@Arsam psychology, phenomenology and cognitivity, ie feelings, sensations and thoughts can all be utilized in a real flight from the contemporary prison house.
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Or even one can argue one must use psychology, phenomenology, epistemology and interdisciplinary attitude to basically understand there is a problem in the prison house of âcontemporaryâ. more profoundly, probably these are the alerting faculties that are reminding us of the problems of the contemporary.
I think you are describing the problems of comparison. Comp lit as a field, which is really supposed to be a meta-discipline of regional/monolingual literary studies, deals with this a lot. (You would think that itâs in art history, too, but I think that the supposed obviousness of the visual (doesnât need to be translated!) makes this comparison work a little (even) less rigorous.) Warning: names. but as far as I can tell hasnât really evolved beyond two unhappy positions: on the one hand someone like David Damrosch who advocates for a world literature that ends up taking for granted what literature looks like (slightly sad memoirs)⊠and then someone like Emily Apter who advocates for the impossibility of translation, Neither group has the conceptual tools to really do comparison. There is some vaguely interesting statistical analysis (far reading) in the Franco Moretti vein, but it only gives us tools for verifying existing hypotheses (which is important; I am not advocating for quantifying culture, but I am vehemently against the total lack of public accountability of most critics to anything outside an immediate circle or their personal tastes) and not for coming up with new ones. I am very excited right now about the work of mathematicians like Olivia Caramello, who are working on the problem of building metamathematical theories to compare across fields of math in a fruitful, dynamic, nontrivial way: how can geometry inform algebra, algebra inform calculus, calculus inform proof theory, etc. etc?
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Quite interesting to see how mathematicians can offer accesible modes of informing a field with another in a meta discipline way. Yet, and although I donât have a deep knowledge on those you mentioned who comment on world literature I donât think any of them get any close to understanding of that meta-discipline which you mentioned. World literature, as soon as one calls it wolrd literature is an object of cannibalism of the established disciplines which we have in mind in the constrains of the epistemic violence which CA is only one of its manifests.
Two things are on my mind: if we agree that colonial arrows has been repressing some modes of oneself relationship to his/her inherent literature, what is repressed is not only the content of literature and the question of impossibility of translation (the parrot tread would be quite meaningful, heartbreaking and relevant to this) but also the ways those people were using and making use of the literature.
Second, which related to my own experience is what I am busy with for quite a long time, and that is Adab, which in Persian means :
The term and its synonyms. Apart from a genre of literature (see section ii), adab in Persian means education, culture, good behavior, politeness, proper demeanor; thus it is closely linked with the concept of ethics. The first occurrence of its use in Persian is in poems by Ć ahÄ«d Balបī, who died before 325/936 (Lazard, Premiers poĂštes, p. 24, nos. 11-13). Adab is the equivalent of the Middle Persian frahang and New Persian farhang (T. Nöldeke, âGeschichte des Artaschir-i PÄpakÄn aus dem Pahlevi ĂŒbersetzt mit ErlĂ€uterungen und einer Einleitung versehen,â Bazzenbergerâs BeitrĂ€ge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprache 4, 1879, p. 38, note 3; H. S. Nyberg, Hilfsbuch des Pehlevi, Uppsala, 1931, II, p. 70); it is also very close to another Pahlavi word, ÄwÄn, Persian ÄyÄ«n, meaning custom, rule, correct manner, and the like. Thus in certain Arabic works of the early Islamic centuries, ÄwÄn is rendered either by adab and its pl. ÄdÄb, or by rasm and its pl. rosĆ«m; but sometimes the original word, in its Persian form ÄyÄ«n, is retained. Despite the opinion of scholars such as A. Christensen (Les gestes des rois dans les traditions de lâIran antique, Paris, 1936, p. 102), G. Richter (Studien zur Geschichte der Ă€lteren arabischen FĂŒrstenspiegel, Leipzig, 1932; repr. 1968, p. 41), and ÊżA. EqbÄl (al-Adab al-waÇ°Ä«z, ed. áž . ក. ÄhÄnÄ«, Isfahan, 1340 Ć ./1961, p. v) adab cannot be considered exactly equivalent to ÄwÄn/ÄyÄ«n.
(http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/adab-i-iran)
And Adabiat, which means literature. But no, it doesnât, if one understands the root of the word is Adab, yet the new format of it is Adabiat, it quite simply explains to one, that there are generations of writers and audience of arts and culture, literature and visual arts that basically have drawn their ethics out of literature. This is true to Turkish and Urdu as well as some Arabic speaking cultures. It is beyond nation-state and it precedes colonial epistemic violence of disciplines.
Neither of those who perceived the literature of the other as world literature ever happened to understand the relationship of the subject, his inherited literature, grammar and culture, his role of political and social activity regarding those entities and above all, all of these in relation to the white colonial era.
So when I mentioned that CA to me sounds not only a literal question but how that literary relationship of the self to his cultural modus operandi, I had this in mind, that I sense it is present in Urdu, Turkish, Persian and Arabic speakers, wether text of Suhail malik, or genius of Reza Negarestani, the enthusiasm of Iqbal, or quite to the contrary the bankruptcy of the artists and philosophers who hide behind their national identity.
In short, it is not the question of what literature has to offer, it is how do we want to read it, eat it, remember it and teach it. CA is too poor to make people polite, teach them sensibility of political life, make itself accessible to the young enthusiast artists and students, and never meaningful to children.
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Thinking of the contemporary, I see both science and art to be under the control of corporations. Two disciplines of enlightened enquiry have been put into a straight-jacket of sorts. I claim this is deliberate. What is produced in both camps ought to be treated with scepticism. The art produced under these constraints will never be an art that is free to be and say what it wants.
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@PlutoCross control is not eternal and constant. We need to draw a distinctions between real control which is temporary, precarious and always relative and its image which is usually assertive and convincing.
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The only way to escape the contemporary is by being anachronistic, for me this is the Renaissance where artists explored the rediscovery of the classics, a study of the natural and a new understanding of the world as it related to humanity. Humanity is at a turning point, no longer âthe measure o all thingsâ humanity has harkened in the age of the 6th mass extinction, of climate change, an era where excess needs to be questioned, our use of resources, of sustainability. The indulgence on the contemporary really can no longer be afforded in this new age where the future is so uncertain. I think it is this understanding, that we can not afford the indulgence of the contemporary anymore that will bring forward the idea that we need to consider the future and rethink our place and our position in the world.
There is no, as yet, force to counter the corporation. So yes, presently, as far as we can see, control is constant, growing, and aims for eternal control. With corporations putting up the money, the art which is selected reflects the values and ideology of corporate culture. Corporations provide a platform for contemporary art. Contemporary art is neo-liberal friendly, if not the poster boy. An art which opposes the corporation and the current art system as it stands, would get us out from the clutches of the contemporary. The problem is, who, or what institutions would show it. We need a place to show which is not what already exists everywhere.
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POST ART
âThe entire situation is so fucked upâ - Bruno Brunnet, Contemporary Fine Art, BerlinBruno Brunnet, like many people in Berlin is open and honest. Having said that it still shocks when a leading art dealer says something so emphatic about the state of Contemporary Art (henceforth CA). Brunnet continues: "Take all the covetousness going on: the numbers, the parties, the glamour. This brings attention. however I find it barren. I always thought that most people are tired when theyâre full. But this is not so. "
1.Brunnet of course still makes his money from selling ânameâ artists and he has lots of them to sell. However behind his publicly expressed brutaltruth is another even more brutal truth and that is the fact that Contemporary Art (henceforth CA) has run its course. More and more creatives are expressing publically doubts they have held for some time. David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, has spoken up
- Jerry Saltz wrote one of the few genuinely progressive opinion pieces on CA by labelling the recent trend in the international art market of a certain generic brand of textual/ neo-minimal/ neo-art povera abstraction as âZombie Formalismâ and âCrapstractionâ. In so doing Saltz dismisses hundreds ofyoung artists BUT few art people complained, many agreed. Dealers agreed but were at pains to point out that their Crapstraction artist/s were the âreal dealâ but not the rest. In the end one feels this IS just product and nothing more.
3.Also we now regularly see whole issues of online journals such as e-flux devoting whole issues to the âproblemsâ of CA as well as A fledgling movement almost aggressively opposed to CA led by figures such as Suhail Malik.
4.Add to this the revolution in the dissemination of images and ideas in social media and the change in mass audienceâs perception of aesthetic hierarchy and the sickening prices paid for CA as the bulk of the population gets poorer then maybe we need to heed of Seth Priceâs dictum: "It is possible that cultured people are merely the glittering scum that floats upon a deep river of productionâ. Production being the enormous bulk of images and objects that wonât be kept in the Archive ofart but still forms the vast majority of human creative activity, the worldâs cultural capital. âThe definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field ofdistributionâ â Marcel BroodthaersThe first great misunderstanding about CA is that it means âart made nowâ. It doesnât,not all art made now is CA nor should it be. CA must be seen as distinct period or epoch in the history of art. Also CA is now, in large part, a marketing term used to sell product.However, and this is important, CA is also an era of art where populism and audience access has never before been so much a part of art. Contrast this historically with Modernism which, for almost a century, was held in contempt by the general public. CA is now âunderstoodâ by many. As Hobartâs MONA shows it now virtually impossible to shock withart. Pussy Riot have Putin as their nemesis so draw their power and success from him. In Australia however we have the great dominance of public servants who, with a continuous supply of public money, oversee the innovation sapping edifice (cancer?) of Government Art. Australia is invisible in international art because it means nothing, all real polemic has been erased from it by the public service mentality.We must think through the good and the bad of CA. On the one hand there is the joy of a public savvy to CA: the audienceâs knowledge that huge car wash brushes mounted on the gallery wall and spinning freely can elicit the same art effect as the Mona Lisa must be compared with the downside which sees the rise of an increasing homogenous and subjectivity atomising âGlobalâ CA that renders individual artists as mere set decorators and prop makers. BUT we must accept that both polarities are RADICAL and important. We are living through a very important moment for art. A Zeitgeist moment very different from the competing styles (isms) and formal innovations of Modernism. Even the high/ low debates of Modernism have vanished as CA actively courted and then became a part of Popular Culture. Even MOMA, NYâs plans forits new development seems to be notably vague on just what it wants to do with its proposed and approved new and corporate bland behemoth chambers. MOMA just makes comments to do with âcontemporary art and performanceâ. In reality they are at least quietly owning up to not really knowing what future art will be but are making a lot of room for it.
5.In reality there has been no formal advance in art since the 60s. Video, video installation, installation art, performance, audience participation, computer based work, cross media workâŠall these were innovations of the 1960s. What has changed is the broadening of artâs reach and its integration with social media and mass culture, including mass institutional and government culture. The burgeoning art fair and biennale culture is usually heavily supported by government trade initiative and national branding. The entire career of an artist such as Elaine Sturtevant worked to find other understandings of current art (initially in her case US 60s Pop Art). Sturtevant, as she is best known as, did this by directly copying (this is before the term appropriation) the works of her peers Oldenburg, Segal, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein. Audaciously she remade Oldenburgâs famous Store 1961 in 1967 in a shop in NY only blocks away from where the original occurred. When asked Warhol gave her a screen used to make his Flowers series (themselves based on an image taken from a Kodak ad) to use to make her copies, and Rauschenberg regularly worked with her as she copied his works. What Sturtevant teaches us is that CA is fuelled only by perception. Remove the novelty of current art and you take away its value altogether. This the Brutal Truth of Sturtevantâs project. One that atfirst amused her Pop peers but ,in some quarters, turned quickly into outright anger. How could it not, Sturtevant was removing their cache; their value.
6.âHence, it is not to the âverticalâ infinity of divine truth that the artist makes reference to, but the âhorizontalâ infinity of aesthetically equal images.â - Boris Groys, Equal Aesthetic Rights
7.One major problem is CAâs indeterminacy, itâs contingency, this is what marks CA as a specific genre. CAâs lack of a dominant style, or preciselyCAâs use of all styles, media and content (flat pluralism) has made the usual Modernist modes of interpretation based on the competing âismsâ of Modernism. Post Modernism predicted this state of affairs but Po Mo had Modernism to âleverâ against. CA has only Mass Culture/ Media as its mirror. Our art historians and critics are of little use with their endless deferral of judgment and âZauberkraftâŠthat retroactively situates the art piece within a historical dialectic or succession of famous namesâ (footnote). As in the film Tron, we are trapped in Groysâs âhorizontalâ infinity. Although the term was used earlier (1923), around1990 CA became useful to delineate the current era of art from an aging Modernism, the term CA is useful for both the market AND academia. So we need to also look at the extremely close (incestuous?) links between the thinkingof academia, the market and academiaâs role in determining and enhancing value for the market. At present the two are in lockstep.Art exists in its distribution; something has to be regarded as art for it to enter art; to enter the Archive. The Archive is the most contested space of art because whatever is canonized in the Archive is valued . There are two types of value in art: Symbolic Value (art history/ the Archive) and there is Market Value. When an object is agreed to hold both these values is when we see the huge, almost unbelievable, prices achieved by art at auction. To put it bluntly it is value that is valued in art. Indeed art has a sur-valuation (a value above value) and this is a residue of its sacral-ritualistic conditions of emergence in pre-modern societies, identifiable with Walter Benjaminâs notion of artâs politically regressive âauraâ
- The conceptual artists Art & Language refer to this quasi-religious undertow in contemporary art as âthe un-secularâ, a de-religionized religion if you will.It is this sur-valuation inherent in art that makes it so susceptible to the situation of hyper valuation that contemporary art currently finds itself in. A situation where we often no longer talk about the meaning of art, we talk about its current auction prices. âIt is much easier to talk about the money than it is to talk aboutthe artâ â Jeffery DeitchThere are regular studies of the nepotism and corruption of CA. The manipulation of the market, estimates that 50% of sales in international CA are laundering Black Money. That 50% of works on the secondary market are fake (this would mainly include earlier Modernist works). The perception that international CA is run by 12 commercial galleries and 2 auction houses. FOOTNOTE"To be with art is all we ask." - Gilbert and George"Contemporary Art faces a potentially terminal crisis. Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-specific, expanding, universal non-genre, much as neo-liberalism passed itself off as the natural state of things. The realisation that Contemporary Art is in fact a time-limited historical period, that can end, is a radical moment. But itâs an idea thatâs gathering momentumâŠI canât see what will emerge afterwards, anymore than I can see what the world economy might look like after Western dominance, but Occupy art can be seen as foreshadowing what replaces Contemporary Art." - Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Artist and curator involved with Occupy Art, NY
9.Above is the more Leftist critique of CA. In many respects it is sound. Many in institutional art, and this includes Art Fairs as well as Government Galleries and Biennials etc, act as thought CA will go on forever and plan their activities accordingly. Pluralism is the style of the day meaning all styles just as Western Democratic Governments promote an illusion of multiculturalism: Equal Aesthetic Rights as Boris Groys has said.Groys has also astutely pointed out the market is far older than Capialism. Humans have always traded with each other. It is perfectly natural and desirable that artists make a living from their work. However what has occured over CAâs few decades is a tier system where 1000s of âlesserâ artists and arts workers get paid little or nothing whilst the Big End deals in millions of dollars. The mechanisms of international CA follow far too closely the mechanisms of Capital. Worse the contingency of value associated inherent within CA means that it is increasingly hard to value one artistâs piece of crushed metal sculture or You Tube-ish video above or below another. Increasingly, as CA can be anything, we are literally valuing âanythingâ. (footnote). For me personally these problems within CAâs structure are the most important issue for art now. The Utopian Modernist dream of Art Into Life has come true but not in the way anyone planned it.âImmersing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of artâand with it, the status of artistâdisperse entirely.â - Seth PriceThe growing tendency for the structures of CA to overtake the autonomous role of the artist. As art increasingly becomes a staged public event so costs of that staging rise. Here the curator and institutional figure assumes more power than the artist. Deskilling of artists, the trend towards photography, video, found objects and hands off fabrication has furthered the role of deskilling as identified by Ian Burn in 1981. These issues have lead to e-fluxâs Anton Vidokle to term the phrase Art Without Artists. Many artistsâfrom extremely established artists to younger practitioners new to the field of artâfeel that curatorial power and arrogance are out of control, with curators assuming the agency of the critic in addition to their executive power in the museum. âIt is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for.Curators also court collectors, sponsors, and museum trustees, entertain corporate executives, and collaborate with the press, politicians, and government bureaucrats; in other words, they act as intermediaries between producers of art and the power structure of our society.â - Anton Vidokle
10.Also by outsourcing the production of art to fabricators or presenting the impoverished collections gleaned from the street (the two are the same, Jeff Koons and Thomas Hirschhorn are both huge art stars, regardless of the superficial outside appearances) artists have opened themselves up to basically doing themselves out of a job. Curators and institutions could well do away with artists altogether and make the enlarged toys and cute objects just as mass entertainment does now. This is the subject of my own large polar bears, a fact lost due to me the artist not incontrol of the reception mechanisms. That was taken from me by QAGOMA."âŠartistic production becomes increasingly deskilledâand, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environmentâexhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visibleasart. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publicsâthrough education, publication, dissemination, and so forthârather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as artâs only possible, ultimate destination." - Anton Vidokle
11.âIt All Looks Like Art To Me Nowâ - Peter SavilleOne of the most interesting figures speaking about CA now is Post Modernist graphic designer turned artist Peter Saville, best known for hisiconic record covers for UK bands Joy Division and New Order. Coming from Design Saville seems better able to see the clash of money, power and aesthetics at the heart of CA more clearly. In his slide projection work It All Looks Like Art To Me Now, 2005 a series of images show what âcouldâ be CA but is instead views that Saville has deemed to be âlikeâ CA. From a German dated, but funky, 60s/ 70s acrylic sheet television studio set to the setting up of Frieze Art Fair in London these pictures show Savilleâs interest in the diffusion of ideas and imagery fromclassic Modernism and CA into everyday life. However the work also proves CAâs contingency, radical or regressive that is the question, probably both at the same time. âSaville argues that over the past four decades in Britain - the crucible ofPop - mass audiences have graduated from an awareness of music, through fashion and design, to artâŠ(he) is concerned with the burn-rate of creative ideas in this visually hyper-literate society, one in which the legacy of historical avant-garde art and design can now be found on the high streets of most towns and cities - from shop facades to food packaging - rather than just in galleries or the homes of connoisseurs.â - Dan Fox
13.Obviously it is not just Britainâs public that has experienced this progression. Now with Web2 everyone is an image maker, a producer AND a consumer at once. However we may need to extend Savilleâs observation. Art has always been involved with its own discourse, what Saville is saying is the audiences matter. From Modernism and Asian art and Cubism with African art onwards art has been content to pilfer (rape really) all other cultural production outside of it. Pop being the prime example hence its ongoing importance. CA worked hard on its Pop-ism, its mass appeal until finally obliterated any material difference with imagery and objects outside of it. Only the maintenance of the system of hierarchical value sourced from the Archive and the Art Institutions keeps CA from disappearing altogether. Only exhibitions spaces matter; a displaced piece of funky fluoro Perspex acrylic or scrappy stuffed stockings is just street clutter, a displaced painting remains a displaced painting. Wouldnât a more productive approach to CA be to reverse the flow of hierarchy? Accept that the mass audience is as savvy as the experts and artists rather than this futile attempt at re-education that all institutions are addicted to. Accept that there are no passive consumers anymore but active consumer/ producers perfectly capable of making CA themselves OR seeing it everywhere. As Sturtevant proved this could be a dangerous situation for the arbiters of current taste. Morethan likely the consumer/ Producers will take it in their stride. Art in the end is only interested in itself.For a far more experienced take on all of this please see the writings of Australian artist Ian Milliss.
12.It would be extremely radical but Australia would be ripe for a grand national experiment in totally changing and reversing the heirachical structure of art. Allowing the public who pay for this Government Art to have the say. Goodness knows what would happen but isnât that the roleof vanguard art? I suspect the same power play that presently blights capital A Art would develop over time within the public. But this would certainly put Australia on the map as a thinking nation. It wonât happen ofcourse but we must accept that we have lost a great deal in this new global sea of Contemporary Art that many are fast losing interest in.So what would a post art or post CA art look like. Christopher Kulendran owns up that he canât imagine it. And visually one canât because we are looking and thinking old school. We are so used to the succession of competing styles in Modernism (Impressionism, Cubism Expressionism, constructivism, Ab Ex, Colour Field, Pop, Minimal, Conceptual) we are looking for an art that looks different, but we are looking in a radically pluralist international/ all styles served here art. There will be no stylistic/formal NEW. What is new is the means of dissemination of art as a totality. We are faced with a TOTAL ART that. like Capitalism, swallows everything and value-adds to everything. How we get this information vianew channels of communication, the www is what has changed everything. This is the New now.Once I did an exhibition at the Gold Coast Art Gallery and people wanted me to sign the catalogue which had a printing error, it was largely unreadable. I complained as I signed but one person said to me: âBut Scott we were never going to actually read it.â From that moment onI learnt my place, Gold Coasters know their city is a work of art in its ownright, in the way Warhol pronounced the Empire State Building as a Superstar, they donât need art to âtellâ them so. The pictures were enough, they were taken from past Gold Coast culture anyway. No Culture had become Noh Culture and had come to the Gold Coast but the citizens donât even need such explanations, there life was fine without art. In my opinion Contemporary Art is leading us into just such asituation: Post Art.
FOOTNOTES
containes Links. apologie, so left out.
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We like to quote Suhail Malik]1:
"The diminishing distinction of past and present under the banner of the contemporary itself corresponds to two leading historical transformations in global political conditions over the period of the 1970s to now, in which contemporary art has become the hegemonic mode of art.
First, as the art historian Hans Belting has elaborated, contemporary art is now a geographically ubiquitous condition of artmaking, establishing a common kind of art that can take place more or less anywhere. It is a âglobal artâ distinct from the traditional category of âworld artâ, which was a Western universalist overview of distinctive arts from di_erent cultures, some of which did not recognise what they fabricated as art. The de-ethnicisation of art in favour of its globalisation via contemporary art, demonstrated on each occasion by the international biennialâs characteristic cosmopolitanism with local flavours, is a consequence of a couple of interrelated factors. On one hand, contemporary artâs emphasis on the now, rather than on school or tradition as the basis for art, admits the relative arbitrariness of the now as the criterion for salience. On the other hand, art today takes the history of art as a usable resource rather than as the unsurpassable authority of traditionâs irrefutably hierarchical asymmetry between the stability of the culture of the past and its current relative ephemerality. That is, contemporary art proceeds by a kind of cultural resource extraction.
Second (and geopolitically synchronous with the emergence of globalisation during the 1990s), the diminishing of substantial difference or antagonism between the now and the then corresponds with the claims made, most notably by Francis Fukuyama, for the âend of historyâ with the demise of Soviet Communism in 1989. Fukuyamaâs claims have their roots in Hegelâs notion of historical progress as the overcoming of contradictions, such that the demise of Soviet Communism and the consequent outright global domination of Western liberalism putatively mark the end of ideological struggles at a world level. Globalisation is built on the consequent common settlement. The âend of historyâ in these terms does not mean that nothing ever happens again, but rather that all subsequent systemic transformations are variants of the domination of Western liberal capitalism. And while the various countervailing contestations of parliamentary liberalism since the fall of the Soviet Bloc reveal that this diagnosis of the post-1989 condition may be palpably wrong with regard to politics in general, it is fully attained in contemporary artâs easy sliding between the present and the past for its generation of newness. For this reason, contemporary art better realises the promise of the postideological condition that otherwise failed to materialise with the collapse of Soviet communism. For all of the specifics of its particular content claims, that is its overarching political act.
For these reasons, every iteration of art as âcontemporaryâ art is a truly global achievement. Again, it is not that nothing new happens in these conditions: on the contrary, the paradox of artâs ageless contemporaneity â which underpins the colonisations of history, education and world-space just outlined â this âtimeless timeâ that Manuel Castells proposes as typical of network societies, means that contemporary art is characterised by the proliferation of the apparently unconstrained newness that it permits. The sci-fi-horror scenario of Shane Carruthâs Primer (2004) provides a useful analogy here: the filmâs conceit is the invention of time-travel that is limited, for technical reasons, to very short times of a few minutes or days. The consequent proliferation of concurrent and proximate pasts, presents and futures corrodes temporal distinction. The destruction of the past by the present â by which individuation, orientation and sense are each time uniquely effectuated, an evisceration that tradition is set against â this ineradicable differentiation wears thin, as then does the difference of the future from the present. That is, contemporary art erodes the systemic transformation of what and how the future of art might be.
For all of their redolence with the paradoxes of time conceived simultaneously in its presence and as a flux, the paradoxes of contemporary art are not however primarily due to its testimony to time but rather to the near-tautology that is contemporary artâs identification with the now. The ageless and smudgy present of contemporary artâs nowness is distinct to the now of time because it is also the historicality of art. Its timeliness marks it out, in a final paradox, not as a category of time but of a durable configuration of art mostly to one side of timeâs corrosive and destructive passage. A repudiation of time as the ineliminable and irrecuperable transition from one moment into another, contemporary artâs newness is a holding pattern for the metastable configuration proliferating the kind of art weâre familiar enough with, a genre called contemporary art".
In essence this Question of the emergence of Post Contemporary Art or more presisly a Post Contemporary Art attitude or sensibility is THE art question today. The problem for many is not the idea of an art after Contemporary Art, its the difficulty of imagining an image of such an era. What will the art look like, we are involved in visual art of course: we make images.
Post Contemporary Art wonât look different from Contemporary Art as Contemporary Art looks like all other prior art and/ or product of Popular Culture (Groys). And also all past art styles are present in Contemporary Art, in its so-called radical pluralism. We also have had formal innovation in art since the 60s.
Post Contemporary Art is all about Dispersion: The Medium is the Message. And that would be new consumer durable technologies.
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A better question would be, âHow can the contemporary be freed from the clutches of art?â
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âWithout bias, they have attempted to ârelocateâ these âworksâ [so called primitive art] into their magical and religious âcontext.â In the kindest yet most radical way the world has ever seen, they have placed these objects in a museum by implanting them in an esthetic category. But these objects are not art at all. And, precisely their non-esthetic character could at last have been the starting point for a radical perspective on (and not an internal critical perspective leading to a broadened reproduction of) Western culture.â - Baudrillard
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CA is state/market controlled art and therefore ideological. If I make work which holds values and an ethic which the system cannot make use of, the work will struggle to be shown. The big gallery like a whale has a number of smaller fish following in its wake. CA is used as a tool of progressivity.
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Umm sorry but you are forgetting one thing POLEMICS. To make an activist point one has to make it simple. I got many of my ideas from Christopher Kulendran from Occupy Arts and they were totally successful in there simple/ simplistic 1% vs the 99%. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17872666
Look back at art history and all the movements we now use (debatably for sure) were Polemical. Iâm sorry but your commentry seemed to me like tedious hairsplitting. My eyes couldnât continue reading. Iâm 53 so I have sat through all these earnest talks where we seemed to be getting somewhere and someone would stand up and say: âBut how do we define artâ. Then the whole debate would evaporate into subjective whatever.
I apologise for dissing you but Malik is doing is obviously polemics. To just dump on the problems so obvious now in Contemporary Art would easily be open to attack as anti-art. But Malik sidesteps this (to my mind brilliantly) by asking what is different about CA and why it is anti-art. Holes everywhere sure BUT we need to be focused and simple here.
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I disagree we need to make clear deliniations to get the point across as I say below. Why re poeple so cozy and cuddley about CA. It had its good period and now its in its Pomp Rock/ Standium Corporate Rock phase, see link above. Time for Punk guys!
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I donât care if this sounds like marketing, But I run an art & curatorial program at @TheNewCentre and your questions @reinhardt41 are at the Centre of what we address. we just began a seminar this past Monday with Diann Bauer and Patricia Reed (members of Xenofeminist collective) which will be getting into detail about all of this: http://thenewcentre.org/seminars/art-reasons/
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Thanks @reinhardt41 for the injunction, sometimes our words have to be targeted to their predicted impact. So, you can try to have an exhaustive definition of a certain thing, thatâs thorough and without holes, but why would you if your goal is in the realm of actions and not words? That kind of careful simplicity, the organizerâs idea of simplicityâand letâs face it, antagonismâtakes a lot of closed door planning. I wonder if this, e-flux conversations, even is that kind of a âcommand tent,â given itâs glass bowl quality. (Though, who would actually come by to read this? Itâs the open door that not everyone will walk into or even notice.)
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