Recently, I suddenly remembered my first years in New York. I arrived from the Soviet Union in 1981 at the age of fourteen. A few years later, I enrolled at the School of Visual Arts. At the time, a lot of younger theorists, art historians, and artists taught there. So, almost accidentally, my teachers included Benjamin Buchloh and Craig Owens.
At the time, I was interested primarily in figurative painting. Still very much in the mindset of my art classes in Moscow, I was looking at Cézanne, Roman frescoes, and Renaissance painting. I had never even heard the term “critical theory.” I vividly remember trying to understand what painting actually had to do with Foucault. The connection was not obvious. I liked reading Foucault, but I could not find any immediate relation to artistic practice.
Not that theory was a totally unfamiliar concept in the Soviet Union. The entire structure of the state was based on ideology and theory. But somehow, it was very different from how these things operated in the West.
After a while, I became familiar with the texts everyone was discussing. Like many artists of my generation, I spent years reading theory and philosophy. At a certain point, I stopped reading fiction entirely. It felt like a waste of time—too subjective, too artistic. The really important intellectual production, it seemed, was theory.
Looking back, that was probably a little extreme.
At the same time, I remained interested in another aspect of this relationship. Many of the artists I found compelling seemed to be engaged in forms of thinking that exceeded the production of artworks alone. This became increasingly apparent to me as I looked closely at figures like Malevich, and later, Eisenstein. Their writings are inseparable from their practice. The works and the ideas develop together.
This also works in the other direction. With Deleuze, for example, it is striking how much of his thinking emerges through a sustained engagement with literature, painting, and cinema. His books on film are unimaginable without film itself. The same could be said of Walter Benjamin, whose writings are difficult to separate from photography, film, montage, and the visual culture of his time.
I suppose this circulation of ideas between artistic and intellectual practice has always interested me. But the relationship is never simple. A lot of the time, artists borrow concepts from theory in simplistic, instrumental ways. And just as often, theorists and philosophers completely misunderstand art. I remember coming across a list in a book by Alain Badiou of the handful of artists he believed truly “counted.” It was difficult to take him seriously as an art thinker after seeing that list.1
Sometimes, artworks produce questions that take years to find their conceptual or theoretical form. The participatory works of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, for example, were already exploring forms of relationality in the 1960s—long before such concerns became a major theoretical discourse in the 1990s. Other ideas appear simultaneously in different places, making it impossible to determine where they originated. The dematerialization of the artwork is a perfect example. Its origins are impossible to isolate because it emerged at the same time in artistic practice, critical theory, curating, and broader social transformations.
I think my initial confusion in school had everything to do with this. I arrived with a traditional understanding of art. I expected to learn about painting. Instead, I found myself in the middle of conversations about language, power, ideology, psychoanalysis, and representation. It took me a long time to understand why these discussions mattered. It took even longer to understand that art itself could participate in the production of ideas.
Only much later did I realize how deeply this question had shaped what we were doing with e-flux journal. From the beginning, the journal was partly based on a belief that artists are engaged in forms of thinking that deserve their own space of articulation. Many of the most influential texts we have published were written by practitioners attempting to formulate ideas that emerged through practice rather than alongside it. Recently, we realized that we have published nearly two hundred texts by artists, and we are now working on a book dedicated to this history.
One of my favorite texts remains Sean Snyder’s “Disobedience in Byelorussia,” originally published in 2009, a self-interrogation of his own “research-based” practice and of the art world’s growing tendency to turn research into a method, a discourse, and eventually another institutional category. Moving between El Al interrogations, North Korean television, Soviet propaganda, art institutions, archives, and his own compulsive accumulation of information, Snyder asks what distinguishes artistic research from research proper. His answer is that art does something research cannot: It makes form itself a site of knowledge, remaining open to contradiction, failure, and consequences rather than producing conclusions—and, characteristically, Snyder arrives at this argument by putting his own practice on trial.
Across her texts in e-flux journal, Martha Rosler begins with the ordinary conditions of cultural life—housing, work, language, money, professional manners—and follows them into the larger systems that produce them. Gentrification becomes a way of understanding the changing role of artists in cities; the exaggerated friendliness of art-world emails reveals the precarious labor and competitive self-promotion of neoliberalism; even bad exhibition prose opens onto questions of class, expertise, and who is permitted to speak with authority. Rosler’s theory emerges through this relentless widening of the frame, until the apparently incidental details of being an artist become evidence of how culture, labor, and power are organized.
In his writings for e-flux journal, Luis Camnitzer persistently argues that art has been mistakenly identified with the objects it produces. What matters instead is what he calls “art thinking”: a way of approaching knowledge through problems, uncertainty, imagination, and connections that established disciplines and educational systems tend to exclude. From museums and art schools to conceptualism, science, and even Schrödinger’s cat, Camnitzer keeps returning to the same proposition: Art is most consequential not when it adds more objects to the world, but when it expands our capacity to ask questions for which the answers—and sometimes even the methods for finding them—do not yet exist.
Rereading these and many other artists’ essays we have published, I am reminded that the relation between art and theory is not one of application. Theory is not simply added to art from the outside, nor does art merely illustrate ideas that have already been formulated elsewhere. More often, the two meet at points of insufficiency: where practice encounters something it cannot yet name, and where theory has to change in order to think what practice has already set in motion. This may be why their relationship remains so unstable, and also so productive. At its best, art does not wait for theory to authorize it; it creates situations in which theory has to catch up, revise itself, or find another language altogether.
Alain Badiou, “Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art,” in Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (Verso, 2006).
