Peter Osborne (writer and academic)
Encyclopedia
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University
, London
. He is also an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy
.
The CRMEP is the leading centre for postgraduate level study and doctoral research in Continental Philosophy in the London area. Since its inception in 1994 it has developed a national and international reputation for teaching, research and publication in the field of post-Kantian European philosophy, characterised by a strong emphasis on broad cultural and intellectual contexts and a distinctive sense of social and political engagement. The CRMEP moved to Kingston University from Middlesex University in the summer of 2010 and sits across the faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and Art, Design and Architecture (FADA).
Staff Profile from the (University of Kingston website)
The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP)
CRMEP Podcasts
See Privatization as Anti-Politics: Interview with Peter Osborne (From the Journal: Reclamations)
Osborne completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex in 1988. Entitled 'The carnival of philosophy: philosophy, politics and science in Hegel and Marx', it no doubt formed some of the material for the more recently published How to Read Marx (Granta, 2005), the fifth chapter of which recalls its title. A central influence upon his thought has been the work of Theodore Adorno, who figures in his early essays concerning the problem of modernity and the crisis in the visual arts
His first book, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995, Reprinted 2011) was reflective of his general understanding of the modern European tradition of philosophy as being "first and foremost a philosophy of time", stemming from the work of Immanuel Kant, as founder of modern philosophy. Osborne discussed the politics of time in relation to contemporary art in a discussion organised by the Frieze Art Foundation and held in conjunction with the Frieze Art Fair in 2008 (See the Frieze Talk 'It's About Time').
In a recent exchange with his colleague Eric Alliez at the Stanley Picker Gallery on 27 April 2007, he explained that at "the end of the Eighties, my project became to "mediate Aesthetic Theory with the history of contemporary art since the 1960s" (understanding Adorno's project as "the project of mediating the transdisciplinary post-Kantianism of Benjamin's thought with the history of modernism") specifically, through the reinvention of 'the dialectic of construction and expression' (Philosophy and Contemporary Art After Adorno and Deleuze: An Exchange). The late work of Adorno anticipates the breakdown of the difference between the arts that Osborne is interested in coming to terms with (see Art Theory and Aesthetics, below).
The follow-up to "The Politics of Time", Philosophy in Cultural Theory, was concerned with what is currently (2011) being pursued further by the CRMEP; namely, the transdisciplinary status of philosophy, as opposed to its traditional self-understanding as a self-contained discipline. Philosophy, as an activity, is constituted in its engagement with the non-philosophical.
See the recent conference From Structure to Rhizome Transdisciplinarity in French thought, 1945 to the present: histories, concepts, constructions (Radical Philosophy Journal, issues 165 and 167).
challenged the aesthetic definition of the work of art, and attempted but failed to be absolutely anti-aesthetic. However secretly it triumphed, by rendering explicit to subsequent generations of artists the conceptual aspect of all art.
For Osborne, a crucial juncture in the transformation of the ontology of the work of art (what art most fundamentally is) is marked by the work of Robert Smithson
. According to this view, the traditional practise of art according to mediums (painting, sculpture, architecture) is understood to have been historically destroyed ontologically by a transcategorial practise and field — inaugurated by work like Smithson's. This is intimated in the title for a lecture he gave on Smithson at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in 2008: 'An interminable avalanche of categories': conceptual issues in the work of Robert Smithson (or, once more, against 'sculpture'), as part of a series of lectures given by significant art historians under the title Cornerstones.
Osborne later made the speculative claim elsewhere that contemporary art is post-conceptual art in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, 9 July 2010. It is a claim made at the level of the ontology of the work of art (rather than say at the descriptive level of style or movement). Around the same time, he gave a lecture in conjunction with Pavilion on the concept of the contemporary and the work of The Atlas Group entitled The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and the Global Transnational. He subsequently published an essay in issue 15 of the Pavilion Journal for Politics and Culture, entitled: Imaginary Radicalisms: Notes on the Libertarianism of Contemporary Art.]
(Talk description): This talk contests what it calls the ‘memory model’ for understanding historical meaning in contemporary art. Setting out from a series of conceptual distinctions between history and memory, which throw doubt on attempts to understand and value contemporary art as ‘artefacts of remembrance’, it develops an alternative theoretical perspective on the critical-historical meaning of contemporary art in the transnational spaces of the international artworld. A contrast between the (backward-looking) memory-model and the (futural) idea of speculative collectives is explored via a critical comparison of three recent video works: ‘We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask’ (2005) by The Atlas Group; ‘Lightning Testimonies’ (2007) by Amar Kanwar; and ‘Lacuna in Testimony’ (20036) by Navjot Altaf.
Art &... (Symposia at the ICA) (Talk description): The dialectic of and art and non-art since the Sixties (the inauguration of the generic concept of art), the dearth of intellectually serious art criticism in the face of the strength of the market and the reemergence of a Humean, empirical aesthetic based on pleasure and displeasure (for which Deleuze is being used to function as the new placeholder of), and resultant blindness of art institutions to be able to determine the difference between historically significant art, and art that is merely present in some form.
(A talk held at the ICA on 29 October 2008) (Talk description): Institutional critique: can the institution ever criticise?
Is all critique inevitable undone and aestheticised by the institutions in which it is presented? In 2005 Martha Rosler restaged her piece from 1973, Garage Sale. The exhibition offered a piece of institutional critique on object festishism, the act of buying and selling, and the notion of an 'art exhibition'. However, Rosler was now a known entity, an institution in herself. Is all critique eventually undone, institutionalised, aestheticised? Or did the restaging prove the persistent validity of such a project? Art into Society: Society into Art (ICA, 1974) brought together the greatest agent provocateurs of their day — Hans Haacke, Gustav Metzger and Joseph Beuys. Are such attempts at undoing the binary oppositions suggested by that exhibition title still pertinent? Was truly anti-institutional exhibition-making simply channelled into live art and happenings, events and music, leaving the exhibition the place for historicised critique? Did we stop chewing the fat of Beuys's critique when we started preserving it? Speakers: Roger Malbert, senior curator, Hayward Touring Exhibitions; artist Carey Young; Dave Beech, artist and member of the Freee collective; Simon Sheikh, critic and curator, Berlin; Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. Chair: Victoria Preston, deputy director, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and PhD candidate, Birkbeck, researching Institutional Critique.
ICA Archival Sound Recordings
Research Seminar: Russian Avant-garde Revisited (See also the discussion)
Research Congress: Expect the Unexpected: Once more on the Horizon of Expectation (discussion)
Kingston University
Kingston University is a public research university located in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, United Kingdom. It was originally founded in 1899 as Kingston Technical Institute, a polytechnic, and became a university in 1992....
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He is also an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy
Radical Philosophy
Radical Philosophy is a British academic journal of critical theory and continental philosophy, appearing six times a year. It was established in 1972 with the purpose of providing a forum for the theoretical work which was emerging in the wake of the radical movements of the 1960s, in philosophy...
.
Life and career
Osborne’s books include: The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995/2010); Marx (2005); Conceptual Art (2002); and Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000). He also edited the three-volume Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (2005). Osborne’s writing on contemporary art includes contributions to the journals Afterall, Art History, October, and Oxford Art Journal, and catalogs accompanying exhibitions including: Matias Faldbakken: The Shock of Abstraction, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo and Ikon, Birmingham, 2009; The Quick and the Dead, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2009; and Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo, 2009. He is currently completing a book on the philosophical aspects of contemporary art. Osborne lives and works in London.Overview
Osborne teaches and publishes on Modern European Philosophy and the philosophy of modern and contemporary art — with particular reference to Conceptual Art. He has written catalogue essays for a wide range of international art institutions including: Tate Modern, Biennale of Sydney, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, and the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. He has acted as a consultant to the Education Programme at Tate Britain (see Spheres of Action and In Defence of Philosophy on the Tate Channel) and is consultant for the Office of Contemporary Art Norway with regard to the representation of Norway at the 2011 Venice Biennale. He also served as editorial consultant for a series of publication for OCA (see the Verksted series), and currently serves as a member of the advisory board for Pavilion (Journal for Politics and Culture). He has played a major role in the bimonthly British journal Radical Philosophy for nearly thirty years and plays an active role in current debates about the future of universities in the UK.The CRMEP is the leading centre for postgraduate level study and doctoral research in Continental Philosophy in the London area. Since its inception in 1994 it has developed a national and international reputation for teaching, research and publication in the field of post-Kantian European philosophy, characterised by a strong emphasis on broad cultural and intellectual contexts and a distinctive sense of social and political engagement. The CRMEP moved to Kingston University from Middlesex University in the summer of 2010 and sits across the faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and Art, Design and Architecture (FADA).
Staff Profile from the (University of Kingston website)
The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP)
CRMEP Podcasts
The transition from Middlesex to Kingston
In April 2010, Middlesex University decided to close down Philosophy, its highest research-rated subject. Middlesex students and staff, and thousands of their supporters in the UK and around the world, battled to save it. The website set up as part of the effort to do so is still running today and is continually updated vis-à-vis related campaigns and issues (See Save Middlesex). There was a lot of coverage in the media, including for example in "The Guardian".See Privatization as Anti-Politics: Interview with Peter Osborne (From the Journal: Reclamations)
Background and Project
Broadly speaking, Osborne's project has followed the conception and function of philosophy as ‘its own time comprehended in thought’ (Hegel). (At a talk at the ICA that was held in response to the (then) plans to close the philosophy department when Osborne and the CRMEP was based at Middlesex, he spoke of the fact that as a practise, philosophy is not quantifiable; that is, it is not something that is easily measurable by time.)Osborne completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex in 1988. Entitled 'The carnival of philosophy: philosophy, politics and science in Hegel and Marx', it no doubt formed some of the material for the more recently published How to Read Marx (Granta, 2005), the fifth chapter of which recalls its title. A central influence upon his thought has been the work of Theodore Adorno, who figures in his early essays concerning the problem of modernity and the crisis in the visual arts
His first book, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995, Reprinted 2011) was reflective of his general understanding of the modern European tradition of philosophy as being "first and foremost a philosophy of time", stemming from the work of Immanuel Kant, as founder of modern philosophy. Osborne discussed the politics of time in relation to contemporary art in a discussion organised by the Frieze Art Foundation and held in conjunction with the Frieze Art Fair in 2008 (See the Frieze Talk 'It's About Time').
In a recent exchange with his colleague Eric Alliez at the Stanley Picker Gallery on 27 April 2007, he explained that at "the end of the Eighties, my project became to "mediate Aesthetic Theory with the history of contemporary art since the 1960s" (understanding Adorno's project as "the project of mediating the transdisciplinary post-Kantianism of Benjamin's thought with the history of modernism") specifically, through the reinvention of 'the dialectic of construction and expression' (Philosophy and Contemporary Art After Adorno and Deleuze: An Exchange). The late work of Adorno anticipates the breakdown of the difference between the arts that Osborne is interested in coming to terms with (see Art Theory and Aesthetics, below).
The follow-up to "The Politics of Time", Philosophy in Cultural Theory, was concerned with what is currently (2011) being pursued further by the CRMEP; namely, the transdisciplinary status of philosophy, as opposed to its traditional self-understanding as a self-contained discipline. Philosophy, as an activity, is constituted in its engagement with the non-philosophical.
See the recent conference From Structure to Rhizome Transdisciplinarity in French thought, 1945 to the present: histories, concepts, constructions (Radical Philosophy Journal, issues 165 and 167).
Art Theory and Aesthetics
Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002), constituted an authoritative survey of the art of the late Sixties and early Seventies (and beyond). Conceptual artConceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
challenged the aesthetic definition of the work of art, and attempted but failed to be absolutely anti-aesthetic. However secretly it triumphed, by rendering explicit to subsequent generations of artists the conceptual aspect of all art.
For Osborne, a crucial juncture in the transformation of the ontology of the work of art (what art most fundamentally is) is marked by the work of Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
. According to this view, the traditional practise of art according to mediums (painting, sculpture, architecture) is understood to have been historically destroyed ontologically by a transcategorial practise and field — inaugurated by work like Smithson's. This is intimated in the title for a lecture he gave on Smithson at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in 2008: 'An interminable avalanche of categories': conceptual issues in the work of Robert Smithson (or, once more, against 'sculpture'), as part of a series of lectures given by significant art historians under the title Cornerstones.
Osborne later made the speculative claim elsewhere that contemporary art is post-conceptual art in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, 9 July 2010. It is a claim made at the level of the ontology of the work of art (rather than say at the descriptive level of style or movement). Around the same time, he gave a lecture in conjunction with Pavilion on the concept of the contemporary and the work of The Atlas Group entitled The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and the Global Transnational. He subsequently published an essay in issue 15 of the Pavilion Journal for Politics and Culture, entitled: Imaginary Radicalisms: Notes on the Libertarianism of Contemporary Art.]
Articles
- Osborne, Peter: Marx and the philosophy of time. Radical philosophy(147), pp. 15-22. ISSN (print) 0300-211X
- Osborne, Peter: (9 July 2010) Contemporary art is post-conceptual art, Public Lecture, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como
Books
- Osborne, Peter: (Jun 2002) Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press Ltd, 304p ISBN 0714839302
- Osborne, Peter: (1995) The politics of time: modernity and avant-garde.London, U.K. : Verso Books. 272p. ISBN 0860916529
- Osborne, Peter: (2000) Philosophy in cultural theory. London, U.K. : Routledge. 146p. ISBN 0415238013
- Osborne, Peter: (2005) How to read Marx. London, U.K. : Granta. 136p. (How to read) ISBN 1862077711
- Osborne, Peter and Alliez, Eric: (2008) Philosophy and contemporary art after Adorno and Deleuze: an exchange. In: Garnett, Robert and Hunt, Andrew, (eds.) Gest: laboratory of synthesis #1. London, U.K. : Book Works. pp. 35-64. ISBN 9781870699969
- Osborne, Peter: (Jun 2002) Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press Ltd, 304p ISBN 0714839302
Seminar, Lecture, Symposia
”The Truth Will be Known When the Last Witness is Dead”: History Not Memory’ (A talk held at Birkbeck University of London: Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies)(Talk description): This talk contests what it calls the ‘memory model’ for understanding historical meaning in contemporary art. Setting out from a series of conceptual distinctions between history and memory, which throw doubt on attempts to understand and value contemporary art as ‘artefacts of remembrance’, it develops an alternative theoretical perspective on the critical-historical meaning of contemporary art in the transnational spaces of the international artworld. A contrast between the (backward-looking) memory-model and the (futural) idea of speculative collectives is explored via a critical comparison of three recent video works: ‘We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask’ (2005) by The Atlas Group; ‘Lightning Testimonies’ (2007) by Amar Kanwar; and ‘Lacuna in Testimony’ (20036) by Navjot Altaf.
Art &... (Symposia at the ICA) (Talk description): The dialectic of and art and non-art since the Sixties (the inauguration of the generic concept of art), the dearth of intellectually serious art criticism in the face of the strength of the market and the reemergence of a Humean, empirical aesthetic based on pleasure and displeasure (for which Deleuze is being used to function as the new placeholder of), and resultant blindness of art institutions to be able to determine the difference between historically significant art, and art that is merely present in some form.
(A talk held at the ICA on 29 October 2008) (Talk description): Institutional critique: can the institution ever criticise?
Is all critique inevitable undone and aestheticised by the institutions in which it is presented? In 2005 Martha Rosler restaged her piece from 1973, Garage Sale. The exhibition offered a piece of institutional critique on object festishism, the act of buying and selling, and the notion of an 'art exhibition'. However, Rosler was now a known entity, an institution in herself. Is all critique eventually undone, institutionalised, aestheticised? Or did the restaging prove the persistent validity of such a project? Art into Society: Society into Art (ICA, 1974) brought together the greatest agent provocateurs of their day — Hans Haacke, Gustav Metzger and Joseph Beuys. Are such attempts at undoing the binary oppositions suggested by that exhibition title still pertinent? Was truly anti-institutional exhibition-making simply channelled into live art and happenings, events and music, leaving the exhibition the place for historicised critique? Did we stop chewing the fat of Beuys's critique when we started preserving it? Speakers: Roger Malbert, senior curator, Hayward Touring Exhibitions; artist Carey Young; Dave Beech, artist and member of the Freee collective; Simon Sheikh, critic and curator, Berlin; Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. Chair: Victoria Preston, deputy director, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and PhD candidate, Birkbeck, researching Institutional Critique.
ICA Archival Sound Recordings
Former West
Continuing to think about the Avant-garde and the relation of art and politics, after his original book The Politics of Time, Osborne has been twice invited to contribute to Former West, a contemporary art research, education, publishing, and exhibition project (2008–2013):Research Seminar: Russian Avant-garde Revisited (See also the discussion)
Research Congress: Expect the Unexpected: Once more on the Horizon of Expectation (discussion)
Podcasts
- It's About Time, Frieze Art Foundation: http://www.friezefoundation.org/talks/detail/its_about_time/
- From Structure to Rhizome Transdisciplinarity in French thought, 1945 to the present: histories, concepts, constructions, The French Institute: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/04/from-structure-to-rhizome/
- An interminable avalanche of categories': conceptual issues in the work of Robert Smithson (or, once more, against 'sculpture'), Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art: http://www.wdw.nl/event.php?act_id=142%20
Video
- The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and the Global Transnational, Pavilion, 28 January 2010: http://vimeo.com/9087032