Contemporary art photography is post conceptual art and its form on Light Paths is that of a fragmentary of an photographic project. The projects below, which are in the process of being undertaken over a number of years, are different from the more extensive or broad ranging projects that have their own websites — such as The Bowden Archives, Mallee Routes, and Walking Adelaide. Different in that they take their bearings of being an an autonomous art from the writings of the philosophical Romantics in early modernity. One aspect of this difference is that the projects on Light Path, have been gathered into a number of series, whose totality is fragmentary in the sense of being open, fractured, incomplete and speculative with systematic intent.
Jena Romanticism (eg., Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Athenaeum’ Fragments’) place an emphasis on the historical ontology of the artwork rather than judgements of taste based on human subjectivity; philosophical art criticism over systematic philosophy (ie., that of Immanuel Kant); and a negative theory of genres that gives rise to a generic or transmedia concept of art. An autonomous art as distinct from a thing become a distinctive form of presentation of truth from science and systematic philosophy.
Peter Osborne in his Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art says that this gives rise to two parallel and competing,though to some extent also overlapping traditions in the criticism of art since the end of the eighteenth century, corresponding to the two philosophical discourses of ‘art as aesthetic’ and ‘art as (historical) ontology’.
The first runs from Kant through nineteenth-century aestheticism (Baudelaire, Pater, Wilde), via Roger Fry and Clive Bell, to Greenberg’s later formalist modernist writings, which mark the aestheticist collapse of his earlier historical self-understanding. It rests upon an aesthetic theory of the arts, with its distant origins in Renaissance naturalism, the new science of optics, and an aesthetic theory of medium that dates back to Gotthold Lessing’. Jeff Wall and Michael Fried are prominent contemporary examples in photographic culture.
The second tradition runs from philosophical Romanticism through Hegel, Duchamp, surrealism and the revolutionary Romanticism of Constructivism, to conceptual art and its consequences in what has been called the ‘post- medium condition’, or the transmedia condition of postconceptual art. It is historically open, the historical present is necessarily privileged, and has a philosophically negative theory of the ‘truth of art’ which manifests this negativity historically.
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