REALITY TESTS Tim Griffin on Hal Foster’s book 'What Comes After Farce?' on Contemporary art. "After all, in recent years, plenty of doubt has been cast on the efficacy of critique within the domain of art, mostly revolving around the waning of its public sphere. But such a condition is only another instance of art as the canary in the coal mine. Looking beyond critique’s limited scope now, as laid out in Foster’s volume, we can begin to see clearly how our ambiguous yet urgent times require different models and terms of engagement." "...as when he makes short work of the contemporary art world’s spiraling expansion in tandem with shifting economic structures. For instance, he handily recounts how artists in the early days of Minimalism took disused industrial spaces as their studios, and thus were able to create larger works, which ultimately required larger exhibition venues, which in turn inaugurated an architectural “space race,” wherein buildings themselves became sculptures of a kind. There is always a dialogue between such action and abstraction, economic or otherwise." "..he points to the example of Hito Steyerl and her declaration that people are already readymades of a kind, impacted so indelibly by the technologies around us—“we successfully impersonate a human for a machine,” she says of the common computer user—that our only subversive option may be to embrace, in a marvelous instance of rhetorical jiu-jitsu, our own “thingness.” Instead of resolving any contradiction between our subjectivity as it is trafficked as an object in culture, she wishes to “intensify it,” aiming to create the possibility of turning the machine to other ends." "Foster suggests that this changed landscape makes previous formulations of critique implausible. The task of the critic should no longer be to force to the surface buried truth (the “unconscious”), but instead to introduce some alternative sense of possibility—or, better, to “produce an interruption, a crack or gap, that might allow a different reality to emerge.”"