ABSTRACT
Rather than recourse to historicism’s investments in determinative causes, “efficient” history, it is argued, should take its cue from the after-life or the history of the artwork following its creation at a specific moment in time. The perceived temporal crisis of art history today has much to do with developments on the scene of contemporary art related to the idea of contemporaneity more broadly. Post-history and post-future are criticized here for their rather facile dismissal of history. Whereas post-history is predicated upon a teleological philosophy of history, post-future is ultimately indebted to the concept of history it purports to abandon. The concept of the past is turned on its heels and used to characterize the present, which withers away, while the past remains and accumulates into a “present past.” Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze, alongside Bruno Latour, are mobilized to form a future-oriented history model, in which anachronic quasi-objects are traced, linked, and associated in actual patterns of interconnection, in part reminiscent of the model set by the catalogue raissonné rather than the established developmental narrative of the history of art.
