Art and Objects

The American philosopher Graham Harman is one of the more lucid writers associated with the ‘material turn’ in humanities scholarship over the last twenty years. Identified with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Speculative Realism— distant cousins of the likes of New Materialism, Thing Theory and New Realism—Harman is part of a broader movement of theorists who, in the words of Steven Shaviro, are interested in how ‘things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us’. While their common ground is much disputed, if there is such a thing as ‘theorists of the material turn’ the deprivileging of human-world relations is key; they advocate not critical modes of debunking, to discover ‘where subjectivity begins and ends’, but more speculative inquiries into non-human agency and the nature of things independent of thought. Like the French sociologist Bruno Latour (whose 2005 slogan ‘Back to Things!’ anticipated this ontological flattening of subjects and objects, turning all into actors), Harman thinks that art plays a valuable role in the contemporary rethinking of things. He states that, when it comes to OOO, ‘aesthetics is first philosophy’. Published in 2020, Art and Objects is the first book to address in detail the place of aesthetics in OOO’s perceptual schema. Unsatisfied by explanations of engagement that focus on subtractive ‘internal’ qualities or imbricated ‘external’ relations of things, OOO instead delivers the world to us as two kinds of objects [O] with two kinds of qualities [Q]—real and sensual [R and S])—thus four separate classes of aesthetic phenomena: RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ, and SO-RQ. Whether living, nonliving, natural, artificial, or conceptual, according to OOO all things can be treated as objects whose sensual qualities exist only as translated emanations of some inaccessible real object anterior to presence. From the beginning, Harman makes it clear that his book is not intended as a survey of contemporary art practices. Instead, it reads as an exercise in revitalizing the almost embarrassingly anachronistic subject of beauty under the banner of OOO, defining art as ‘the construction of entities or situations reliably equipped to produce beauty’ (xii). So, what is beauty? Harman’s delectably concise definition is ‘the theatrical enactment of a rift between a real object and its sensual qualities’ (140). As alluded to in the title, Michael Fried’s seminal 1967 essay Art and Objecthood is a key point of comparison throughout. He joins Fried in advocating absorbed and anti-literalist encounters, asking readers to reconsider formalist