Open Works: Art, Science, and the Transnational Avant-Gardes

This course asks how “open works” of 20^th century avant-garde practices overturned artistic conventions and decentered dominant knowledge paradigms amidst wider processes of decolonization and globalization.

“Open works,” as defined by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, comprise modern art that is structured by chance effects, ambiguity, and perceptual instability, producing a “field of possibilities” for viewing publics. Such “open works,” Eco identified, emerged as spatio-temporal relativity and quantum mechanics revolutionized science by undermining the classical premise of a fixed and predictable cosmic order. The “open work,” Eco proposed, responds to this rupture through a radical break with traditional artistic conventions.

Interrogating the pre-histories, trajectories, and political salience of “open works,” this course traces a counter-narrative of the 20^th century turn from object-based to conceptual art practices. Beginning with pre-WWII avant-gardes, we examine how widespread artistic interest in a speculative “fourth dimension” and quantum theory enabled surrealist and concrete art avant-gardes to break with perspectival representation and access domains of critical truth that subvert social conventions.

Turning to the post-war context, we will study a range of artistic groups producing “open works,” as identified by Eco, including the New Tendency movement active across Europe, the Arte Programmata movement in Italy, and kinetic art avant-gardes between London and Paris. Locating these artists as forerunners of an international turn from object-based to conceptual or “dematerialized” practices, we will critically examine how these artists advanced subversive and radical cosmic imaginations while also risking collusion with forces of technocratic governance.

Shifting to the 1970s, we will subsequently consider how artists further radicalized “open works” through a turn towards sociology, anthropology, and information theory, examining practices such as Nil Yalter’s “ethno-critical” art and the media interventions of the Collectif d’Art Sociologique in Paris and the Laboratorio di Com

We will conclude by investigating contemporary resonances of this trajectory, examining critical engagements with scientific ideas by artists such as Black Quantum Futurism, as well as the way that “open works” more broadly enabled the current prevalence of art-making as a process of collective transdisciplinary research. Throughout this course, we will attend closely to the ways that these artistic practices engage with global political dynamics, including artistic negotiations of economic crisis and authoritarian governance, the significance of artists’ migrant and racialized experiences, and their engagement with feminist, anti-colonial, and New Left social movements.