Anders Kølle  1

Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023, 1-13 
© 2000 by Assumption University Press

AN APORIA OF POSSIBILITY: ON TECHNOLOGY AND 
THE LOSS OF MATERIALITY OF ART

Anders Kølle1

ABSTRACT

Numerous art historians and art critics have announced the 
death of art. From Arthur C. Danto´s Hegelian analysis to 
Hans Belting´s Kantian reading, art’s fate seems sealed 
and its potentials exhausted. These approaches either claim 
that art has become pure idea and is thus no longer art but 
philosophy, or that art has so lost itself in the myriad of it’s 
possibilities that the artistic schools, periods and traditions 
which once provided it’s stability has vanished . In the 
following article, the crisis of contemporary art is analyzed 
from a third and strictly material perspective. Drawing on 
the thinking of André Leroi-Gourhan, the article proposes 
to look at art´s current crisis as a direct result of the changed 
relations between the human and matter or between the hand 
and materiality, that modern technologies and processes of 
automation have produced. Where the human hand becomes 
increasingly superfluous, the ties to the material world that 
used to steer and guide artists is equally lost.    

Keywords: the end of art; technology and automation; 
André Leroi-Gourhan; the hand; materiality of art 



2   Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023

Many obituaries have been written for art to the point where they 
now form one of the liveliest and most promising genres of art criticism 
and art history today. It attracts intellectuals from a broad variety of 
disciplines and schools. Although there is little agreement as to the causes 
of art´s death, there is, however, broad consensus that a revival of art is 
highly unlikely – at least in the form recognized by art historians and 
art critics from the time of Winckelmann and Diderot. In the words of 
the German art historian, Hans Belting: “I spoke of the farewell to the 
guiding model of an art history with an internal logic, which was favored in 
describing shifts of style from one period to another.”2 The loss described 
by Belting is first and foremost the loss of any successional narrative, 
of any linear conception of art and its history, where styles continuously 
succeeded and replaced one another. Due to the postmodern dissolution 
of all grand narratives, due to today´s skepticism about any linear and 
coherent history, contemporary art finds itself completely disoriented, 
robbed, it seems, of its future as well as of its past. Where there is no 
history, there can be no progress, and where there is no progress, art loses 
the very driving force which used to propel it. Without history there are 
no visionaries, without tradition no rule-breakers and no avant-garde. 
Losing the “guiding model” of the past, contemporary art is therefore, 
according to Belting, losing its very foundation, indeed, its life force and 
very reason for existence: 

“We can now discern what is stirring people´s minds when 
art loses the internal mirror of all the particular genres 
in which it has been created for so long. This is where 
progress, the life force of the individual arts, ceases to keep 
the old sense. Progress is exchanged for the concept of the 
´remake´: let´s repeat what has been done before. Any new 
manifestation is no better, but also no worse… The genres 
always provided a solid framework, which now begins to 
dissolve. Art history was a framework of a different kind, 
designed to put art´s course in perspective. That is why the 
end of art history is also the end of a story: either because 



Anders Kølle  3

the story is changing or because there is, in the received 
sense, nothing more to tell.”3 

It is not my intention here to offer yet another epilogue for art. 
Personally I am less convinced than Belting that the history of art truly 
has come to an end. It may very well be that the many reports of art´s 
death are, to quote Mark Twain, ‘greatly exaggerated.’ This, however, 
does not mean that the contemporary art scene is untouched by the 
significant changes in the conception and foundation of art as described 
by Belting. The enormous profusion of styles we witness today together 
with the extremely short lifespan of any artistic expression may indeed 
appear to be the symptom of, if not a deadly illness, then at least a crisis 
that would challenge of understanding of art. It is this crisis rather than 
any presumed death of art that I wish to address.

There are many difficulties facing contemporary artists. Perhaps 
one of the biggest is the fact that everything today seems possible through 
the endless range of analogue and digital media techniques generating 
an unending variety of styles. Although this undoubtedly sounds more 
like a luxury than like a genuine and serious problem, it says something 
fundamental about the situation of the arts of today: the constant 
negotiation between possibility and necessity that historically has shaped 
the arts is today supplanted by pure possibility without any conceivable 
restraints – neither of a conceptual nor of a concrete, material nature. 
Where everything is possible, as Kierkegaard once reminded us, it is also 
possible to get lost in every possible way. So the contemporary artist is, 
like Kierkegaard´s Don Juan, faced with unending choices, all of which 
may appear equally desirable at a distance and equally dull once chosen. 
Today´s absence of any sense of framework or artistic principles and laws 
may very well prove every bit as challenging as the total lack of artistic 
possibility and freedom that has been in the darkest chapters of our past. 
Art is in this respect no different than any other activity, enterprise or 
game: some sort of resistance and opposition is needed for the possibility 
of any development to occur.



4   Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023

Surely this aporia can be addressed in several different ways. One 
might, as Belting does, analyze it in strictly art historical terms. The lack 
of resistance is thus translatable into the lack of tradition and the lack of 
artistic genres and schools. The problem is basically a problem of authority: 
where art academies and art history are losing their previous privileged 
positions, a power vacuum is created that leaves art in a seeming state of 
chaos. Professional judgement is supplanted by layman opinion and the 
contingent fashions and tastes of the art market, offering no directions 
other than the whims of collectors and gallerists. Albeit clearly elitist, 
this approach does offer important insights into the specific postmodern 
conditions where art styles are as exchangeable as fashion styles and the 
only guiding principles are the ever changing prizes of the market.  

Another, less elitist, approach will be to address this aporia from 
a more technical and concrete, materialist perspective. The problems 
facing contemporary art can also be formulated in technical terms and 
with a focus on the specific, artistic means of production. All art forms 
are techne and as such susceptible to technological developments and 
changes. As we shall try to extrapolate in the following, the problem of 
choice, the lack of any guiding principles and laws are closely related 
to larger changes within the technological field of science and society 
itself, in a period of human history where the use and handling of all sorts 
of materials and tools is subject to dramatic changes – both within and 
outside the art world. The crisis of contemporary art is, as we shall see, 
as much a crisis of the hand, of the shifting roles of manual labor and 
work, as a crisis of lofty, artistic ideas.        

At the end of his seminal work, Le geste et la parole (1964-65) 
the French anthropologist and philosopher André Leroi-Gourhan gives 
a somber account of the direction in which modern humanity is heading. 
Due to the invention of more and more sophisticated and abstract machines 
and technologies, the gap between humanity and the rest of the living 
world is constantly increasing, threatening to destroy the last ties between 
man and his environment. This severance is particularly obvious in the 
development of robotics and machine automation where the role of human 



Anders Kølle  5

labor and agency is quickly diminishing, reducing human engagement 
and involvement to an absolute minimum. While this may from a certain 
perspective be regarded as a pure victory and gain, finally freeing the 
human being from the toil of physical labor, this liberation does have 
profound and less innocent consequences for the future possibilities of 
the human being. Where automation prevails, the human hand recedes 
and becomes for the first time in mankind´s history superfluous. What is 
threatened is not only the human ability to work but our very palpable and 
physical contact with the world. Our relation to matter, to the particularity 
and very concreteness of things, is thus thrown into a state of uncertainty 
and crisis. We, as a species, are literally losing touch with the world, 
receding from our previous proximity and contact with things unto an 
ungraspable, unreachable distance. In the words of Leroi-Gourhan: 

“The loss of manual activity and the reduction of the 
human physical adventure to a passive one will cause… 
serious problems… We must therefore expect a completely 
transposed Homo sapiens to come into existence, and 
what we are witnessing today may well be the last free 
interchanges between humans and the natural world.”4 

As recognized by Kierkegaard, the liberation from all restraints 
is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Freed from tools, gestures, and 
muscle, Homo sapiens is losing its very physical and worldly foundations. 
This divorce from matter, this crisis in the relationship between man 
and environment, which today, in the age of climate change and climate 
catastrophe is manifesting itself ever louder and clearer, affects not only 
man as an empirical, sensuous, biological creature but as an intellectual 
and cultural being as well. One way of tracking and following this 
manual regression is therefore through the arts, where the relationship 
and drama between man and matter for millennia has been played out. 
If Leroi-Gourhan is right in his diagnosis then surely the manual retreat, 
the manual surrender must be inscribed and find expression in the history 
of art itself. 



6   Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023

Looked at from a purely material perspective one can detect 
two main tendencies in the developments of modern art through the 
20th century: One which leads towards an apparent freeing of matter, 
lessening the artistic grip and control; and one which seeks the complete 
abolishment of matter, pursuing sur-material and immaterial goals. What 
both tendencies, despite all differences, share is a common distrust in 
the traditional relationship between matter and tool, material and hand 
and a suspicion towards all inherited artistic technics. Where the hand is 
still actively engaged in the artistic practice, it no longer seeks absolute 
control but allows chance and contingency to play an active, sometimes 
even determinate role. Matter is no longer what is to be mastered but only 
loosely, often hastily, sculpted and formed. We see the hand tremble as if 
in the grips of a fever, leaving traces, no longer appearing to circumscribe, 
delineate or represent a thing. Figuration is either completely abandoned 
or only persists in almost illegible forms, flirting with its own demise and 
destruction. One might, as Roland Barthes5 famously does, see this as the 
signifier´s triumph over the signified, resulting in gestures that now only 
exist for their own sake. But this aesthetic pleasure derived from the works 
of Cy Twombly and other more or less abstract expressionists in no way 
contradicts or curtails the malaise and awkwardness that has creeped into 
the artistic production. A certain clumsiness and ineptitude is precisely the 
sought-after effect which is here evoked with strangely pedantic precision. 
It is as if the hand and gesture of the artist communicate their very inability 
to project their own expression: a beautiful and touching surrender for sure, 
but nevertheless an unmistakable concession. Figuration hence becomes 
a sign of the past, belonging to a bygone era, an echo of a manual and 
manipulative skill that appears increasingly outdated and foreign. From 
the last traces of blurred, shaken and contorted figures in the works of 
Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel or Asger Jorn to their complete disappearance 
in the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and 
many others, the story of painting in the 20th century would appear to be 
one of increased material emancipation and matter´s gradual but certain 
triumph over the tool and the hand. Although figuration has since then 



Anders Kølle  7

experienced an important revival, today being at least as common and 
popular as abstract art, the return to recognizable, legible figures has lost 
any kind of naturalness and naivety it might have had in the past. All kinds 
of artistic means are employed to either cover over or make excuses for 
the reappearance of figuration in art, as if figuration after having been 
abandoned for so long can only reemerge on the canvas and under the 
brushstrokes of the artist as an awkward, uncomfortable stranger: Georg 
Baselitz hangs his pictures upside down, Gerhard Richter covers his 
figurations in so many layers of paint that his figures are either partially 
or completely buried. It is as if artistic, technical skill must somehow 
make amends for its own return to the site of production. But surely, 
where the matter is set free, the hand is equally emancipated – at least 
in principle untied from any previous bonds and commitments. Today, 
everything indeed seems possible and the range of artistic styles and 
means of expression appear broader than ever before. Photorealistic art, 
abstract art and graffiti art are exhibited side by side in the galleries and 
museums of contemporary art, and the hand is free to use spray cans, 
stencils, knives, hammers and scissors in the constant pursuit of new 
expressions – not to mention the many other body parts as well as body 
fluids that have been more or less provocatively applied since the works 
of Yves Klein and the rise of feminism and body art in the 60s and 70s. 

The other main trend of the 20th century would appear to dispense 
with the hand and the tool altogether. Matter and manual labor are here 
no longer emancipated but rather circumvented or completely eclipsed. 
What begins with Marcel Duchamp and his Readymades is the realization 
that art does not have to depend on any physical practice but can consist 
of pure conceptualizations. The artist is first and foremost an intellectual 
and the main material of his work is ideas. Instead of taking the detour 
over color and paint, instead of wasting time and energy developing and 
perfecting a skill, it suffices to choose an already fabricated object and 
transplant it unto the art scene. Hence the signified now outshines the 
signifier, placing all emphasis on the content and the idea of the work 
instead of on its empirical, sensuous form. The artist is now a finder 



8   Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023

instead of a creator, a chooser instead of a craftsman. What he seeks to 
express is expressed no longer thanks to but rather in spite of the material 
support. The hand now seems either completely superfluous or reducible 
to the simple function of the index finger, pointing out what is next to be 
selected and put on display. Arthur C. Danto6 has in his Hegel-inspired 
writings famously declared this the end of art since art has dissappeared 
into the spirit, become something else, namely philosophy. Whether or 
not conceptual art truly constitutes a final break with the discipline of art 
to become pure conceptual thinking, it is clear that art can no longer be 
thought of in classic, art-historical terms. In this sense, conceptual artists 
have been far more radical in their rejection of all previous art forms and 
modes of expression than abstract painters ever were. Gone are even the 
last traces of the artworks´ aura that Adorno7 in his aesthetics held on to. 
Mass production and automation is henceforth no longer the enemy and 
destroyer of art but its new, good playmate and friend – enabling Marcel 
Duchamp to collect his mass produced urinals and bottle driers and Jasper 
Johns and Andy Warhol to exhibit their selections of soda cans, bean 
cans, and soap boxes. Immaterial ideas and material support thus enters 
into a new and significantly cooler relationship, based on the uniform 
and always predictable products of the assembly line and the machine, 
leaving the sculpting of matter outside artistic concern. Although this may 
indeed appear to be the only reasonable artistic reply to the significant 
changes in late capitalist society, there can be no doubt that something 
essential is lost on the way. In the words of Marcel Duchamp, describing 
the thoughts behind his own selections of Readymades: 

“You can choose many objects if you want but the thing 
was to choose one that you were not attracted to for its 
shape or anything, you see. It was through a feeling of 
indifference toward it that I would choose it and that was 
difficult because anything becomes beautiful if you look 
at it long enough… Indifference, you see, there is a form 
of indifference in life after all. We are indifferent to many 
things, aren´t we, and so, especially in painting or art, 



Anders Kølle  9

generally, it´s a matter of taste. A painter paints and applies 
his taste to what he paints and, in the case of the Readymade 
it was to get rid of that intention or feeling and completely 
eliminate the existence of taste, bad or good or indifferent.”8 

Together with the cooling of art’s relation to matter, it would appear 
that an emotional cooling follows as well – the new attitude towards the 
art work being one of deliberate indifference. And Duchamp is far from 
alone in his search for emotional detachment and indifference. Not to 
arouse feelings or emotions of any kind seems to become a common trait, 
even artistic strategy, in the works of a broad range of artists following 
Duchamp. Since emotions are regarded the enemy of thought, a truly 
conceptual art must do its best to avoid them – hence the anemic works 
of Joseph Kosuth, his naked and cadaverous clocks and chairs; hence the 
dry and purely analytical and intellectual aims of the Art and Language 
movement. As always, Andy Warhol took this idealized coolness and 
indifference even further, looking for boredom and emptiness itself: 

“I´ve been quoted a lot as saying ´I like boring things.´ 
Well, I said it and I meant it… Apparently, most people 
love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details 
are different. But I´m just the opposite: If I´m going to sit 
and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don´t 
want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly 
the same. Because the more you look at the same exact 
thing, the more meaning goes away, and the better and 
emptier you feel.”9

Surely, indifference, emptiness and boredom seem to be the natural 
consequence of consumer society itself where all goods are repetitious, 
interchangeable and alike. It is the luxurious boredom of the supermarket, 
the towering indifference of popular entertainment and TV shows. But 
again, this apathy can also be thought of in more technical terms: where 
the hand recedes from the artistic practice and site of production itself, 



10   Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023

liberty and boredom, passivity and emptiness become synonymous. It 
would appear there is only a short distance from the superfluity of the 
hand to the superfluity of the artist himself. Although, matter is precisely 
what no longer matters, the question is, if the manipulation of matter 
can be taken out of the artistic equation without also influencing, even 
damaging and crippling, the generating of artistic concepts and ideas? 
Isn´t the pure intellectual stance towards art threatened with emptiness 
and boredom from all sides? How far can concepts and ideas truly go 
on their solo ride? If Arthur C. Danto is right, that conceptual art is no 
longer art but philosophy, one should remember what kind of philosophy 
this is: What Danto is describing is German Idealism after the opposition 
between mind and matter, subject and object, reason and nature has been 
resolved and all historical and dialectical movements have come to a final 
standstill. As enticing and liberating as this Hegelian freeing of spirit may 
possibly sound, it does leave the crucial question, what mankind is now 
supposed to do? Surely, the sheer sterility of this final stage is enough 
to make freedom sound a terribly lot like boredom. And even without 
following Danto unto such soaring, philosophical heights, one may still 
wonder what pure concepts and ideas, left on their own, detached from all 
material concerns, are truly capable of? In the words of Leroi-Gourhan: 
“The loss of manual discovery, of the personal encounter between 
human and matter… has closed one of the doors to individual aesthetic 
innovation.”10 Where creativity is no longer challenged by anything, where 
ideas meet no material or worldly resistance, thought may seem to lose 
the very dialogue partner from which its innovative powers and vitality 
springs. What we are left with is nothing but a empty conversation: Art 
talking to itself about art – which, and this is no coincidence, is precisely 
how Ad Reinhardt has described it: “Art is art-as-art and everything else 
is everything else. Art-as-art is nothing but art.”11  

Whether we approach contemporary art by the way of modernist 
painting or by the way of conceptual art, the problem now appears to 
share certain important features: the emancipation of matter no less 
than its conceptual effacement leads to a crisis in the artistic production 



Anders Kølle  11

itself. Either art is sealed off in a tiresome, redundant conversation with 
itself or art is set free to pursue any and every imaginable goal. In both 
cases freedom seems equally problematic. The manual regression that 
characterizes our age of increased machine automation leaves the hand 
strangely jobless, often awkwardly superfluous in many, if not most, 
day to day operations  – a tendency that the coming years of new IoT 
technologies are sure to make even more pronounced. The deliberate 
expression of manual ineptitude, the stumbling and stuttering of the 
modern and modernist hand across so many canvases, metals and marble 
blocks is perhaps the melancholic yet beautiful sign of the human hand´s 
gradual withering and faltering. Let´s recall what the concept of techne 
used to mean: for centuries art was regarded primarily as a craft, giving 
form, providing shape to matter. The word techne derives from the Proto-
Indo-European root “Teks“, meaning “to weave.” This should undoubtedly 
be taken literally as the production of garments and textiles which has, 
throughout the history of mankind, played an essential, indispensable 
role. But the word may also evoke a number of transferred meanings that 
are no less significant to a traditional understanding of art: to weave, not 
only garments, but also brushstrokes, colors, impressions – to weave ideas 
and matter, to weave concepts and form in an ongoing dialogue between 
opportunity and necessity, freedom and law.

   



12   Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 24 no. 2 July to December 2023

ENDNOTES

1  Anders Kølle teaches at the International College, Khon Kaen University, 
Thailand.

2  Hans Belting: Art History after Modernism (Chicago: The University 
of Chicago Press, 2003), 7.

3  Ibid., 14.
4  André Leroi-Gourhan: Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology, 1993), 407.
5  Roland Barthes: The Responsibility of Forms (New York: Farrar Straus 

& Giroux, 1985)
6  Arthur C. Danto: After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale 

of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)
7  Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of 

Minnesota Press, 1998)
8  Jeanne Siegel: Artwords – Discourse on the 60s and 70s (New York: 

Da Capo Press, 1992), 17.
9  Lars Svendsen: A Philosophy of Boredom (London: Reaktion Books, 

2005), 104.
10  André Leroi-Gourhan: Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology, 1993), 397.
11  Jeanne Siegel: Artwords – Discourse on the 60s and 70s (New York: Da 

Capo Press, 1992), 51.



Anders Kølle  13

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1998

Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. New York: Farrar Straus 
& Giroux, 1985 

Belting, Hans. Art History after Modernism. Chicago: The University of 
Chicago Press, 2003

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014

Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of 
History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014

Danto, Arthur C. What Art Is. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014

Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Cambridge: Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, 1993

Leroi-Gourhan, André. Treasures of Prehistoric Art. New York: Harry 
N. Abrams, 1967

Leroi-Gourhan, André. The Hunters of Prehistory. New York: Atheneum, 
1989

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on 
Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 

Siegel, Jeanne. Artwords – Discourse on the 60s and 70s. New York: Da 
Capo Press, 1992

Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books, 2005