Abstract
Drawing on a deep and subtle understanding of a plurality of art practices, Terry Smith considers the transitions between the modern and the contemporary in relation to changes in geo-political alignments, economic globalization, communication technologies and historical ideas. He argues that the contemporary invalidates linear time, so that the present is stretched backward and forward without becoming the past or the future. Consequently, it is not clear when the contemporary begins and when it ends, especially because museums and galleries, foundations and endowments with established art collections, want to be up-to-date and at the start of the new.
In addressing this issue, Smith describes how under the contemporary, audiences and viewers encounter objects and images in ways that undermine or replace academic canons, traditional techniques and modernist styles, so that simultaneous contingent art practices in diverse places interact without a common history. He identifies the frictions and tensions between three interrelating and overlapping developments that form contemporary art as a different ensemble from modernist art.
First, within art institutions there is a resurgence of modernism which endorses the methods, formats and tastes of the past. Directly or indirectly, the aim is to reinforce the aura, the status and the value of the art held or traded by museums, corporations, collectors and auction houses which have a stake in the circulation of art objects as commodities and the maintenance and increase of their prices. Smith critically discusses how this flows in and out of the codes and signs of consuming and advertizing that have been transformed by new internet related media. All this includes sensationalism as a form of product differentiation which immediately and temporarily thrills or shocks or repulses. The effect on audiences and viewers is transient and does not lead to contemplations and puzzles about line and color, nature and beauty, space and time.
At one level, there is a trend for cities to finance art fairs, festivals, biennales and block-busters to promote their international profile and prestige. At another level, these spectacles are experienced by audiences and viewers who approach them with excited anticipation and exit them with provisional anxiety. These feelings are not unrelated to the financialization of the global economy, which is characterized by risk, speed and tenuousness, because wealth and income appear to be disconnected from material production.
Despite this interest in the spectacular and the sensational and the search for effect rather than meaning, for Smith, history exists as reconstructed memories which influence the present. Art involves both current work and recurrent themes and problems, forms and genres, characters and events which are not fixed in their times, because each historical period merges into another. This is the case with 20th-century modernism which has prefigured, but has not determined or framed, contemporary art practice.
Second, following decolonization, the rise of the non-aligned movement and the end of the Cold War, for Smith, the present involves responses to new structures and agencies of power and inequality between classes, genders, ethnicities, peoples and nationalities. Because European and American modernism has lost its relevance and ability to lead, while post-modernism has been compromised by its relativism and individualism, these responses occur through an immersion in fluid and mutable communication, representation and imagination inflected with different cultural heritages from the East and the South, so that contemporary art is world art for the first time in history.
Recognition of artists from the East and the South has something in common with the spectacular and the sensational when it is enhanced by extravagantly promoted travelling exhibitions and publically funded international shows. Although this is linked to the accumulation of capital as a form of investment by museums and galleries or by private buyers and corporate collectors, Smith surveys and assesses the work of those artists who challenge the cultural domination of Europe and America and transcend primitivism, exoticism and orientalism. He shows that intercultural, crosscultural and multicultural dialogues undermine the homogenization caused by globalization. In contrast to the appropriations by European and American modernism, now authentic translations of art practice occur through alternative communities and collective groups of artists, many of whom are self-taught and self-activated. In this way, the art practices of the colonial, the marginal, the peripheral and the provincial disrupt and encompass the metropolitan centres.
Archeologists and anthropologists contribute to the negotiations whereby indigenous artists balance financial interest, communal sociability and spiritual functionality. Smith discusses how, post-colonial mergers with and separations from indigenous art, which has been partially suppressed and selectively collected, continue to orient and disorient, despite government sponsoring and commercial marketing. As Smith’s analysis shows, this involves resistance and reaffirmation. For example, the engravings and paintings of Australian Aborigines record the movements of pastoralists and contain images of ships and railways, of armed policemen and soldiers, of mines and miners, of military and civilian aircraft. This is not a passive reaction to modernity, but an embrace of aesthetic possibilities to bring material objects and economic impacts under control through their incorporation into Aboriginal modes of understanding.
Third, according to Smith, inside and outside these post-colonial discontinuities, professional artists are redefining and resituating themselves because contemporary art includes a move from individual creation to collaboration, which consists of situations that reveal and conceal, that disclose and enclose, that confront and accept. He explores informal, intimate and relational art practices which include cooperative virtual networks and interactive media activities. While these retain a loose connection to the formats of modernism, this art does not emerge through studios, museums or galleries, but is presented in alternative spaces, on internet sites and through ephemeral public displays, which, among other things, allow relays with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Today, time, space and matter mutate and are connected when art objects and images are positioned and experienced through a variety of phenomenologies and ontologies. Art practices are enhanced by the acoustics of voices, sounds and silences through remixing and recycling, whereby recording and playback are broken up and manipulated to create visual displays. Artists work with composers and cinematographers, electronic engineers and computer programmers, to bring inscription, transmission and vibration to painting, sculpture, photography. This is facilitated by a move from analogue to digital, which leads to the view that all images are malleable rather than fixed, whether as video or projection, so that the image tends to replace the object.
In summary, What Is Contemporary Art? is pervaded by the paradox that the contemporary can only be contingent and relational, that it is both with us and leaving us. The paradox is resolved when contemporary temporality, spatiality and mediation are experienced as art practice which expresses strains between intimacy and ubiquity, immediacy and transition, being with others and apart from them. The present is the now that refracts, including through video and digital files, beyond reproduction into what is historically present and currently becoming.