How to Explain Pictures to a Dying Human: On Art in Expanded Ontologies

This article addresses how can we rethink the defining dilemma of contemporary art - the impossibility of its aim to shake off aura and 'blur with life' while remaining art at all – in relation to posthumanist conceptions of self and thought as continuous with a world that is itself living thought?

Artists of the last century increasingly included ‘external reality’ directly within the artwork in such a way that reality is made to re-enter into appearance. By introducing ‘external’ elements into new aesthetic and semantic relationships, artists have tried to blur the artwork with 'life itself'. Yet if art fails to distinguish itself from reality, it fails to be art. How, this article asks, can we rethink this defining dilemma of contemporary art in relation to posthumanist theories of the interdependence of the human with complex living webs, and the non-exclusivity of semiotic processes to human societies? How can we understand the paradox of posthumanist art that gestures to these ideas while maintaining its autonomy and separateness from reality.