To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
Alternatively, if you wish to purchase this article individually, you may do so via JSTOR. Please follow the instructions on this page.In his 2006 Hermes Lecture, titled 'Depiction, Object, Event' (2006), Jeff Wall proposes the term 'second appearance' to describe the quotation in and transmutation by the art field of social institutions not immanent to it.
If Warhol could imitate a media firm, others coming after him could imitate a museum department, a research institute, an archive, a community-service organisation and so on that is, one could develop a mimesis, still within the institution of art, of any and every one of the potential new domains of creativity suggested by the conceptual reduction, but without thereby having to renounce the making of works and abandon the art world and its patronage.1
Thus, the conceptual reduction is actually an expansion in real terms, an inflation. Under the 'post-medium' or 'expanded field' condition of art, which Wall also relates to Thierry de Duve's category of 'nominalism', such institutions are tautologically designated as art objects by their appearance in the art field - and also grammatically via their relationship to other practices inhabiting this field. 2 The examples Wall mentions, taken from a survey of contemporary biennials, include 'critical urbanism... radical pedagogies... strategies of wellness... hobbies and therapies', all amounting to an 'art of prototypes of situations' in which 'it would not be as if anyone renounced art, but that art itself became diffuse, lost track of its own boundaries and lost interest in them'.3
In an irony that we might deem delicious or unpalatable depending on our taste, the lecture was delivered to a public comprising art professionals and local business entrepreneurs. And as one of Wall's instances of 'an
