ART & OBJECTS - A review.

By: Mathyn Ressang

Art and Objects

In the introduction to his book, Art and Objects, Graham Harman gives an overview of what he
perceives as the current status of the art-world and philosophy - two worlds which he believes to be
closely connected. According to Harman, it has ended up in a ‘wilderness defined in philosophy by a
misguided opposition to realism, and in art by a superannuated commitment to the now grandfatherly
spirit of Dada”1. Modernist art, says Harman, is known to have found its theoretical fundament in the
‘formalist’ philosophy of Kant, especially his third critique, on aesthetics. The decline into this
philosophical and artistic wilderness is said to have started from the early 1960’s, when postmodern
thought and alternative approaches to art, such as Dada, pop and conceptual art began to gain
influence. Harman says this has led both philosophy and art to a dead end, and the project of this book
is to give an alternative for postmodern philosophy such as phenomenology and critical theory and
post-formalist art-criticism. It is interesting that even though he spends the greater part of the book
refuting traditional formalism and postmodernism, he does not seem to give a clear argument for
exactly why postmodern thought and post-formalist art are as problematic as he takes for granted in
this book. Harman thinks that formalism and its ontological implications have been left aside, without
having been really overcome. In order to make progress in both art and philosophy, he believes that
we must return to embrace the ‘autonomous thing-in-itself’2. Still, Harman never mentions the
historical context that has led to the rejection of Kantian thought (Thinkers like Adorno and
Merleau-Ponty accused the terror of world-war two to be theoretically justified by modernist thought)
even though it seems this would have given a more fair account of the development and reasons of
postmodern thought and art.
In essence, in this book he aims at providing a new form of formalism that preserves the
merits of Kantian thought and adapts to the criticism of postmodern thought. He makes his plea via
the lines of the philosophical school of Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO) and the result of this
synthesis between traditional formalism, the antithetical postmodernism, and the innovative OOO, is
what he calls Weird Formalism.

Overview of the book.

He discusses the ontological status of the Object in Kantian thought, which deems the beholder and
the artwork as wholly separated. The only relationship the beholder has toward the object is the way it
appears to the beholder, but the object-in-itself always remains closed off from the beholder. The
object-in-itself thereby always remains autonomous in the sense that an object, say, an apple,
maintains the same meaning or essence regardless of its context. OOO agrees with this idea of the
autonomy of the object, while the postmodernists differ in that they take the meaning of the apple as
partially dependent on the context in which the apple is encountered.
Where OOO differs from Kantian formalism is that the latter takes as a basis of philosophy
the relation between only two entities, mind and world, whereas OOO takes the supposed relation that
would exist between all the other non-human objects in the world as equally important as that of

1
Graham Harman. Art and Objects. (cambridge: Polity press. 2020.) x
2
Ibid. 4.
human-object relations. One example he gives for the non-human object relation is that of oxygen and
hydrogen, which are both autonomously existing compounds that in their relation create a new object,
namely water3. This already gives a hint to the essence of his main thesis, that the relationship
between the beholder and the artwork creates a new object, just like hydrogen and oxygen create
water.
Over the course of the book, Harman discusses two prominent art critics, Greenberg and
Fried, who he characterises as formalists, and whose works he seems to use as a sort of gateway for
moving from philosophy to art and back. After highlighting the main characteristics of OOO, Harman
focuses on the OOO’s implications on art. OOO understands art as a sub-category of beauty, and
beauty is taken as a tension between noumenal objects and their sensual qualities4. It holds that
characteristic to artworks, other objects of knowledge, is that they are unpharaprasable. Both Kant,
Greenberg, Fried and Harman agree that Beauty is never literal. It cannot be conceptually understood,
or produced by formula. The aesthetic experience of the beholder and the artwork is a ‘cognitive
activity, without being a form of knowledge’5. However, Harman disagrees with Kant placing beauty
on the human side of the relation, and with Greenberg and Fried placing it on wholly on the side of
the artwork6.
For Harman, beauty is found in the relationship of the commited beholder and the
autonomous artwork. Harman focuses on two very influential artistic currents that appear to be
strongly opposed to the formalist thinking of Kant, Greenberg and Fried, and Harman, and their
exclusion of literalism from art; Dadaism and Surrealism. The significance of these is that they, other
than modernist artists, acknowledge no importance to the aesthetic standards that were provided by
formalism. He gives the example of Marcel Duchamp, who, with his work fountain, which is literally
and nothing more than a urinal, radically tore down the criteria of what is supposed to count as art.
The fact that this work, and many others alike have become canonical in the art world, poses a
problem for the traditional formalists, in that from Duchamp on, even objects that refer to nothing
more than their sensual qualities, or, literal objects, now can count as art. Harman argues that OOO,
other than traditional formalism, includes this kind of literalism based on the following ontological
insight; art-objects, literal or metaphorical, are encountered in an aesthetic sphere, suchs as in a
museum or gallery. Thereby, the relationship of the beholder and the object already gives rise to a new
object that is the product of this relationship under influence of this sphere. Therefore, even though
Duchamps urinal is like any other, it is because it is encountered in a different sphere, that the
relationship that arises is an aesthetic one7.

Critical note
The central idea of his book is what Harman calls weird formalism. This refers to ‘the notion that the
beholder and artwork fuse jointly into a third and higher object’8. This third, higher object gives us a
new perspective on the ontology of art. Much can be said about this apparent strange (something
which he, given the name weird formalism, seems to acknowledge himself) proposition. He describes
this ‘newly formed object’ as a sort of ‘unseen atmosphere’ that contains both the beholder and the
autonomous artwork. The relationship is seen as an object in itself and not, like the phenomenologists
hold, that the intentional relationship is still something occurring inside the mind, and thereby still

3
Ibid. 44.
4
Ibid. 140.
5
Ibid. 30.
6
Ibid. 141.
7
Ibid. 163.
8
Ibid. 173.
idealist9. This newly formed object, or ‘cell’, as he calls this third object, is something that is
composed of the combination of both the beholder and the object. Harman says that in this new
approach, by taking not only the beholder, or the object as autonomous, but rather, their union, we are
able to assess a much wider range of art as objects that stand in their own right, rather than see them,
like the postmodernists, as objects whose meaning is dependent on that of other phenomena. So it is
within the holistic relation, which includes the beholders' devotion to the artwork, and the artworks
steering toward a particular interpretation, that gives rise to a paradigm in which we can assess an
artwork as an autonomous object, while still including the overcoupling context.
But then, how is this any different from the concept of interpretative, or hermeneutic reality
that has already been formulated half a century ago by thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and
Habermas? Harman dismisses these ‘mainstream phenomenologists’10 as mistakenly taking the
idealist path by treating phenomena as wholly inside of the mind. He argues that that this ‘cell’ is the
overarching object above the beholder and the artwork, but this poses the following problem: Harman
likes to use the comparison between two combined chemical that make up a new chemical, of course
we could not say that this newly formed beholder-artwork combination leads to an actual fuse of the
two. It has no material objecthood. As Harman describes this newly formed autonomous object as a
sort of ‘atmosphere’, we could say it is a hypothetical, or, metaphysical object. What this leaves us
with is that this cell that he speaks of can be worked with as an intuition, or speculation at best, and
these, of course, are things that are based in the mind. It strikes me that the ‘cell’ Harman describes is
very similar to the phenomenological idea that the beholder encounters an object, in this case an
artwork, in consideration with what is plausible or relevant to include in the encounter of the object,
except that he adds a speculative realists twist that seems to me an anticlimactic conclusion to an
interesting but somewhat biased assessment of the current state of the artistic and philosophical world.

The philosophical current of Object-Oriented-Ontology has, by highlighting the relationship between

non-human objects, the potential to give interesting alternatives to assessing the ontological status of
objects. By focussing on Art, Harman has given us such an alternative. It seems, and I believe he
would agree (at least to some extent), that this alternative is to be tried and adjusted by artists, art
critics and philosophers, in order to really reveal to what extent it would benefit the art-world and
whether it is not just a new formulation of an old (but valuable) idea.

Harman, Graham. 2020. Art and Objects. Cambridge: Polity press.

9
Ibid. 174.
10
Ibid.