The current moment in art is a slippery beast. Recent books on the subject—Right About Now: Art & Theory Since the 1990s (2007), Art Power (2008), among others—don't even try to identify movements or offer definitive judgments. Instead, they propose loose conceptual frameworks that encompass diverse, often contradictory positions. This unruly book, by the Berlin-based critic Jörg Heiser, is perhaps the boldest of this bunch. Though he doesn’t attempt to encompass the entire art world, he does claim to determine the “things that matter”.

To this end, Heiser jettisons postmodernism, returning to the notion of an avant-garde that pushes culture forward by questioning its constitutive terms. What matters in art, he asserts, is what “fuels art’s progress into the future.” This idea may sound naïve in an art world that seems to be moving in myriad directions at once. Heiser smartly accommodates this fact by characterizing contemporary art as a fractious and disjointed affair whose over-arching dynamic is a productive struggle between contradictory ideas. Accordingly, the book’s main chapters illustrate four key oppositions: pathos vs. ridiculousness, bodiless elegance vs. pungent physicality, illusion (Debordian spectacle) vs. anti-illusion (artifice exposed), and art (criticality) vs. market.

It’s a compelling argument, particularly the analysis of the role of ridiculousness, or slapstick—which he dates from Duchamp—in deflating the high seriousness of art. Yet rather than champion one position over the other, Heiser asserts that the two are utterly interdependent. Slapstick is only interesting when it has something pompous to tilt at. Thus John Baldessari's subversion of Conceptualism is successful because it acknowledges the solemnity of Joseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt, whereas Paul McCarthy's ironic grotesquerie is nothing but an exercise in debasement turning in upon itself.

As befits the restlessness of his theory, Heiser's writing is lively, if uneven. His analysis of painter Maria Lassnig's negotiation of her body's surface appearance and interior sensation is cogent and engrossing, as is his short, but revelatory history of multi-screen projection. But in his otherwise provocative chapter on ridiculousness and pathos, his brief discussion of women artists as latecomers to slapstick is but a cursory nod to feminism (even though women certainly have more to gain in undermining the establishment). Elsewhere, his argument for the participatory aspects of video installation—while rightly debunking assumptions about passive viewership—is belabored and overly literal.

The text is also marred by bad puns and cringe-inducing exuberance. Heiser describes the opposition between art's critical autonomy and its absorption in the marketplace as “J'accuse!” vs. “Jacuzzi!” Elsewhere, his exultation of the best video installation artists as “dancing with the pictures and their viewers—dancing polkas, waltzes, and sambas—dancing all night long,” is unabashedly cornball.

Yet perhaps more egregious—in a thoroughly global art world—is the book's almost exclusive focus on white artists of European descent. While Heiser notes in the introduction that he is “looking forward to reading a similar kind of book written from a non-Western perspective,” he fails to acknowledge analogous theories of flux and in between-ness advanced in the 1990s—in the West—by scholars and artists of color like Kobena Mercer and Coco Fusco. Apparently, their astute negotiations of duality and conflict—influential for a generation of artists worldwide—have only, all of a sudden, begun to “matter.”

This review originally appeared in the November/December 2008 issue of art on paper. Reprinted with permission.

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