Artists Space

Anywhere or Not at All

Book Launch & Talk
April 27, 2013, 7pm

This event marks the launch of writer Peter Osborne’s Anywhere or Not at All (Verso, 2013), a major new philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through an approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Osborne will give a lecture touching on the central concerns within this series of essays, particularly asking what kind of discourse can open contemporary art up effectively to critical analysis. Following his talk he will be joined in conversation by writer Suhail Malik.

A book cover with an old car vertically arranged next to Arabic writing.
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso Books, 2013). [A book cover with an old car vertically arranged next to Arabic writing.]

Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art develops the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” progressing through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London. He is a long-serving member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Conceptual Art and Marx.

Suhail Malik holds a Readership in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, London, where he is Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art. For 2012-13, Malik is Visiting Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York.