Wilfried Dickhoff's After Nihilism: Essays in Contemporary Art by Ben Davis

Lacanian analysis teaches us the dangers of interpretation. Interpretation of a patient's symptom always runs a risk: because of her desire for the approval of the analyst, the patient may generate new symptoms simply to confirm his theory. An analogous danger is inherent in art critical interpretation in relation to the desire of the artist, and Wilfried Dickhoff's After Nihilism is significant in the way it lays out the stakes of this dilemma. For the nihilism in the title, we can read 70s Conceptual Art, and if we are 'after' nihilism, it is because Dickhoff's concern is what happens to art after conceptualism's appropriation by the institution it promised to critique. The bulk of the book consists of twenty-six tour-de-force theoretical readings of individual artists Dickhoff sees as having found a way to make meaningful art amidst the resulting chaos. The figures he brings together may seem peculiar, ranging from Francesco Clemente, someone very few theoretically-informed critics choose to love, to artists such as Cindy Sherman - the example, if ever there was one, of an artist whose work seems explicitly manufactured to meet the approval of critical fashion. Dickhoff's use of theory is less rigorous than it is something like the philosophical equivalent of a painting by David Salle, throwing fragmented opposites together: the ghostly sketch of Lacan floating on top of a huge bust of Adorno next to a copy of Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. This effect is no doubt pleasing to Dickhoff, whose overtly Romantic program for art considers artworks successful when they evidence the tension of being within "simultaneous parallel systems." This last insight is probably Dickhoff's most suggestive. High Conceptual Art questions the art object, but inasmuch as one can be certain of this questioning, it doesn't really force a confrontation with one's own preconceptions. A work is only effective, Dickhoff asserts, if it embraces the 'end of art' and yet nevertheless plays as if art were still possible, so that one is forced to question the question, unsure which game one is playing. This motifÑidentical to the Lacanian structure of the lie - is one that After Nihilism returns to time and again. And yet, what is to keep this formulation from becoming merely the worst kind of marketing, of 'having if both ways?': "Yes, he's a great painter... and heÕs clearly read Bataille!" It is this, I would suggest, that cannot be decided by formal interpretation. Keeping art's contradiction alive can only be accomplished by the insertion of an artwork into a praxis, something that transcends the mere specificity or difference of the sensuous object. A close reading of After Nihilism reveals that this is why, despite an overtly Romantic and formalist agenda, Dickhoff must repeatedly 'place' his objects within the context of the Cologne art scene within which he finds them. The presence of these momentsÑwhen the celebration of formal particulars overflows itself - is a testament to the honest ferocity with which this book confronts the dilemma of art.

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