In a room of a gallery of your choice, you may ask every person in your presence the question, “what is art?” For every individual asked, you will most likely get a completely different answer. It is entirely possible that you will get a well-articulated answer that sweeps you off your feet, but most likely, the response is a series of impromptu anecdotal references to one’s personal relation with an object of some sentimental significance, sometimes backed by a version of a once-heard, now-outdated theoretical definition—aestheticism, expressionism, formalism, and, most recently, the agency of the “artworld” in the institutional theory of art. Seemingly elaborate, seemingly meticulous descriptions in appreciation of “cultural objects” on display are in trend amongst the gallery goers. The descriptions ache to justify the cultural object on display as art, yet come short of a common and coherent ability to define art (and hence to justify what is on display as art). More successfully, they reveal a crisis in the “artworld”: namely, the crisis of incongruency of accounts of art.
This crisis is not limited only to those partaking in the “artworld.” People are bewildered by art, and part of this bewilderment is because of conceptual art that poses a question front and center: “Is this art?” The inconsistency in responses to what I now call “the question of art” was what I took notice of in my early studio practice as an artist, and was what led me to art theory and to philosophy more broadly. Motivated by the original question, “what is art,” for which we have no satisfactory answer of the caliber that the question itself inquires, the question that has remained relevant is, “how is the encounter with art possible if we don’t know what art is?” That is, if arthood is not yet objectively attainable, how can it be experienced as art? You may read ahead and ask if we could say that “artwork” does not exist. Similar to what Derrida says of literature, there is no core principle or substance of art; art is not. There is no “artwork” per se. Supposing that “artwork” does not exist as a real category, the only way that art can retain an essence, without being reduced to a mere social and cultural phenomenon, is for it to be understood as a mode of object determination—a metaphysical and pre-theoretical lens of some sort that we wear—for which the experience of an object becomes possible. Thereby art-object and else a commonplace object are the forms that these determinations take.
My dissatisfaction with theory grew out of this same consideration, leading me to a range of metaphysical and phenomenological questions. There is a circularity in positing the question of art. The positing of the question strives to establish what art is, yet in order to do so, theory constantly draws from what is not-yet-art and presumes, with a great degree of faith, that its arthood may already be presupposed. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is a typical example of this. For theory to ask and give a justification for how a 1920s urinal put on display is a work of art, it has to first suppose this commonplace item as an “artwork.” In philosophy, I break with the orthodoxy of the analytical tradition (the solidification of what I refer to here as theory) that limits the field of inquiry to a domain of objectivity. On the other end of the divide of the philosophical tradition, continental philosophy usually investigates art within a socio-political context and adapts a hermeneutical lens, which, although generative, reduces art as a whole to a set of practical applications recognized and utilized by cultural apparatuses—by which I mean any arrangement that captures and directs human behavior. These apparatuses are the very same things that gatekeep and regulate art by presupposing their role as authorities and selling an idea of what art is without concern with the fundamental essence of art. The “artworld” has full hegemony over what is constituted as art what engagement with art might be and who is the bearer of this relation. It’s this structural power that poses as the bearer of truth and has deflated notions of art, philosophy, objectivity, and subjectivity that I find to be problematic.
I am fond of phenomenology and the set of problematics that Heidegger sets forth: the problems of method, truth, facticity, primordiality, essence, and most importantly the idea of difference. For us to even use the terminology “artwork” (usually paired with its contrasting opposite, “non-art”), and hence to ask the question is x art, we have to presuppose that an object is always already either a work of art or an ordinary object. The entirety of my graduate work in philosophy, and much of what I am writing in my post-graduate practice as an independent thinker and artist, is to show how this presupposition is the origin of the strange bewilderment in the encounter with art.
The question of art is simultaneously a question of what art is, and it is always in relation to this question that a notion of art may be formed. At the heart of every encounter with art there is a non-literal engagement with the question “what is art.” Art precedes its theoretical articulation, the same way being precedes essence, and so the very question of art is manifested through the embodiment and act of engaging with art, prior to its explicit formulation in theory. Therefore, limiting art to a theoretical articulation is to miss the mark of the essence of art. Much of the interest that guides my current writing is articulating the implications of this co-informing relation. Recapturing predicament, the here and now preceding and resisting objectification, has been lost in the fog of abstract reasoning, and simultaneously upholding the rigor of philosophical thinking, has led me to work my way back to art. The amalgamation of the two in my work has most recently resulted in a number of plays, which I call “Trials.” In the heat of the predicament, in the assumability of character roles, that is, participation in the subjectivity of the position of each character role, my position quite vividly appears anew in a cross-method approach that I have formed at the intersection of my interest in art and philosophy.
Nima Abkenar
Born in Tehran, Nima Abkenar is a conceptual artist and writer based in New York City. His
interest broadly lies at the intersection of art and philosophy, where the two mutually create the
conditions for the possibility of the other.
Abkenar holds an M.A. in philosophy from The New School for Social Research. His work has
been reviewed by the LA Times, Las Vegas Weekly, KNPR, Science Times, Australian National
University, Cosmos, Hamshahri, and ISNA. His visualizations of astronomical objects were
showcased by NASA for two consecutive years (2020–1), and has produced public art projects in
collaboration with the Black Mountain Institute and the City of Las Vegas Cultural Affairs.
His experience of displacement is conspicuous in his work. Oriented by metaphysics and
phenomenology, his writing returns to the fundamental: truth, essence, significance, meaning,
being, and art—rejecting presuppositions of the dominating discourse. Abkenar founded the
English Section of Alqesseh, an independent press. The Section, in his own words, "strives to lift
the barriers to true creation by bringing the deliberate decision-making, the authority, back to the
author, and facilitates the conditions of creation."
