ABSTRACT
Bourdieu is dismissive of anti-art. For Bourdieu, anti-art’s opposition to art is contradictory: a transgression reliant upon the existing field of art. But Bourdieu misrepresents anti-art – and its relation to art – in addressing it in terms of transgression. For the anti-artist, art is not a unified field but always already divided: a situation which calls for the radical negation of art’s foundations, not the transgression of its limits. So how should we attend to anti-art? The difficulty is that anti-art does not, despite appearances, produce things. Rather, we should consider what the anti-artist does in terms of actions: intervening in the present. Anti-art actions are more like political slogans than artworks: attempts to counterinterpellate partisan collaborators not elicit appreciation. Thus anti-art actions must be understood in terms of the particular artistic conjuncture in which they were undertaken. The chapteranalyses examples from the historical avant-garde: from Duchamp’s readymades to Manzoni’s tins of ‘artist’s shit’.
