Good photo:)
Yes, this is exactly how for once we should try to observe the West
and its culture, including, and perhaps especially, art.
We should consider art to be one of the instruments of colonization
of the “others”. That includes art museums, biennials, art market,
art history,…
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The way I understand this “overcoming” is certainly not in the semantic sense, but rather as the overcoming of what you well described: “a set of economic and institutional relations regarding the production, and circulation of art”. I believe that this is the core of what’s at stake here, this mediocre system that pretty much kills any real possibility of human creativity. I also think it’s quite a difficult challenge to overcome this system, as it seems to me that even a “counter-system” is embedded into it. Again, cannot help but believe that such problem is part of greater one: our stubborn modern thinking. The only way I see that some real overcome can happen is to have the courage to look inward, into our own way of thinking. When we change, the system will undoubtedly change.
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I think this gets at a couple things - which again, I’ve attempted to carefully to carve at their joints: CA’s theory severs the connection between description and prescription, as Reza Negarestani has put it – symbolic value is thus accrued through the championing of a privatized and subjective form of love (Malik, Phillips - Tainted Love); it is agnostic towards style and form, which is why it can embrace work as diverse as Jonathan Meese and Rachel Whiteread. Its justification is wholly arbitrary, and is only meaningful so far is it reinforces the “brand”. In order for these differences to become meaningful again, and not just mere proliferation, one would need an aesthetics which could determine and affirm critical histories and disciplinary criteria. Postmodernism chipped away at genre distinctions in an attempt to promote freedom, but it was a liberal “freedom from” not a rational “freedom for”, as Negarestani and Wolfendale have put it. This is what I mean by needing a renewed interest in an aesthetic theory – something that can reconnect descriptions of artworks with how they are to be interpreted-- else, even given a severance of the theoretical position of CA from its market corruption, we are still left in a state of whimsical prescription. Which is why you need not only a program of political re-orientation (politics of art), but also one of aesthetic re-orientation. Malik’s point is that the indeterminacy of CA’s theoretical position is politically leveraged to maintain a state in which, in the end, the market is the sole arbiter of value, not any aesthetic determination.
Edit: Moreover, those committed to a political operationalization of aesthetics should welcome the move to further criteria, as it would help us judge whether or not, in a design sense, the aesthetic gestures are at all effective in achieving what the work says it is trying to do.
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I’m not sure that CA needs to be historizcised as such-that only seems to underscore the compartmentalising linear historical model that is complicit in so much of the socio/econ/political entrappings of the art market and that art that is of the present has the potential to unpick. What may be more useful is to imagine a new use of art-one than can coexist with the existing structures in the sense of just leaving them to their own devices, but making them blush in the self-realisation of their own inadequacies. I see the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as an excellent example of such a new paradigm, illustrative of Benjamin’s constellation where the image is dialectics at a standstill: one that is determinatively affirmative, politcally engaged but never polemical and has an overwhelming amount of participation from diverse communities. Overall the curated works invite a relationality with the viewer (not the market) by means of their dialogic openness, and sometimes playfulness, that gifts an understanding of how much freedom is tied up in the visibility/invisibility of the image and outside the biennale spaces, art works and ideas are spilling all over the streeets. Of course to leave a trace it is going to require people to write about it and, it being quite a redemptive experience for me personally to experience this show in the face of the repetitious vacuity of the declared contemporary, I intend to do so and hope many others will too.
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Shanghai Biennial curated by Anselm Franke and others was also extremely good in similar ways.
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Simply, contemporary art, houses elements of neo-liberal doctrine. It is an art form which works in tandem with this ideology. It serves masters only. This is extremely limiting. So, to escape and go beyond the contemporary, make it not neo-liberal but other.
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I think it is Clutches.
I think of ‘overcoming’ as in itself a modernist impulse.
Yes it is, but we have to start somewhere. That’s why I find Bruno Latour’s approach of modernity as an illusion the best way to go. To see the modern thinking not as a progression in time but rather as the thinking of a social group that is bound to change.
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PlutoCross: Yes. There are a number of logical affinities between the neoliberalism and contemporary art.
also, shifting from one extreme (indeterminacy) to another (connecting art work’s description to how it can be interpreted) is not solving the problem of contemporary art or aesthetics because the dominant system, despite its manifest image of indeterminacy, is itself nothing but a very particular way through which art is connected to its description.
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It seems this tread is not being followed very much anymore but I find it very interesting and since it has been my concern and it has occupied my thoughts and imagination for sometime I wish we continue contributing to it.
Anyway, please excuse my regressive rhetoric which will follow. First of all this professionalism which is constantly present in writings and conversations on CA to me seems like a symptom of an exclusive approach to the problem. What I am being reminded constantly is that when I remember my teenage years, where I was being dragged and becoming interested in art in general, cave art, Greek art, Chinese art if the Ming period and modern or contemporary art would never feel fundamentally different. I don’t find adolescents voice, thoughts or sensibility quite refelcted in this reflection on CA. I am sure approaching CA for a north American or west European teen is different from an Iranian teen (like me 10 years ago).
From there I can begin to think of the linguistic structure of art, artist, modernism, conte,porary, etc, in non-European languages. Are the mentioned problems exactly the same in non western countries?
Honestly I still do not relate to many of the ‘professional exclusive elit’ rhetoric of CA. Intertextuality probably is not the most powerful term to show the irrelevance of naming art products or art sphere contemporary or not contemporary, but yet for sure so many still compare, juxtapoze or negate a work of CA with a non-CA. Then maybe the question is shrinking to the mind-set of thinking about art which makes many of us limited to CA terms and understandings.
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I was looking at the tread again now and searched colonization, surprisingly only once mentioned and not elaborated. As a comtinuation of what I just mentioned above I think it is necessary to rephrase the primary question as ‘how can we be decolonial towards the world of art today that abuses history, future and codes of conducts by calling itself CA’.
Basically as much as the rest of the non-colonial knowledge and sensibility are not represented in what we percieve as the hype of knowledge and art and etc, the non colonial art won’t be represented truly either. Yet introducing different modes of perception and production of art, ontology and teleology of art might have its audience here and there.
To me, CA and it’s code of conduct seems like those cultures with a claim of CA feel too excited to finally have a voice on what art is and they never want to give it back to whoever who owned it before. While thinking about this I was reminded of the other tread initiated by Dadabase, which I vaguely remember as the attempt for emancipation of art from material. Well, isn’t story telling and the sensibily concealed in it the most sustainable form of art that has survived the destructing dimension of time and has been polished and zipped information up until the ‘Contemporary’ time? As the story of Alladin is just another story of 1001 night which the European translator has added to the tread of 1001, as he had the right to do so.
The example above to me works not only as a field of literature, poetry, poetic perception of the world but also as art, i think if you ask someone from Pakistan or Turkey, if she has jot been too infected with Contemporary Art Correctness, she wouldn’t distinguish, literally, a poet’s work from a painter 's work.
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Could it be that Contemporary Art is a place of quick-sand, where one is sinking and unable to get free of. If CA is political, in that, it is a reflection of the ideologies of neo-liberalism, then it serves that system and therefore, serves power. It is the elite and the corporations who win-win-win from contemporary art. It is accepted that Abstract Expressionism was promoted by political institutions like the CIA. Bringing the art capital of the world to NYC. With the success of that you would not stop but continue on, maybe CA is some kind of political tool. A head-lock or even a battering ram, depending on which side you’re on.
To free art from the clutches of the contemporary one must confront the contemporary situation with all its ills and smash it wide open.
This quote I took from another thread on here titled Marcuse was right, and could help here, “a major step in our breaking out of that closing universe. By naming it, by helping us to get conscious of it, by conveying its overwhelming power, [Marcuse] helped us to define ourselves in opposition to it—total opposition.”
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Agree!! And this reminds me of how far we can keep ignoring the uses and manipulations of words and language. The word Contemporary is used as in the Orwellian Newspeak technical inductions :
“The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognised, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.”
The word Contemporary used for Art, The Arts, Publications, Shows etc etc , has the quality of a Newspeak word. Is very easily recognised and it limits to its specific meaning, always present tense functional neutral sense.
Its very complex to de-tour this word, the pet of neoliberal art markets since the CIA plans, and is not per chance, that we are discussing this now.
The discussion seems geared towards the idea of Contemporary applied to various timings and speeds at producing contents, culture and art and depending of where (Nations/ Continents) such productions are coming from and its socio-political implications. The problematics rest on how anything produced now can be called Contemporary and so could be “used” facilitating its transactions and archiving for consolidating its dubious market value.
The darkest and Orwellian side to this, is that by calling something Contemporary, we fail to call it, name it, define it, give a sense etc etc, on other deeper senses and terms to the thinks we produce as part of our culture for deeper means than just decoration or transactions.
Before the CIA plans, the Arts had specifics names, the word Dada, was not made to end up as just “Contemporary Art” from the 20’s and 30’. All Arts have context named for various reasons. To annihilate all that particulars, to substitute them for just an average timing sense added to a Nation/ State or Continent is actually a very totalitarian political gesture and a very efficient one for the markets and values that are sustaining such world.
Its interesting how Marcuse is actually compelling us to name it, which again seems to support how much of this issue is all about language and its possibilities of been used for redemption or at least for an exercising of constant revolutionary critical powers.
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In reality, which means through a particular planetary practice, contemporary art has come to mean fashionable art. This fashionableness can be and has been rewarded to postcolonial art as well as so many other aesthetic / political movements of recent decades. Art’s real exit from contemporary art must involve rejecting fashionability of its form/content.
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Yes, it could be called ‘art now’, or ‘present art’, or 'today’s art.
…sorry but I mean calling the art in case by names that imply its politics or at least its style.
In UK the master of the publicity universe ( the same one who made Tatcher win ) mister Saatchi, teach us that all this words as Now, Young, Present and Today, are equals to Contemporary, including the famous “Contemporary Art Now” editions …
I am trying to recall how the arts produced, till quite recently and even under Eurocentric or Anglo- Centric old school standards, where always mentioning a period in terms of specifics names, a model which then was taken by the “rebels” -I guess any movements that where breaking with the rules- and that gave them the reason to “rename” themselves in various fashions as :
Vorticist
Futurist
Impressionist
Blue Riders
Da-Da
Pataphysics
Los Putrefactos
Los Nadaistas
and so on…
As Orwell explains, and not for just talking about a fiction, the issue with this kind of words is that are actually so easy It refers to something almost as easily recognised, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Is about not having to think, to investigate, to doubt, etc etc that the neoliberal or the premonitory Orwellian totalitarians where actually doing. Its obvious that USA had mastered such strategies, possibly helped with the kindness of another propaganda maverick, the nephew of Freud and his symbolic nemesis, mister Edward Bernays.
Is about not thinking, and just having a very politically neutral umbrella that opens easy uncompromising commerce.
What best that: Now, Young, Recent, Emergent, Contemporary to sell sell and sell anything and everything today today today.
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So basically we are all in one way or another trying to recognize the repression within the word contemporary and all are seeking a way out to that too much covering of the intentions, which are so perverse. Robert C. Morgan some years ago in Tehran Museum of ‘Contemporary’ Art, openly said that future of art, the good art, goes towards using the achievements of Modernism with psychological point of view. This recourse to psychological dimension sounds so sound in the realm which has been opened up with such repressive intentions such as CA!
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Art is bigger than money. It is bigger than religion.
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