Aesthetic Presuppositions of the Object: Graham Harman and Contemporary Art (original) (raw)

In one way or another I feel that contemporary art is haunted by the 'il y a' ('there is') of Levinasian theory; the description of encountering some impersonal existence. I feel that this notion is beneath (or on the surface of?) modern arts obsession with the 'materiality of the signifier' and the Greenbergian anti-representationalist theory of 'surface' in modern art. In this sense arts 'object' has always been real in a common-sense realist way and not in a 'weird' way (what Harman has called 'Weird Realism). Instead of characterising the object, matter (or the carnal) as unknown in these artistic discourses they are instead characterised as base, indifferent, flat, abject, or, on the subjective side, characterised as the existential embodiment of suffering found in Levinas' phenomenology of anxiety, insomnia, nausea etc (we are objects too, but desecrated ones). I want to use Graham Harman's work to suggest that the object has features which could be characterised as unknown and not merely material or base, which do not evoke the 'thingness' of death (Blanchot). This 'unknown', however, is not the return of fideism or some gothic analogy that the withdrawn object is barbaric, horrifying or full of darkness. It instead argues for the 'uncanny' (Freud) nature of Harman's object, which, unlike vampires and werewolves, exist in the cold light of day whilst still causing discomfort.

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