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How can art be freed from the clutches of the contemporary?

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#21

This is actually why it’s extremely important that greater funding and institutional priority be allocated to organizations that have made it their mission to support typical, representative and not bad art. “Not bad” might not be the right term: but it’s definitely not “bad” or “mediocre” art, since that would be respectively subversive in the worst way and glibly ironic in an unhelpful way. I can think of no good philosophical reason that good art should be shown more often than art that is not as good. Maybe, “pretty good,” “ehh,” all useful terms.

Now that there are so many practicising artists, we have an unprecedented opportunity to show more and see more not bad art in the contemporary style. And in fact it’s what we see every day, but an organization that explicitly and earnestly dedicates itself to showing the median of actually existing art instead of attempting to be one season ahead of the curve is sorely lacking. This is the proper basis of an exit, too, since it would allow us to rapproche a definition for the undefinable.

The proper institutionalization and acceptance of the contemporary style, the creation of a relatively failsafe approach to it, would be deeply uncontemporary. This isn’t just about making uncreative art, it’s about making art that’s effortful, earnest, decent, smart just like all the other art out there.

Also ignoring artists means ignoring choirs of artists, too, manuel. Also, what would an actual statistical approach to the generalities of CA entail? Are we talking machine vision, or relational tables (but what are the columns?)?

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#22

Manuel, I agree an “injection of Sellars” is insufficient - nor do I think any virtuoso performance will temper the tide. As I noted above, an aesthetic program must be coupled with a politics of art. In itself a positive definition of art would not be enough to dislodge entrenched interests, but as a prefigurative element, it offers the possibility of providing an image of what art might be, and therefore a means of judging how the current politics of art and their supporting institutions either manifest themselves according to this criteria, or not. Crucially, to move beyond a merely prefigurative politics, and into a politics proper (pace Gramsci) strategic considerations about the organization and structure of institutions must be considered alongside this model. For without some kind of actual support of this vision, we have nothing more than a theoretical framework.

As far as the generalities of CA, from my reading of Malik’s interpretation:

First, [Malik] believes that contemporary art abides by what he calls an ‘anarcho-realist maxim’. This maxim requires that art be more real, more true to life than actually existing art. This is, in his words, a charge against “art’s artificiality”.

Secondly, he recognizes what he calls contemporary art’s ‘meta-generic limitation’. That is, there is no particular form which art must take, instead it is indeterminate. This is the non-identity of contemporary art, which is characterized by the indefiniteness of its content, subject of address, and criteria of judgement. Because this non-identity of art is not definable by a particular genre, but is any conceivable genre characterized by some a common method, it is itself not a genre, but a meta-genre of art.

Which I read across Brassier’s critique of Endnotes’ communization hypothesis to think of disassociating functions from structural totality. Anyway - more here if anyone is interested: http://joshuaj.net/2014/the-grammar-of-contemporary-art/

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#23

Suhail’s contributions to this debate are obviousely invaluable. However as it is clearly stated in my original question, any attempt to liberate art from the “contemporary”, prior to addressing the problem of indeterminacy, has to cope with the semantic hijacking of the term contemporary by Contemporary Art as a particular artistic genre / mode of production.

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#24

Thanks Mo, but based upon your rephrasing of your initial inquiry, what do you intend to investigate here? Are you concerned with the content of the term “contemporary,” as distinct from CAs instantiation of it? In which case, is this a question of temporality? Or do you mean in terms of rhetoric, which it seems would reflect back upon implicit assumptions of the content of the term? Or are you concerned with the mechanisms whereby it hijacks the term? Are you proposing an engagement over the politics of language capture? I am curious how you see the priority of this issue, since many of these avenues, to my mind anyway, lead directly to the indeterminacy issue.

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#25

I think the question we need to consider is: Do we even need art tomorrow? What is it doing?

#26

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure of the stakes here, at least with the question framed in this way. As I understand it, what you’re taking issue with is the idea that “contemporary art” no longer describes a temporal marker–art made in the present–but a specific aesthetic or stylistic mode that has made a claim for contemporaneity as such, thus foreclosing on other possibilities for art in the present. That’s certainly true: an MFA grad student at Yale is a “contemporary artist” in a way that a Sunday landscape painter in the midwest who exhibits at a community center is not. But is the most important issue here really one of terminology? I’m not sure that taking back the word “contemporary” from “contemporary art” is the crucial first step to finding a way out of art’s current, inarguably dire situation.

Some of the points David Hodge brought up here seem to be crucial for avoiding a conversation in which we run around in semantic circles. My sense is that one of the most significant implications of “contemporary art” becoming a kind of stylistic category rather than a periodization is that it naturalizes a set of economic and institutional relations regarding the production, and circulation of art, one that includes art schools, commercial galleries, museums, global biennials, and so on. As David’s comment suggests, there’s a remarkably high bar for entry into “contemporary art,” one that isn’t universally available. While it’s certainly important to define the terms at hand–eg, what we mean when we say “contemporary art”–I don’t think we can even begin to talk about “contemporary art” as a style or genre without accounting for the broader structural situation in which it exists and proliferates. What does it even mean to “overcome” contemporary art as a style or genre?

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#27

I would agree, this is a relevant question. What we call art is not
some kind of universal category but an invention of the “Western
culture” only a few centuries old. As a notion it is already
obsolete and will continue to be propagated only by inertia since,
in addition to a widely accepted story in which it exists called the
Art History, there is enormous infrastructure put in place because
of it. But I doubt there will be any vital idea that could emerge
out of a belief in uniqueness, originality and creativity.

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#28

I would tend to agree that getting overly hung up on a semantic debate about the term “contemporary”, is in this case not particularly useful to a debate about CA, or at least it is, only in so far as it helps to illuminate how power is being used to maintain a particular hold on the predominant mode of art production today.

To my mind, Malik is illuminating because he diagnoses how a certain theoretical negativity regarding any positive development of aesthetics is instrumentalized to maintain a market function. This then can be broken down into two problems, which I’ve attempted to more or less indicate above:

1.The issue of aesthetics, or how to theorize art beyond it self-imposed stasis, which gets at a number of philosophical sub-problems including its epistemological scope and developement, historicization, critique and value value judgement, and how these are related to art’s ontology. Indeterminacy here then, is a philosophical problem about how to sort the priority of an ontologic indeterminacy and an epistemic incompleteness in the face of temporalization. CA takes the route of considering ontological indeterminacy a metaphysical realism, thereby blocking any epistemic development.

2.The other major problem being a politics of art, which may get at the structural issues which Hodge and rwetzler begin to indicate, so now your talking economics, institutions, conditions of production and circulation. Malik’s major concern is with politics, and how art can actually be operationalized as a political force; I would disagree that art’s primary purpose is to serve a politics, thus my above indication regarding the distinction between a politics of art (politics>aesthetics) and political art (aesthetics>politics) and my sorting of the aesthetic and political questions. At the time of his writing “Exit from Contemporary Art”, Malik was much more of the opinion that art operated amongst a structural totality (read capitalism as diagnosed by Endnotes) but has since moved towards a much more accelerationist position. In this move, I think we are also in agreement – for if the state of real subsumption has no escape, and capitalism is a totality which may only be dismantled wholesale, then it seems that the only exits available are transcendental (read:theological), and any immanent movement is reterritorialized.

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#29

Is it just me, or is this conversation a bit short on specifics? I mean there is Jeff Koons, but there is also Martha Rosler. Somehow one needs to account for both perhaps?

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#30

Thanks @anton for asking us to get specific.

I think that there’s an obvious practiced distinction between Contemporary Art (a particular mode that includes both Koons and Rosler) and contemporary art (which just happens to be made right now). You might disagree in principle with that distinction and try not to use it but it is used otherwise.

It seems to me that in talking about CA you’d either want to start by identifying a set of works and then finding a common principle, or beginning with a definition and then finding candidates. In terms of specifics, then, what about this case?

I think that the latter means of speaking of the contemporary in strictly literal terms is useful. The literalness of prices is also useful. Take the Chinese art market for living artists:

“China has grown to become the largest art auction market in the world, making up 37.2% of the world’s art sales volume, followed by the US with 32.1% and UK with 18.9%, according to a report released by Artron in association with Artprice.”

Cui Ruzhuo, Zeng Fanzhi and Fan Zeng top the list and I’ll wager that none of you have heard of any of them. CA or not? Or is that an inappropriate question?

#31

I think that question actually gets us somewhere important. As Anton’s comment suggests, “contemporary art” as a stylistic category is remarkably elastic, to the point of being practically useless. You’d be hard pressed to find any meaningful thing that links the work of, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Candida Hofer, and Jacob Kassay on the level of form or technique; what they have in common isn’t a shared style at all, but rather shared channels of circulation/exhibition/reception. But access to those channels is obviously not evenly distributed across the globe, even as one of the hallmarks of "contemporary art’ is its global reach (the biennial circuit, etc.) So, as DXB points out, an artist like Cui Ruzho can sell a 2005 painting for nearly $10 million at Christie’s, but under the banner of a sale of “Fine Chinese Modern Paintings” rather than Modern/Contemporary–he remains a “Chinese artist,” not a “contemporary artist.” It seems to me that what we need to account for in trying to parse the problem of contemporary art as a category (and in defining its limits) isn’t so much a style or aesthetic at all, but frameworks of inclusion/exclusion, which, as an artist like Cui Ruzho makes clear, doesn’t immediately map onto levels of market success.

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#32

It seems you are assuming that there is a “bad art” and a “good art”
which would make sense if you are within art-raum, in other words
if you believe in art. But this distinction is irrelevant if you are an
“outsider”, lets say an anthropologist, who observes/studies art
as a phenomenon, as a material expression of a certain set of
beliefs articulated first within the Western world.

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#33

Dear Walter, not exactly. What I mean is that there is a certain material reality to artists’ practices:
what it actually means to work in an internationally uneven market, wrestling with form, technology, etc., i.e. conditions of production. It seems to me that when discussion of art, contemporary or any other, is reduced to a kind of an ontological, abstract discussion, it becomes a bit vague and formalist.

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#34

I feel a bit like I’m beating a dead horse here, but again, I think its useful to separate the issues of aesthetics and politics. I would freely admit I’m not sure I can yet provide a context for judging Koons and Rosler in the terms of an aesthetic theory, and I appreciate e-flux’s attempt to produce a theoretical context, even if I think it is wrong. It’s often a lot easier to pick these things apart than build criteria – I have been working on alternatives, and maybe in a few months I’l have some more answers for you in this respect. I don’t think this means we should give up on thinking about the issues of aesthetic criteria, and then hand the field over wholesale to an anthropological or political theorization – so far as they allow for a cognitive map of the politics of art, great! I think this kind of theory is also important, but it doesn’t get at the issues of art in its own terms. If art is just a species of doing politics by other means, then it is a wildly ineffective form of politics, and I think people are right then to say, “well, what is it for? do we even need this?” If you proceed to revolutionize art according to purely ethical or political criteria, you may wind up with a world where people have more freedom to create, but you still have no means of discerning what it is that they are creating, and whether or not it contributes to human development in any meaningful way (and I mean, aside from any sort of private self-satisfaction, which smacks of a liberal individualism). Edit: Or, maybe to rephrase my aside so I don’t run afoul of my own distinctions: a trivial localism.

#35

I agree with you and also believe that this genre (contemporary) is still pretty much attatched to the modernist concept of art, it just has a different packaging. I think that in order to move forward, the whole modern thinking needs to be properly confronted. This thick separation between subject and object that is so rooted in our minds that even post-modernist philosophy cannot overcome. In order to do that, I believe that a more genuine spiritual approach towards art should be effectively taken. People should be at service of the art, never the opposite (which unfortunately is what we see the most in the contemporary art world). And art should be at the service of the soul.

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#36

The “art in the contemporary style” term is ‘useful and proper’ to itself alone, sucks semiotic resources into its proprieties and self-sufficent utilities. The suck (hear the swoosh) is a black hole or a kernel panic, a hole panic. Luckily the panic hole is coated with platitudes. Warning, we got some slippery footing around the edges! Here we go from Frankenstein to oxymoronic via the deux-ex-machina of Fontana…

'"…'s “… ” paintings are made from fabric, plastic, acrylic and sometimes gold leaf. More sculptural than painterly, the sensuous works are stitched together with Frankenstein-like lushness… adds meaning with suggestions of emotional sensitivity and physical fragility, transforming the works into characters in a conceptual beauty pageant that channels the ghost of Lucio Fontana…the exhibition pushes and pulls the viewer into a rich psychological zone characterized by conflicted emotions and oxymoronic thoughts."

I guess I meant to quote this by way of trying to understand why it seems so common in the press releases for the art to be described in terms of how it ought to affect the viewer, together with the deux ex machina of modernist names as … enforcer?

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#37

In art, specially Contemporary Art, there is an evident gap between research and theory production and practice. This raises doubts. Of course, one very often meets artists who are interested in Negarestani, or Malik, but it doesn’t seem to materialize in their practice. Some of the doubts it raises are particularly: In Malik, for instance, if the work just DOES, something, then the discourse is just redundant. Right? Why use Malik’s ideas to “Vitalize” Contemporary art instead of just making work that doesn’t rely on a discourse for the sake of art’s self-validating boosterism? Joshua: I really like your texts, I find them useful to illustrate the current condition of contemporary art, but, say why along your wonderful texts you don’t try to show us with your work how an artist can make non indeterminate and non contemporary art? It is this sort of attitude that is problematic: When someone makes work that “deals with…Malik” for instance, it seems like they don’t get it…The whole point is to not have to deal with it, and the reason of course is that contemporary art needs to be accrued with symbolic value to justify its de-skillification. I think we believe in art too much, and as Walter said, it seems crucial to understand the artistic world not only as a financial cronyism , but as a remnant of an older way to look at the world, dragged by momentum into the present day…

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#38

You are right, in any discussion about art it is important and
necessary to take into consideration the material conditions
of its production. The art scene continues to thrive especially
because of an enormous infrastructure(museums, galleries,
fairs, market, publishing, etc.) established around the notion
of art, as the building of churches and temples was based on a
certain economy and infrastructure establish around the notion
of god. But as those churches with all the icons, frescoes and
sacred objects, do not prove that god exists, all those art museums,
art histories and artworks do not prove that art exists. They are
just materialized expressions of the belief systems of certain
groups of people that could be observed and study from an
anthropological position. If we are within the post WW2 art
narrative, as it was established in the West, then for us there is
a big difference between works of Kurt Schwitters, Issak Brodsky
and Adolf Ziegler. They could not appear together, for example,
within the MoMA permanent installation.
But if we are anthropologists of art, then these would be just
examples of three different understanding/expressions of art in
the first half of the 20th century (something like three
denominations). In that case these three artists could appear
together within, lets say, an Anthropological Museum of Art.
This would be not an art museum, but about art museum,
in some way the only truly contemporary museum possible today.
So, this would be my concrete proposal:
Lets think about making an Anthropological of Museum Art where
works of art will be exhibited and studied as artifacts from an
“exotic and faraway land”.

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#39

Manuel – I am interested in Malik’s critique of CA, that’s not to say I endorse all of his positions, nor am I sure that the work just DOES something that makes discourse redundant. I don’t think my work “deals with…Malik”, but I do try to be attentive of the criticisms he has raised. I think Malik has begun to approach developing positive interventions in institutionality through the collaborative project Real Flow, which I find extremely interesting, but am still critical of in certain respects. As I’ve repeatedly stated above, I’ve bracketed my concern with politics in relation to the aesthetics issue. Not that I think it has no import for politics, but the kind of import that I think it has for what I’ve called the aesthetics>politics transition is not a straightforward intervention as many seem to believe, and that art as a primary site for politics, even what I’ve called a politics of art (politics>aesthetics), is not very effective. If you want to do politics, begin doing political interventions – art may have some resources for thinking through this, but it can’t be the end of your political intervention.

I think my position towards aesthetics is principally more Kantian, filtered through the Sellarsian critique of the given and engaging pragmatic inference and abductive capacities through orientative affordances, which produces a conceptual-semantic hermeneutics amplified by a communal normative position in regards to its reception and value judgement. This is all very general – but, as I said, I’m still really working to sketch this in more determinately. It’s not necessarily meant to be prescriptive, but to help understand the conditions which art effectuates thought and help us understand in what ways we can value it according this criteria.

As far as my own artistic practice is concerned – that is always evolving, and if it fails to present what I’ve endorsed, all I can attempt to do is experiment further and push the work harder.

#40

Dear Walter, this is a photo of Bronisław Malinowski who was in a certain sense the father of modern anthropology. Is this the type of a relationship we want to have to art? Would such position bring us better understanding of our subject?

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