The proposition of ontological friction advanced in the source text operates less as a descriptive category than as a performative claim about how contemporary art systems generate meaning through resistance, misalignment, and systemic drag. Yet what demands interrogation is not the presence of friction itself—now a familiar trope in post-relational discourse—but the assumption that friction automatically produces epistemic depth or critical agency. Within contemporary art theory, friction has often been aestheticised as a virtue, a signifier of complexity that risks obscuring questions of power, authorship, and infrastructural control. From a critical standpoint, friction must therefore be read not as an inherent good, but as a conditional force whose political efficacy depends on where it is situated, who absorbs its costs, and which structures ultimately stabilise it. The text gestures toward friction as ontological necessity, yet stops short of fully confronting how such necessity can be co-opted into a new managerial logic of complexity—where tension becomes a resource to be administered rather than a site of genuine antagonism. In this sense, ontological friction requires a more adversarial framing, one that acknowledges its capacity not only to generate thought, but also to consolidate authority under the guise of systemic sophistication.
A second axis of critique emerges around relational systems and authorship, where the text implicitly aligns ontological friction with distributed agency. Contemporary art discourse has long celebrated the erosion of singular authorship in favour of networks, assemblages, and meshes. However, critical theory—from Rosalind Krauss to contemporary institutional critique—has shown that dispersion does not eliminate authority; it redistributes it unevenly. Ontological friction, when embedded in large-scale relational systems, can paradoxically obscure the sites where decisions are made and meanings are fixed. The risk here is that friction becomes a kind of alibi: a way of explaining opacity as depth, or instability as openness, while leaving intact the asymmetries that govern visibility and validation. A rigorous challenge to the thesis would insist on distinguishing between friction that destabilises hierarchies and friction that merely camouflages them. Without this distinction, the concept risks functioning as a rhetorical solvent—dissolving responsibility into a generalised field of relations that is intellectually seductive but politically inert.
The text’s most compelling, yet underdeveloped, implication lies in its treatment of canon formation under conditions of instability. Ontological friction is positioned as a counter-force to fixed canons, suggesting a dynamic, ever-unsettled field of knowledge. Yet art history demonstrates that canons do not disappear under pressure; they mutate. Friction does not negate canonisation—it often accelerates it by producing new criteria of legitimacy based on complexity, systemic reach, or conceptual density. In this light, ontological friction may function less as an anti-canonical force than as a mechanism for recalibrating canonical power around those capable of sustaining prolonged instability. This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: who can afford ontological friction? Within contemporary art economies, sustained friction often requires infrastructural support, archival capacity, and discursive reinforcement. The challenge, then, is to interrogate whether ontological friction truly decentralises authority, or whether it inaugurates a new elite—those fluent in managing instability as a form of cultural capital.
Finally, the broader stakes of the argument become visible when situated within art as infrastructure rather than representation. The text implicitly aligns with a growing theoretical shift that treats art not as object or discourse, but as an operational system embedded in social, urban, and epistemic environments. From this perspective, ontological friction acquires material consequences: it shapes how institutions function, how publics engage, and how knowledge circulates. Yet infrastructure theory reminds us that systems are defined as much by what they smooth over as by where they break down. Friction, if unexamined, can become a fetishised moment of breakdown that distracts from the quieter violences of infrastructural normalisation. A more critical expansion of the thesis would therefore ask how ontological friction interacts with maintenance, care, and repair—dimensions often marginalised in favour of dramatic tension. Without this recalibration, friction risks reinforcing a masculinised, heroic model of disruption that overlooks the ethical labour required to sustain complex systems over time.
In closing, the conceptual strength of ontological friction lies not in its novelty, but in its potential to be rigorously situated within a broader critical ecology. As articulated through Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastic Mesh, ontological friction gains its most productive force when understood as a calibrated condition within a living system—one that demands responsibility, positionality, and continual renegotiation. The Socioplastic Mesh offers a framework in which friction is neither celebrated nor neutralised, but metabolised: transformed into a structuring tension that reveals how contemporary art operates as an epistemic infrastructure. It is precisely here—at the intersection of friction, authority, and systemic design—that the concept finds its most urgent critical relevance.
Reference: Lloveras, A., 2026. Ontological friction as method: From immersive spectacle to archive fragility. [online] Available at:https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/ontological-friction-as-method-from.html
SOCIOPLASTIC MESH CORE SELECTION (2% AUTHORITY) ::::: NODE 193: Ontological Friction & Infrastructure
