenance of the transposition
creates preconditions for a process whose nature is now more transformative:
it changes the field as a whole. By the same token, the agency is removed from
the person who accomplished the act, the “transposer,” in this case the expert
in his or her arts field, to the transposed means, technique, or concept, which
henceforth we could call a “transponent” (as opposed, for instance, to a “com-
ponent,” which a transponent will never turn into).
Within its new field the transponent is at first a stranger, or even an intruder,
but there is also something in it that is strangely familiar or unheimlich, and
therefore also attractive. From the point of view of the transposer this is not,
of course, surprising, because the existence of the transponent is based on its
potential (and possibly still hidden) affinity with the surrounding field. It may
just happen that the transposer alone is aware of this affinity at the beginning
of the process. The surrounding field may reject the transponent, but it cannot
reject the affinity the latter establishes and communicates, and which there-
fore already has a foothold in the new terrain. The transponent persists not only
because of that occasional continuity and similarity but also because the field
in which it has its legitimate site and significance (and where it is not consid-
ered a transponent) continues to exist. This active exclusion indirectly, and
paradoxically, supports and nourishes the persistence of the transponent. The
constant tension between belonging and not belonging both protects the
trans­ponent against assimilation and provides it with energy. The support
remains indirect because it is solely dependent on the activity of the transposer,
who has initiated the process by his or her act and has now also become respon-
sible for its continuation. Even though the transponent is a sort of escapee or

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 Esa Kirkkopelto

renegade in relation to its initial field, to which there may be no return, it does
not deny its origin within the new field. It conveys certain essential features,
qualities, and energies to the new field without worrying about their ownership
or authorship. It is thus a sort of hybrid, but it neither gives itself up to either
side nor constitutes their union. It is an agent of change. In relation to its new
field it is relatively free and autonomous, but still capable of communication.
However, the communication is not informative but transformative. Whatever
the transponent “says,” or what is “said about it,” changes the surroundings.
Neither is it a medium: it does not translate the events of one field into the
events of another. It does not bring messages or represent the fields that it puts
in indirect communication.
The changes that follow are unpredictable in many ways, and from the
appearance of a transponent one cannot predict what will happen later. In
accordance with Deleuzian modal logic (Deleuze 1968, 269–76), which seems
the most appropriate here, we could formulate what happens in the following
way. The transponent makes features appear from the surrounding field that
until that moment had been virtual and latent. If the affinity between the trans­
ponent and the surrounding field is based on a real but still virtual affinity, the
explication of that affinity, its actualisation, necessarily has a transformative
impact on the field.
The only thing the transponent remains dependent on is the transposer who,
if he or she is an artist, becomes an artist-researcher as the consequence of his
or her act. That is unavoidable, given that the consequences of the transpos-
itional act always remain to be seen, explained, and expressed. Explaining and
expressing them, in turn, requires measures: repeating, varying, testing, observ-
ing, modelling, theorising, argumentation and dissemination, that is, research.
Without further measures a transposition remains an exceptional incident,
which may be significant but the significance is lost in the darkness of history,
where it remains to be discovered by some other researcher. Artistic research
in many cases can be understood as a transpositional practice: a technique, a
device, a point of view, a product, a concept, or an agency removed from the
context of one artistic genre into another, or into some extra-artistic practice
or mode of knowledge production, to study the consequences of that move.
How are the new surroundings affected by the transponent (and, indirectly, the
field from which it comes)? What kind of after-effect does the operation have
on the initial context, for instance the artistic genre the transponent escapes?
Research is carried out by observing these changes and articulating them col-
lectively. It produces knowledge of how different realities are constructed,
about the way the different fields interact and penetrate each other implicitly,
about the reality of art.
As art changes into research in the way described above—in other words,
transpositionally—it is not instrumentalised. What happens instead is the trans-
formation of the artistic practices themselves. The artistic processes, methods,
devices, and techniques involved in transposition abandon the remnants of the
auto-representation of the representative regime, which still today burdens
the arts and from which the avant-garde has not succeeded in liberating them

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 Abandoning Art in the Name of Art

so far. Without appealing to the authority of a particular artistic genre and its
acknowledged forms, an artist-researcher as a transposer ventures with his or
her invention, the transponent, into a strange realm with the aim of opening
and constructing new types of relations with the real. Artist-researchers should
not miss their lost art or careers. Essentially, they do know what they are doing.
That knowledge, which concerns the reality of art, has never been entirely tacit.
It has made itself known at least symptomatically, for instance in artistic protest
movements or the individual retirements I discussed above, in the paradox­
ical attempts to abandon art in the name of art. The problem, if there is one,
rather relates to the fact that artist-researchers are not necessarily recognised
in their surroundings and they, like all genuine researchers, have to proceed
alone. This loneliness is not a mere individual or social fact attributable to a
lack of esteem, for instance, but a constituent part of the transpositional logic
of artistic research in practice.
Let me conclude by returning to the question I posed at the beginning of
this essay: What does artistic transposition tell us about transpositional logic
in general? Is not a work of art a sort of transponent as well, insofar as it enters
our world as if from without, as if from outer space, and insofar as its existence
cannot be deduced from its surroundings? It is, of course. To the extent that any
object can be presented from an artistic perspective, as an artwork or an artistic
component for instance, any object whatsoever can be transposed if it is simply
moved to a “wrong” place and thereby “estranged.” But the comparison also
reveals the basic difference: artworks cannot help appearing as what they are,
whereas artistic transponents make appear what they are not. Their function
is in this respect “phenomenotechnical” and comparable to scientific instru-
ments (Bachelard [1934] 2003). When an object is identified as an “artwork”
it is always in the “right” place, no matter if it is met in a museum or found in
the street, whereas an artistic transponent is always and deliberately where it
does not belong. Correlatively, the target of its transformative effect is not in
the receiving subject (as in the case of an artwork) but in its surroundings, no
matter whether the latter are social or physical.
Since the opening of the aesthetic regime, everyday objects have been
included in artworks, or they have been presented as autonomous artworks,
but an artistic element becoming a part of our everyday reality without turning
into a monument or an instrument seems to be a much longer and more com-
plicated process. Insofar as this process from now on advances in terms of artis-
tic research it no longer operates dialectically in terms of “pro-” or “anti-,” or
“art” and “life.” The point here is rather to liberate contemporary art-making
from this dialectic characteristic of both art-making and its critique during
the modern and postmodern eras. In relation to the debate described above
between modernism and the avant-garde, artistic research might today be con-
ceived as a way to liberate the avant-garde from its deadlock—that is, to bring
its appropriation to a halt and pursue its agenda by new means. Mere art crit-
icism does not suffice here, but it helps. The reconsideration of the legacy of
the avant-garde can be applied for contextualising artistic research historically
and liberating it from overtly institutional, artistic, or philosophical closures.

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 Esa Kirkkopelto

As artistic research liberates art from producing and representing art, it

changes our relation to art significantly. Different kinds of logics of artistic pro-
duction, such as that of transposing, are thus reconceived as processes of reality
research, not as representations of reality or reactions to it. This is also why I
found it necessary in this essay to try to capture transposition according to its
most general and abstract features: transposition is a method of invention with roots
deep in the modal dynamics of the real, which for the very same reason is capable of being
addressed in accordance with this method. It is not that the arts manifest or illustrate
the transpositional logic of the real (in which case it would once again become
representative of it). On the contrary, and finally, we should perceive trans-
position as a creative and artistic aspect of the real, as belonging to its innate
dynamics at different organisational levels. Correlatively, artistic research as I
have written about it in this essay is interested in the reality of art, not in art as
part of the given reality and not as its representative.

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