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Art and its Negations

Brief Description

An analysis and defence of negation in art, drawing on Hegel, Marx and Adorno. This

is part of a larger research project on art, negation and the avant-garde, that will form the basis of Roberts’s forthcoming book Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2014) .

Research Rationale

Roberts’s central argument is that when art abandon’s the possibility of the ‘new’ it falls back into heteronomy and the academic. In this way there can be no renewal of art without art resisting, reworking, dissolving what has become tradition, and duly, therefore what has become heteronomous, But this link between the ‘new’ and value should not be confused with conventional modernist notions of formal ‘advance’ or stylistic supersession in art, or nihilistically, with the destruction of tradition tout court. Rather, the ‘new’ here is the restless ever vigilant positioning on art’s critical relationship to its own traditions of intellectual and cultural formation and administration. The mistake of postmodernists, therefore, is that they identify art’s claim to autonomy not with art’s necessary reflection on its own conditions of possibility, but with simplistic notions of elitism and historicism.

Strategies undertaken

Roberts discusses the continuing relevance of the avant-garde (as an open-ended set of research programmes) as central to the defence of negation; the avant-garde becomes the unfolding – although non-linear – space of art’s positional strategies of negation. The material was first presented at the University of Copenhagen, October 2008; and the essay has been translated into German in the leading literature/theory journal in Germany, Lettre International, Summer, 2013. Roberts has also published extensively on the avant-garde over the last few years, for example, ‘The Avant-Garde After Avant-Gardism’ (in English and Russian), Chto Delat, No 17, 2007, and ‘Revolutionary Pathos, Negation and the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History, No 41, 2010