The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art: Negative Work

In his influential essay “Provisional Painting,” Raphael Rubinstein applied the term “provisional” to contemporary painters whose work looked intentionally casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling; who appeared to have deliberately turned away from "strong" painting for something that seemed to constantly risk failure or inconsequence. In this collection of essays, Rubinstein expands the scope of his original article by surveying the historical and philosophical underpinnings of provisionality in recent visual art, as well as examining the works of individual artists in detail. He also engages crucial texts by Samuel Beckett and philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Re-examining several decades of painting practices, Rubinstein argues that provisionality, in all its many forms, has been both a foundational element in the history of modern art and the encapsulation of an attitude that is profoundly contemporary.

Raphael Rubinstein is Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston, USA. He is a New York based art critic and in 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014 The Silo was given a Best Blog Award of Excellence by the International Association of Art Critics. In April 2017, The Miraculous: Houston, a public-art installation by artist and wife Heather Bause Rubinstein, based on his book The Miraculous, debuted as part of the CounterCurrent Festival.

David Carrier has taught philosophy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and art history in Cleveland, Ohio. A former Getty Scholar and a Clark Fellow, he has been Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Class of 1932 Fellow in Philosophy, Princeton University, USA.

DAVID CARRIER is the Champney Family Professor at Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art. He has written numerous works including Principles of Art History Writing, The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s, and High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism.

Tiziana Andina is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Labont Center for Ontology at the University of Turin, Italy. She is co-editor of the Brill Research Perspectives in Art and Law series and of the Bloomsbury Aesthetics and Contemporary Art series.