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| ISBN-13: | 9781478003472 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 148 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
contemporary art, contemporaneity, and art to come
WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART?
The word "contemporary" has come to replace the words "modern" and "postmodern" to describe the consequential art of our time, even though the meaning of "contemporary" is at once obvious and opaque. What are we to make of this situation?
Another way of putting this would be to ask, What is contemporary art? or perhaps, What has it come to mean these days? The point is not, of course, to seek an essence, or even a set of qualities, that would characterize art for inclusion in some long-term definition, nor even limited criteria that would certify art as contemporary nowadays. To do either would imply a position outside and above a discursive and practical world in which I, like all others concerned with such questions, am thoroughly implicated. Rather, the point of asking about usages past and present, to distinguish between them, is to grasp the meaning and purpose of what is thought and done in the name of the two terms "contemporary" and "art" when they are brought into relation. In other words, the issue arises because a set of social and aesthetic values with the name "contemporary art" attached to them is emergent, yet the nature of these values is unclear — they are much contested and surrounded by ambiguity, despite their evident cultural energy.
So I posit the question provisionally, using it as a hermeneutic bomb, that is, in the expectation of only "as if" kinds of answers. Yet I believe my suggestions to have purchase, to have explanatory and exemplary power. I approach them in three quite distinct, but connected, ways.
The first is the most obvious: contemporary art is the institutionalized network through which the art of today presents itself to itself and to its interested audiences all over the world. It is an intense, expansionist, proliferating, global subculture with its own values and discourse, communicative networks, heroes, renegades, professional organizations, events, meetings, monuments, markets, museums, and distinctive structures of stasis and change.
Contemporary art galleries, biennials, art fairs, auctions, magazines, television programs, and websites, along with whole ranges of associated products, are burgeoning in both old and new economies. They have carved out a constantly changing, but probably permanent, niche in the ongoing structures of the visual arts and in the broader cultural industries of most countries. As well, they are a significant, growing presence in the international economy, being closely connected with high culture industries, such as fashion; mass culture industries, such as those related to tourism; and, to a lesser but still important degree, specific sectors of reform and change in education, media, and politics. If you doubt any of this, go to the vernissage of the Venice Biennale, open the pages of Artforum, check out the list of cultural institutions in tourist guides to any significant city in the world, or peruse local and national newspapers to see the upfront treatment of events at contemporary art museums, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, or its equivalents in other cities. This is a culture that matters, to itself — its own subculture, local cultural formations, and the complex exchanges between cultures — and as a force within the culture of internationality, currently in globalizing mode.
The second approach is, to me, more fundamental, the kind of answer a philosopher might give to the question "What is contemporary art?" The response is difficult to explicate, although easy to state in a definition-like form: contemporary art is art infused with the multiple modes of contemporaneity and the open-ended energies of art to come. I am identifying here the driving spirit of the contemporary, not its overt, institutional, well-shaped forms. A certain spirit of contemporaneity is present in the most significant art of our time, and only some of it is found — along with much art with merely a superficial relation to the deeply contemporary — in the institutions of contemporary art.
The third way of putting the matter is even more particular, with resonance mainly within contemporary art practice and theory. It is about the internalities of style: the approach, therefore, of an art historian. It requires that I introduce special meanings to several terms, meanings that will become clear as I explore examples of current and recent art. The reasoning goes like this.
To give compelling communicative form to the spirit of contemporaneity, artists these days must, I believe, work through a particular set of representational problems. They cannot overlook the fact that they make art within cultures of modernity and postmodernity that are predominantly visual, that are driven by image, spectacle, attraction, and celebrity, on a scale far beyond what their predecessors faced. Furthermore, artists are embroiled willy-nilly in the shaping and reshaping of these cultures by constant warring between the visceral urgencies of "innervation," on the one hand, and the debilitating drift toward "enervation" on the other. In artists' efforts to find figure within form, to win it from formlessness, they cannot avoid using practices of surfacing and screening that, along with the rise of the photogenic and the impulse to the conceptual provisionalization of art itself, are the great technical and aesthetic legacies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Artists who turn their backs on this constellation of problems and possibilities cease to be contemporary artists.
I explore in this chapter the implications of all three ideas about contemporaneity in art, but I begin with the theme just introduced: the implications of the popularity of contemporary art.
ART AND POWER
Outside the Power Institute, the words "power" and "art" rarely occur in the same sentence. Yet they did so when the Tate Modern opened in May 2000, partly because the gallery is located in what was the Bankside power station in London. Indeed, Channel 4 made a television series about the project and produced a book to commemorate the event, titled Power into Art. Maybe this was what British performance-artist duo Gilbert and George had in mind when they announced, gleefully, during the opening celebrations that the Tate Modern demonstrated that "Art is power!" Knowing them, however, I am sure that they were pointing to the massive conjunctions of private and public patronage behind the £134 million raised to convert the building, as well as to the political maneuvering that would be required to maintain it from there on out. Given their Thatcherite political outlook, perhaps they were permitting themselves the frisson of contemplating (abstractly, of course) the casualties that such focusing of public wealth would occasion. Being erudite avant-gardists, they would have been punning on the famous slogan of Joseph Beuys, "Kapital = Kunst" (to be found, not so incidentally, scrawled by him on a preserved blackboard in the museum's Beuys Room; echoed in Imants Tillers's fund-raising mural in the foyer of the MCA; and parodied by Jeff Koons's self-parody, in his photo-poster titled Artforum, 1988–89, as his generation's reincarnation of Andy Warhol.
In some ways, Britain has come rather late to the institutionalization of contemporary art — at least compared to Europe, where, on average, two new museums of modern or contemporary art have been built each year since the mid-1980s. In the United States, new or expanded public galleries of modern and contemporary art have been a regular occurrence every few years, recently in such major cities as Chicago and San Francisco. Sydney has had the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art since 1968 and the MCA since 1991.
Until the opening of Tate Modern, those Londoners interested in contemporary art would regularly visit the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, and a host of smaller, scattered venues around London and the provinces. The Young British Artists (yBa) phenomenon was sustained and displayed by private capital, notably that of the Saatchi brothers, advertising moguls closely associated with the Conservative Party during its years of ascendancy. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a time when, in the words of critic Adrian Lewis, "Art aspired to the condition of advertising." Unfortunately, a lot of highly celebrated art achieved this goal.
It fell subject to the glitzy superficialities of media hook, the empty noise of advertising repetition, the attenuated vacuity of the hyperreal — in other words, it succumbed to the disco drift into enervation, one of the two great forces shaping visual imagery in our times. Examples from the later 1980s include Damien Hirst's various split sheep in formaldehyde sculptures. Australian artist Dale Frank preceded these British shockers by a few years with his "bad paintings." As with Koons, contemporary art surrenders its critical impulse and becomes itself just another hot item in the shop window of current visual culture.
These trends certainly helped contemporary art become hip. Attendance at Tate Modern began at double the level anticipated and has grown to tens of thousands per day, approaching Metropolitan Museum of Art numbers. Specifically, the Tate had 2.7 million visitors in the first five months, 118 percent over target, and 5.25 million in its first year of operation. Crowds came from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, ranging in age from early twenties to late sixties, mostly female but not overwhelmingly so — demographics shared by museums of modern art everywhere, now spread to those with an emphasis on the contemporary.
What were the crowds surging to see? A display that began, on each of its four floors, with rooms in which important works by the modern masters quickly gave way, often in the same room, to works by artists who had recently come into prominence: Monet Water Lilies eclipsed by a Richard Long floor piece and mud wall; Matisse's wonderful sequence of Jeannette backs facing off in gentle struggle with South African artist Marlene Dumas's watercolors, meditating, in a way possible only after feminism, on the exigencies of being in a woman's body. In the Turbine Hall, visitors lined up for over an hour to climb and descend the three thirty-meter-high towers making up Louise Bourgeois's exploration of her psychic chambers (Untitled), and to walk beneath the spider legs of her giant Maman (1994). A whole floor was given over to installations commissioned for the occasion, exploring the dialogue, in video artist Gary Hill's words, as inscribed over the entrance, "Between cinema and a hard place."
Crowds lined up and surged at the Royal Academy of Arts, too, which was showing Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art. Visitors entered the exhibition through a small hole that brought them to the space beneath the stairs of Gregor Schneider's Haus ur in Rhedyt, Germany, and then through the claustrophobic labyrinth he had created there. Soon after, they were shocked to see that a meteorite had burst through the roof and felled a life-sized trompe l'oeil sculpture of the pope — Maurizio Cattelan's La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour). New Age escape was possible if visitors immersed themselves in Mariko Mori's lotus bubble; and a romanticism of rubbish was to be found in Tim Noble and Sue Webster's installation The Undesirables.
Horror was more in evidence than beauty. The strongest works used one quality to evoke the other: British artist Darren Almond's Bus Stop (2 Bus Shelters), 1999, fixated viewers with the clean precision of German industrial design, until they realized that the two bus shelters in his icy cold room had been transported from outside Auschwitz (figure 1.1). In the second-to-last room, Jake and Dinos Chapman presented eight museum display cases, each containing hundreds of intricate, toy-sized quasi-humanoids committing unspeakable atrocities on one another, acting out the worst nightmares of Nazi concentration camps. It was titled, appropriately, Hell, and it was hell to take in (figure 1.2). In the final room, three huge, brightly colored, happy jingle paintings by Jeff Koons surrounded his sculpture Balloon Dog (Blue), 1994–2000 (figure 1.3).
My first thought as I exited the exhibition was that the organizers were giving us a soft landing after so much horror. Halfway down the stairs, it struck me that perhaps the last room could have been titled Hell as well. What kind of world is it when we celebrate our manipulation as consumers of yet another commodity, as amusing ironist Jeff Koons encourages us to swallow, with a knowing smile? At moments I think that Koons's imaginary world is a symptom of our contemporary trauma, that he is the interior decorator from hell.
The point of these recollections of exhibitions recently seen is that they prod us to pinpoint reasons for the popularity of often quite challenging current art. Certainly, expert publicity is assembled around these exhibitions, and yes, much of this art has achieved the condition of not just advertising but fashion, so the works can be quick to digest and easy to like. Concentrations of power, cultural and otherwise, attract interest like magnets, sometimes for adventitious reasons, such as then-mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani deciding, during a 1999 election campaign, to attack the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum.
Mayor Giuliani's response itself precipitated a media sensation. The mass media feeds off stories structured around conflict between classes, races, cultures, and individuals. In Sydney, contemporary art hits the front pages when it coincides with our city's obsession with clashes between powerful personalities and the battle over property, especially waterfront real estate, most notably at Circular Quay. Yet contemporary art as art becomes news, mostly when artists create works that seem to come from another cultural planet than that on which most readers of a given newspaper or watchers of a given television channel live.
George Pell, archbishop of Melbourne, objected to the display of Andre Serrano's photograph Piss Christ at the National Gallery of Victoria, and like Pell, Mayor Giuliani found Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin Mary "blasphemous" and "disgusting" because he saw a willful, arbitrary, and probably atheistic defilement of a sacred icon (figure 1.4). Yet anyone who gave these works the contemplation that all artworks, as all icons, deserve, would come to see them as, in fact, efforts to situate transcendent (and perhaps even religious) experience in settings that create a new, contemporary kind of beauty. Ofili combines elements of Zimbabwean, glam-rock, and gangsta rap aesthetics; Serrano's draw to spirituality is evident in most of his work, such as White Christ (1989).
The Council of the National Gallery of Australia retreated from these values when it cancelled the Sensation exhibition. National Gallery of Victoria director Timothy Potts took a similar path when he withdrew the Serrano work from exhibition on the grounds that violent objection to the work by crazed members of the public endangered the safety of museum attendants. The mistake being made here, by all concerned, is that of reading works of visual art as literal statements, as offering up their meanings at first glance or not at all.
All those who made censorious decisions in these cases failed to allow the communicative time that is due even to the most media savvy works of contemporary art. Indeed, each of these would-be and actual censors succumbed to reading the artworks as media events. By assessing art based on how they imagine it would play with the people, as mediated by the media at its worst, these leaders became subject to "spectacularization," that is, to the values of immediacy, superficiality, and commodity that they would, in other fora, sententiously condemn.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Art To Come"
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Anticipation and Historicity 1
Part I. Thinking Contemporary Art
1. Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity, and Art to Come 27
2. In a Nutshell: Art within Contemporary Conditions 54
3. Contemporary Architecture: Spectacle, Crisis, Aftermath 64
4. Concurrence: Art, Design, Architecture 101
5. Background Story, Global Foreground: Chinese Contemporary Art 126
6. Country, Indigeneity, Sovereignty: Aboriginal Australian Art 156
7. Placemaking, Displacement, Worlds-within-Worlds 198
8. Picturing Planetarity: Arts of Multiverse 228
Part II. Art Historiography: Conjectures and Refutations
9. The State of Art History: Contemporary Art 245
10. Theorizing the Contemporary and the Postcontemporary 279
11. Writing Histories of Contemporary Art: The Situation Now 311
Conclusion: Concurrence in Contemporary World Picturing 353
Notes 365
Index 417
What People are Saying About This
“Global in scale, yet granular in their attention to specifics, these essays map the defining conditions of art and architecture today, laying out the forthright line of inquiry that has made Terry Smith an indispensable guide to understanding the vexing contradictions of twenty-first-century artworlds and their possible futures.”
“Art to Come offers a splendid synthesis of Terry Smith’s reflection on contemporaneity. Smith is one of the main thinkers of that notion, without which there is no real understanding of contemporary art. The book shows the richness of contemporaneity as an ongoing hypothesis that keeps art alive, disclosing the main forces shaping twentieth- and twenty-first-century art as well as those probed, questioned, and sometimes reinvented in it. Those forces include not only globalization, neoliberalism, climate change, transculturality, indigeneity, and colonialism but also decolonization, inequality, and coeval connectivity.”