non places and the spaces of art
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IntroductionThis is a paper about cultural form. More speci�-
cally, it is a paper about the transformation of a
particular Western cultural form, art (in its modern,
generic, post-Romantic, institutionalised sense as‘autonomous’), under the conditions of an emer-
gent global capitalist modernity. It moves in four
parts from 1) a clari�cation of the notion of ‘global
capitalist modernity’, via 2) discussion of the signif-
icance of space to the understanding of art as cultural form, to 3) a critical exposition of the con-
cept of ‘non-place’, as the spatial correlate of the
temporal form of the modern, and 4) a characteri-
sation of ‘art-space’ as a distinctive – indeed, exem-
plary – type of non-place, current transformationsof which need to be understood in terms of devel-
opments in the spatial logic of modernity itself.1
1. A global capitalist modernity?For all its ubiquity and apparent simplicity, ‘moder-
nity’ remains at times a confusing term. It is under-stood here to refer to a culture of temporal
abstraction centred on that restless logic of nega-
tion that makes up the temporal dialectic of the
new. As such, it de�nes a distinctive structure of
historical experience. Nonetheless, the unity of thisstructure notwithstanding, its concrete meanings
are open to signi�cant historical variation, relative
to the speci�c terms and boundaries of the various
�elds of experience that are subjected to its
temporal logic, and to the speci�c modes of nega-
tion that are employed. Such negations give
determinate content to ‘the modern’ in any partic-
ular instance, in each speci�c time and place. ‘Themodern’, in other words, is primarily a schema, in
Kant’s sense: a ‘rule of pure synthesis’ or ‘tran-
scendental determination of time’ that mediates
the pure givenness of appearances with categorial
or intelligible forms. It is only secondarily or deriv-atively a mode of historical periodisation (with
various beginnings, but no end) and a cultural-
historical project. ‘Modernity’ is the name for an
actually existing, or socially realised, temporal
formalism that is constitutive of certain formationsof subjectivity. It is in this sense that it is a distinc-
tively ‘cultural’ category: the fundamental form of
time-consciousness in capitalist societies.2
Within the terms of this analysis, art is modern
to the extent to which it is dependent for its intelligibility upon the temporal logic of negation
characteristic of the dialectic of ‘the new’, in a qual-
itatively historical (rather than a merely fashion-
based) sense of the term. That is, it is modern to
the extent to which it makes its claim on thepresent, through its negation of past forms, in the
name of a particular, qualitatively different future.
Furthermore, as the art of a present which is itself
modern (in the sense of understanding itself within
the terms of the dialectic of the new), modern artis inherently engaged with the issue of abstraction
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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001
Non-places and the spaces of art
Peter Osborne Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy, Middlesex University,
London N17 8HR, UK
© 2001 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 / DOI: 10.1080/13602360110048203
at the level of its social content, as well as those ofboth its own historical logic and, more concretely,
its relation to �guration – this more immediate
sense in which art is conceived as being ‘abstract’
being but a particular artistic means for the expres-
sion of the other two. Indeed one might say, fromthis point of view, that art is the privileged social
site – or at the least, the catalytic trigger – for the
experience of abstraction, in and for itself, as an
historical form. Modern art extracts abstraction
from its various social sites and re�ects upon it asform. Hence the danger, but by no means the
necessity, of aestheticisation, which involves a
forgetting of the social bases of abstraction as a
form of experience.
Such are the presuppositions about modernityand art that govern what follows. However, if the
modern is a temporal concept, it nonetheless has
certain spatial – speci�cally, certain geo-political –
conditions of existence. These conditions are
currently undergoing radical transformation in theprocess of the globalisation of capitalism as an
economic and cultural form. It is for this reason, in
my view, that the global capitalist modernity that
is currently emerging must be considered a distinc-
tively new historical form of modernity itself. Forthe fundamental change in its spatial conditions
alters the distribution and dynamics of its temporal
form. This is not ‘late’ modernity (it shows no signs
of ending), let alone ‘postmodernity’ (an idea that
appears more preposterous by the day), but, moresimply, another, more generalised form of moder-
nity itself: supermodernity, perhaps, in the light of
the intensi�cation of its temporal immanence,
although personally I do not favour the term.
This process may be summed up in three theses:
1. We live in an emergent global modernity.
2. At the same time, there are many modernities;
but the logic of multiplicity of these moderni-
ties is different – has a different conceptualshape – from the multiplicity of previous
forms.
3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, geo-
politically, about the hegemony of the West,
but about the hegemony of capital.
Let me explain these, very brie�y, in turn.
1. We live in a global modernity. This is to
say, the globalisation of certain socio-economic
processes currently constitutive of modernity as aform of historical experience (overwhelmingly but
not exclusively, capitalist relations of production and
exchange) means that, for the �rst time historically,
as a result of the collapse of the Soviet system (the
dream of a socialist modernity), and at a certainlevel of abstraction and possible experience, moder-
nity is everywhere. Modernity has become spatially
one. There is a single spatial ground to the de�ni-
tion of the historical present. In particular, within
the current form of capitalist globalisation, the twomain geo-political conditions of the previous form
of modernity (colonialism and the Cold War) are no
longer the primary spatial basis for the temporal
differentiation of the new. The temporal differen-
tial of the modern is no longer primarily derivedfrom historically �xed or enduring socially coded
spatial differences; it is immanent to a single plan-
etary space of which all places are a part, albeit in
radically uneven ways. This temporal differential is
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Non-places and the spaces
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distributed across global social space in new, morecomplex and often rapidly changing ways.
2. At the same time, there are many moderni-
ties: distinct forms of experience of the modern.
However, these are either socio-spatially speci�c
forms of experience of (the one) global modernity(socio-spatially embedded perspectives on its glob-
ality, if you like), or the result of social processes
and practices at lower levels of spatial organisation:
within regions, for example, or within historically
received patterns of inter-national domination. The‘modern’ temporal coding of such historically
received relations of domination (colonialism, impe-
rialism, Cold War) subsists within global modernity,
but it conditions, rather than in itself determining,
the distribution of temporal differentiations at aglobal level. This multiplicity of modernities has a
new conceptual shape, to which the idea of ‘alter-
native’ modernities is inadequate. For as Harry
Harootunian has argued, the notion of alternative
modernities tends to reinscribe the historicallyreceived geo-political particularisms of the moder-
nity/tradition binary of colonial difference, within its
generalisation (through simple quantitative multi-
plication) of the �rst term.3 The multiplication of
modernities within global modernity has, rather, amore complex, distributional logic.
3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, about
the hegemony of the West, so much as about the
hegemony of capital. Capital is not in itself tied to
any territorial principle (this is the distinctive modeof abstraction of the value form), although different
regimes of accumulation may have particular geo-
political conditions of existence at particular histor-
ical times. ‘The West’ has been the geo-political
carrier of the principle of capitalism, historically, but capitalism is increasingly generalised, residing
immanently in the global economic system,
following a territorial logic that may enter into
con�ict with the geo-political interests of its primary
‘hosts’. Global modernity (one, internally differen-tial, historical present) is as much, if not more,
about the historical effects of the relations between
different forms of capital, as about the relations
between capitalist and non-capitalist social forms.
Different forms of capital refunction (appropriateand transform but also preserve) a variety of non-
capitalist social forms, producing historically
ambiguous identities and contradictory experiences
of abstraction.4
This emergent global capitalist modernity has two additional spatial features to which I would like
to draw attention: 1) an intensi�cation of the
primacy of temporal over spatial relations to the
point of the immanent negation of place as a spa-
tial variable – which is not the same thing as thenegation of space, since ‘space’ is not reducible
to ‘place’; 2) a focusing or concentration of this
process on changes in the spatial determinations of
metropolitan centres, giving rise to what Saskia
Sassen has called ‘global cities’ or, more broadly,what Manuel Castells describes as ‘informational
cities’.5 These changes derive from changes in the
spatial logic of economic and communicational rela-
tions and have de�nite implications for the devel-
opment, or fundamental determinations, of art asa cultural form; implications with direct relevance to
ongoing debates about the autonomy of art, insti-
tutionalisation, and avant-gardes. It is thus through
this spatial lens that I shall approach these debates.
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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001
2. Art and spaceThis is hardly a new move. It was fashionable in the
1980s and early 1990s to distinguish postmodernistfrom modernist theory by a turn (or return) to space
and spatial relations, against the supposedly one-
sided obsession with time and history constitutive
of the problematic of modernity. That any such
move from ‘time’ to ‘space’ is simple-minded (likethe af�rmative conception of postmodernism
itself, or indeed, the idea of a temporal problem-
atic without spatial presuppositions and implica-
tions) hardly needs restating today. When we speak
independently of ‘time’ and ‘space’ we always dealonly with aspects of integral sets of time-space rela-
tions. Nonetheless, the spatial conditions of various
temporal relations were undoubtedly neglected,
theoretically, in earlier debates about modernity, in
part because of the relative historical stability duringthat period of their implicitly assumed basic form:
the territoriality of the nation-state. The new focus
on space within Anglophone theory during the
1980s and 1990s, at the intersection of disciplinary
transformations in geography, urban sociology,political economy, anthropology, architecture, and
cultural theory, recti�ed this neglect, to a great
extent, �rst at the level of the local (especially, the
urban), second at the level of regions (both within
and beyond nation states), and more recently, atthe global level. However, in the main, this litera-
ture has remained isolated from the (post-post-
modernism) renewal and complication of debates
about modernity, in large part because of its devel-
opment within the self-enclosed and increasinglyimplausible problematic of postmodernism. It has,
though, connected up with both post-minimalist
debates in art theory (especially around the notionof public art)6 and critical writing about the archi-
tectural schemes of various post-conceptual artists
(such as Dan Graham) and the gradual ‘architec-
turalisation of art’ with which such art may be asso-
ciated.7
This is a tendency that goes far beyond the
increased importance of architectural design to
museum development and display, and the insistent
presence of architectural projects in art spaces
(plans, models, diagrams, computer-simulatedbuildings, etc), to include gallery-alteration and
building-modi�cation as not merely institutionally
recognised, but increasingly dominant, art forms.8
Minimalism effaced the boundary between painting
and sculpture, drawing attention to the art object’srelations to its institutional space; post-minimalist
art often moved outside the physical locality of the
gallery altogether. This new type of work situates
itself at the boundaries between architectural space
and its environment at a time when the distinctionbetween architecture and infrastructure is itself
being challenged by newly integrated forms
of urban planning, made possible by new design
technologies and building processes and materials.9
It points back to the prescient signi�cance of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, although it
tends to de-politicise and aestheticise his legacy. It
points forward to a new stage in the development
of the post-conceptual art culture of installation or
spatial instantiation. (Installation, on my under-standing, is the spatial instantiation of art ideas.)
These are developments to which the still power-
ful Situationist problematic of commodi�cation
and technological mediation (‘spectacle’) remains
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relevant, but to which it increasingly appears, incrucial respects, inadequate. They also mark a
certain historical redundancy in existing forms of
the artistic project of institutional critique, insofar
as they presuppose the art museum and gallery as
the prevailing physical sites of contemporary art. Ishall take a conceptual approach to these develop-
ments, starting at the highest level of abstraction:
the negation of place.
3. Non-placeThe idea of non-places derives from the French
historian Michel de Certeau’s Invention of the
Everyday. Volume One (1974), but it is from the
short but powerful text by the French anthropolo-
gist Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to anAnthropology of Supermodernity (1992), which in
certain respects inverts de Certeau’s use of the
term, that I shall take my cue. Augé’s book is
concerned to rede�ne the object of an anthropo-
logical study of ‘the contemporary world’. It introduces the idea of non-places as the spatial
dimension of a general conception of ‘super-
modernity’ as a culture of ‘excess’, de�ned by an
‘overabundance of events’, in which the very idea
of individuated culture, ‘localised in time andspace’, has become redundant. As the spatial
consequence of ‘changes of scale,. . . the prolifer-
ation of imaged and imaginary references, and . . .
the spectacular acceleration of means of transport’,
Augé’s idea of non-places embraces:the installations needed for the accelerated cir-
culation of passengers and goods (high-speed
roads and railways, interchanges, airports) . . .
just as much . . . as the means of transport
themselves . . . [the proliferating] transit pointsand temporary abodes . . . under luxurious or
inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats,
holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty
towns threatened with demolition or doomed
to festering longevity) . . . the great commer-cial centres . . . where the habitué of super-
markets, slot machines and credit cards
communicates wordlessly, through gestures,
with an abstract, unmediated commerce . . .
and �nally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilise extraterrestria l
space for the purposes of a communication
so peculiar that it often puts the individual in
contact only with another image of him [or
her]self.’10
As its syntax suggests, ‘non-place’ is conceived
negatively, as ‘a space which cannot be de�ned as
relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.’
As such, it is a form of space characterised by
abstraction, in which its passing inhabitants locatethemselves �rst and foremost through relations
with words. This ‘invasion of space by text’, as Augé
puts it, is understood to produce a ‘solitary contrac-
tuality’ as the distinctive mode of social existence
of its (temporary) inhabitants. ‘Alone, but one ofmany, the user of a non-place is in contractual rela-
tions with it (or with powers that govern it) . . .
[and] is reminded, when necessary, that the
contract exists.’ Such ‘instructions for use’ may be
prescriptive, prohibitive or informative (‘Take right-hand lane’ and ‘You are now entering the
Beaujolais region’ are Augé’s distinctively French
examples); they may be in ordinary language or in
more, or less, explicitly codi�ed ideograms; and
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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001
their proponents are not individuals but institutionsof various sorts, the presence of which is at times
explicitly stated (Metropolitan Transport Authority),
at others only vaguely discernible.11 Augé’s non-
places are thus the dialectical residue of the dual
negation of place by itineracy and textuality.However, productive as I hope this idea will be
shown to be, Augé’s presentation of the concept
of non-place is both theoretically ambiguous and
critically ambivalent. Theoretically, it equivocates
between an abstract and a dialectical conception ofnegation. Critically, it oscillates between a back-
ward-looking romanticisation of the anthropolog-
ical conception of place and a forward-looking
positive ‘ethnology of solitude’. This is the result of
the restrictions of the anthropological perspective.Thus, Augé writes:
The non-place . . . never exists in a pure form;
places reconstitute themselves in it; relations
are restored and resumed in it; the ‘millennial
ruses’ of ‘the invention of the everyday’ and‘the arts of doing’, so subtly analysed by
Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and
deploy their strategies. Place and non-place are
rather like opposed polarities: the �rst is never
completely erased, the second never totallycompleted; they are like palimpsests on which
the scrambled game of identity and relations
is ceaselessly rewritten.12
This is in many ways a plausible – indeed convincing
– even poetic, scenario. However, if the non-place never exists in a ‘pure form’ (that is, as an
absolute negation or annihilation of place), this
is surely because it can only be coherently
construed, conceptually (and not just as an accident
of ‘existence’), as itself intrinsically a special type ofplace, constituted as a place by its dialectical nega-
tion of place in the anthropological sense of a space
that generates identity-forming meanings out of
the permanence and generational continuity of the
physical contiguity of its boundaries. That is, I wantto argue, all non-places are places qua non-places,
not only in addition or palimpsestically; since their
meaning derives from their determinate negation
of the relation between locale and meaning,
internal to the boundaries of physical contiguitywhich de�ne what Manual Castells calls the ‘space
of places’, which is the terrain of Augé’s analysis.
(In Castells’s words: ‘A place is a locale whose form,
function and meaning are self-contained within the
boundaries of physical contiguity.’)13 Hence Augé’svarious lists of ‘non-places’. Yet this form of dialec-
tical interiority to place tempers the radicalism of
the idea of non-place, reducing its challenge to the
spatial logic of places to the blocked passage of a
negative dialectic. Hence its critical ambivalence –only poetically resolved.
Despite his implicit account of the social basis
of non-places in the revolution in transport and
communications technologies in market societies,
and his understanding of their tendency to gener-alisation, as all places increasingly become places
through which people travel – for Augé, traveller ’s
space is the ‘archetype’ of non-place14 – Augé fails
to press the concept of non-place beyond its
abstractly negative determination, towards the ideaof a new spatial logic. He leaves the concept of
place in place. For Augé, the only positive content
of the concept of non-place resides in the idea
of solitary contractuality, an associated ‘emptying
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Non-places and the spaces
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of individuality’,15 and its necessarily being ‘over-written’ by conventional relations of place by the
actors within it. In particular, the concept of place
fails to register within itself the spatial dimension
of the new forms of interdependence that exceed
the logic of place (whether by transport or commu-nication) and which render the notion of non-place
necessary. Such new forms of interdependence
exceed the anthropological sense of place, not by
virtue of their failure to generate a certain identity-
forming type of meaning, but by their negation ofthe purely spatial dimension of place as physical
contiguity. (The anthropological imagination fails to
conceive of the possibility of an identity-forming
generation of meaning outside the con�nes of
place – in the speci�c sense of a place de�ned by‘boundaries of physical contiguity’. In this respect,
the conceptual destruction of anthropology is a
condition for thinking the structure of experience
under the conditions of a global capitalist moder-
nity. Critical anthropology can never, in principle, becritical enough.) However, if one conceives Augé’s
non-places in the context of such networks of
relations, they appear less as ‘empty’ or ‘solitary’
versions of traditional places and more as radically
new ontological types of place, constituted quaplaces through their relations to another spatiality,
which Castells calls the ‘space of �ows’. This ‘space
of �ows’ is a purported new spatial logic grounded
in ‘the transformation of location patterns of core
economic activities under the new technologicalsystem . . . the rise of the electronic home and the
. . . evolution of urban forms.’ It governs ‘�ows of
capital, �ows of information, �ows of technology,
�ows of organisational interaction, �ows of images,
sounds and symbols’ – not exclusively, according toCastells, but nonetheless already ‘dominantly’.16
(This is an economic-technological version of the
globalisation thesis.) The international art world is
a space of �ows.
What Augé calls ‘non-places’, it would seem, aremore properly conceived as the product of the
dialectic of the space of places and the space of
�ows. In this sense – that is, critically reconceived
– the idea of non-place may be developed into
a genuinely ‘post-anthropological’ conception ofplace, which moves beyond Augé’s self-under-
standing. In fact, it promises to move beyond
Castells’s own still abstractly oppositional sense of
what he nonetheless acknowledges to be a dialec-
tical relation between places and �ows, in whichthe contradictions between their different logics
appear, in his words, as ‘a structural schizophrenia
. . . that threatens to break down communication
channels in society’.17 (It should be noted that the
two sides of this supposed ‘schizophrenia’ are actu-ally mainly distributed between different, hierarchi-
cally related, social groups. In this respect, the
oppositional element in the structure represents a
con�ict of interests and forms of identity, rather
than a split within a single social subject: the emer-gence of a new spatial elite. There is a con�ict here,
not over ‘space’ as such, so much as over spatiali-
sation.) Finally, such a rethinking of Augé in rela-
tion to Castells raises the possibility of giving
analytical substance to what Hardt and Negri haverecently called ‘a new place in the non-place’ or
(better) ‘a new place of the non-place’, which
would be the site of ‘ontologically new determina-
tions of the human’, an alternative (for them,
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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001
republican) global form of non-place opposed tothe non-place of the currently emerging power they
call ‘Empire’.18
It is the prophetic hope of this idea that it will
resolve the contradiction (stoically endured by
Augé, with a certain melancholy) between the factthat, in Augé’s words, ‘never before have individual
histories been so explicitly affected by collective
history, but never before, either, have reference
points for collective identi�cation been so
unstable.’19 Whether or not this might be any more than a prophetic idea depends in large part
upon the relations between place and non-place,
places and �ows; and in particular upon the
constitution of places qua non-places by �ows. This
happens at all levels of place-based spatial organi-sation: from the human body all the way up to
what Hardt and Negri treat as the (politically) ulti-
mate non-place, the planet, or at least the physical
contiguity of its surface layers. (There are other
places to which humans, or their crafts, have trav-elled or might be imagined to travel – other planets
– central to the political imaginaries of the last
century. But they do not as yet bear on the
question of the actual spatial form of political
subjectivisation, which is the issue here.) Mostimportant of all, perhaps, is the mediating level of
global/informational cities, at which we may also
locate the network of the international artworld.
Global/informational cities are ‘spaces of contem-
poreity’, in the literal sense of a coming togetherof times – nodal points of multiple temporalities –
and the prime mediating sites of the dialectic of
places and �ows, the spatial register of interacting
temporal forms.20
4. Art-space as non-placeThe institutional spaces of art are related to the
new global/informational metropolitan non-placesthrough the network character of the international
artworld, but also, more fundamentally, via the deep-
rooted immanence of metropolitan spatial experi-
ence to modern art itself, both in its formal structure
and context of reception. As Brian O’Doherty has put it, with reference to Schwitters’s Merzbau, but
the point holds for modern art more generally:
The city provided the materials, models of
process, and primitive esthetic of juxtaposition
– congruity forced by mixed needs and inten-tions. The city is the indispensible context of
collage and of the gallery space. Modern art
needs the sound of traf�c outside to authen-
ticate it.21
The organising principle of collage is the mythos ofa city; and collage is at the core of a generic (non-
medium-based) modernism. But modern art still
‘needs the sound of traf�c outside to authenticate
it’, to refer it back to this principle, because of the
self-enclosed, self-insulating character of galleryspace. It is in its speci�c character as a self-enclosed
and specialised place that the gallery appears as an
exemplary or ‘pure’ non-place: constituted as a
non-place by its dual negation of place-based social
functions by itinerary and textuality: the itinerary ofthe viewer, the ‘textuality’ of the work – a form of
itinerary that mediates the universality of the work’s
address with the individuality of relations of private
property. In O’Doherty’s words, ‘the empty gallery
. . . [is] modernism’s greatest invention’ because thewhite cube is ‘the single major convention through
which art is passed’:
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If art has any cultural reference (apart frombeing ‘culture’) surely it is in the de�nition
of our space and time. The �ow of energy
between concepts of space articulated through
the artwork and the space we occupy is one
of the basic and least understood forces inmodernism. Modernism space rede�nes the
observer’s status, tinkers with his [/her] self-
image. Modernism’s conception of space, not
its subject matter, may be what the public
rightly conceives as threatening. Now, ofcourse, [it is 1976] space contains no threats,
has no hierarchies. Its mythologies are drained,
its rhetoric collapsed. It is simply a kind of
undifferentiated potency. This is not a ‘degen-
eration’ of space but the sophisticated conven-tion of an advanced culture which has
cancelled its values in the name of an abstrac-
tion called ‘freedom’. Space now is not just
where things happen; things make space
happen.22
A familiar minimalist insight, you might say. Indeed
it is, and it led rapidly to the transgression of literal
(or ‘empirical’) gallery space, and the proliferation
of ‘site’-based work, since ‘things make space
happen’ and not the other way around. However,and this is my point here, it is naïve to believe that
this transgression of literal or ‘empirical’ gallery
space constitutes a violation of the ontological
character of art-space as instituted by the gallery
and the modern art museum. Rather, the space thatart-things/relations ‘make happen’ remains art-
space, wherever it is, insofar as the contextual ‘art
character’ or function of the things/relations
remains tied up with the (much misunderstood)
notion of ‘autonomy’. In this sense, art-space is self-instituting, once historically established through
what O’Doherty calls ‘the placelessness and time-
lessness’ of the gallery’s ‘hysterical cell’: art turns
space into art-space. Non-place is the spatial dimen-
sion of art’s autonomy, and thus, its continuingmodernity. What keeps this space stable, O’Doherty
argues, is the lack of alternatives. ‘A rich constella-
tion of projects comments on matters of location’,
but they do not so much suggest alternatives
as ‘enlist . . . the gallery space as a unit of estheticdiscourse.’23 My claim is stronger: not only is
gallery-space a unit of aesthetic discourse in post-
minimalist art, it establishes the ontological struc-
ture of art-space which must subsequently be
recreated by the work in each instance whereverit is.
The ‘architecturalisation of art’ is in this respect
also a reduction of architecture to art. The idea that
‘everything is architecture’, in Charles Eames’s
famous words, is a particular in�ection of the ideathat ‘anything can become art’. Indeed, it is this
latter principle viewed from the standpoint of
construction. Taken literally, such architectural
imperialism presages the end of architecture. For
the principle is unstable. ‘Everything’ and ‘anything’quickly become ‘nothing in particular’ and then
‘nothing’. That ‘anything can become art’ marks
the destruction of medium speci�city, convention-
ally associated with neo-Dada and minimalism, but
it is more fundamentally realised in conceptual art, as the condition of possibility of the main trans-
formation in the ontological status of art over the
last three decades: namely, the replacement of
the primacy of the ‘object’ by the installation or
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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001
instantiation of the art idea. Fundamentally, it is not objects that are ‘installed’ here (although they
may be the literal medium), or even works, but art
ideas. Works are the product of the installation.
Installation has been transformed from a technical
to an ontological category. In the process, art isbecoming co-extensive with the material articula-
tion of art-space. This is a process belatedly recog-
nised by the major art institutions and recently
symbolically sealed by the acquisition by the
Museum of Modern Art, New York (cathedral ofpre-conceptual modernism), of PS1 in Brooklyn.
Painting is itself subject to this condition. That is,
just as during the 1960s, the status of painting as
‘an’ art, sui generis, gave way to the requirement
that paintings legitimate themselves directly as ‘art’(‘painters’ had to become ‘artists’, they were no
longer artists simply by virtue of being painters), so
the use of paint to make ‘art’ now increasingly
requires the painting (no longer an ontological cate-
gory) to make a claim on the broader art-space.One can see Schnabel struggling with this, I think,
and it is perhaps the more interesting aspect of
certain 1980s neo-expressionist works by Baselitz
and Kiefer. However, the art-character of the archi-
tecture of contemporary museums supervenes,insistently, on the objects within them. The �rst,
New York Guggenheim, was the forerunner here,
now franchised internationally on the back of the
success of Gehry’s Bilbao building and one can see
a similar process at work in the great turbine hallof the Tate Modern, in London. A peculiar reversal
is occurring: it is now only outside these spaces
(allegedly dedicated to it) that contemporary art can
‘live’ critically on its own terms. This was always
true of the museum as mausoleum, but it isbecoming true of the contemporary art museum
and gallery too. However, and this is my main point,
paradoxically, art can only ‘live’ there, outside the
gallery, by recreating the ontological character of
gallery space (art-space) in various ways, trans�g-uring the social character of the space it occupies.
Contemporary art produces (or fails to produce)
the non-place of art-space as the condition of its
autonomy and hence its functioning as ‘art’. That
is, autonomy is not an external condition of art, butmust be produced anew, on the basis of its external
conditions, in each instance, by each work, by its
immanent negation of place. Art cannot live, qua
art, within the everyday as the everyday. Rather, qua
art, it necessarily interrupts the everyday, fromwithin, on the basis of the fact that it is always both
autonomous and ‘social fact’.24 It is the continued
search for a productive form of this duality that has
driven art beyond the literal physical space of
museum and gallery into other social spaces. It isin this sense that the internal space of the gallery
has become, in O’Doherty’s words, ‘an emptiness
gravid with the content art once had’: a negative
image of the content art still seeks outside the
gallery, compensated by the architectural art-spaceof the gallery itself. Ironically, under these condi-
tions, it is perhaps works of institutional critique
alone that are currently keeping the contemporary
art museum alive as a space for art other than the
architecture of the buildings themselves.
Notes and references1. This is the text of a talk to the conference ‘Returns
of the Avant-Garde: Post-War Movements’, organised
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Non-places and the spaces
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by the Centre for Arts Research, Technology and
Education (CARTE) and the School of Architecture,
University of Westminster, 24–25 November 2000. It
draws on materials from a larger project on art as a
cultural form, ‘Art or Aesthetic?’, for which I am
grateful for support from the Arts and Humanities
Research Board of the British Academy.
2. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity
and Avant-Garde (Verso, London, 1995), ch. 1.
3. H.D. Harootunian, ‘Ghostly Comparisons’, paper for
the Traces conference ‘The Impacts of Modernities’,
Ewha University, Seoul, 23–24 September 2000;
forthcoming in Traces: A Multilingual Journal of
Cultural Theory and Translation, no.3 (2002).
4. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race,
Class, Nation: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris
Turner (Verso, London and New York, 1991).
5. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991);
Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information
Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-
Regional Process (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989).
6. See, for example, Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art
and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996).
7. See, for example, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected
Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, edited by
Alexander Alberro (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and
London, 1999), Pts III and VI, and Anthony Vidler,
Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in
Modern Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and
London, 2000), Pt II.
8. For example, Jorge Pardo’s current (year 2000)
‘Project’ on the ground �oor of the Dia Centre in
Manhatten; or Richard Wilson’s 1997 modi�cation of
the Serpentine Gallery, London.
9. See, for example, the plans submitted by the �nalists
for New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture
Competition for the Design of Cities, which asked
participants to redesign the area of the West Side of
Manhatten from around Penn Station to the Hudson
River, exhibited at the CCA, Montreal, 15 November
2000 – 15 April 2001. The prize was won by Peter
Eisenman, but the most impressively ‘infrastructural’
submission was the one by Jesse Reiser and Naako
Umemoto.
10. Marc Augé, Non Places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe
(Verso, London, 1995), pp. 28–32, 78–9.
11. Ibid., pp. 77–8, 83, 99, 94, 101, 96.
12 Ibid., pp. 87, 78–9.
13. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture. Volume 1. The Rise of the
Network Society (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), p. 423.
14. Non-Places, op. cit., p. 86.
15. Ibid., p. 87.
16. The Rise of the Network Society, op. cit., pp. 377,
412. See also pp. 410–18.
17. Ibid., p. 428.
18. Michael Herdt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000),
pp. 216–7, 208, 188–90.
19. Ibid., p. 37.
20. On Castells’s analysis, space is ‘crystallised time’ or
‘the material support of time sharing social practices’.
The Rise of Network Society, op. cit., p. 411. This is
the socially dominant aspect of the space-time
dialectic because it is through time that we are consti-
tuted as �nite – that is, mortal – beings. It is the onto-
logical signi�cance of the constitution of �nitude
through mortality that is the element crucially lacking
from Marx’s materialism.
21. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology
of Gallery Space (1976, 1981, 1986) (University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1999), p. 44. Returning
to this text today one is struck by both its radicalism
and incisiveness – so different from most of today’s
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writings in the purportedly critical, but largely merely
rhetorical, genre of museum studies.
22. Ibid., pp. 38–9.
23. Ibid., pp. 107, 80.
24. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 225–9.
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