|
To speak of an art of the future or an undiscovered art is to necessarily speak of a different aesthetic agency, a different mode of production, a different system of social relations, and a different mode of discovering a category called art.
A "future / undiscovered art" is an art that does not only finally forsake the construction or authority of "art" or even of the "aesthetic" in the modernist or even postmodernist sense, but invalidates its rationality altogether and its seemingly infinite capacity for reflexivity and self-referentiality.
In carrying out such a radical operation, which seeks to challenge the very infrastructure and ethical pedagogy of an art system and culture industry in place in current society, the "future art", therefore, has to resist the teleology of progress, the free-market overinvestment in newness and latest-ness, and the discriminatory premise of distinction. It is a kind of art that actively nostalgizes a positive utopia for history.
As a form of transition, the art that is yet to come must be able to realize certain impossibilities, the not-yet possible, that already haunt us in some form of "eschatological tension." It must reflect on the unimaginable totality that can be grasped at the moment of its crash, on the one hand, and the retreat to an archaic patriotism of land and country whenever the security of transnational hegemony is substantially threatened, on the other. It must reckon with the infinite transformability of cells of people who seek cover in multiple tropes of identities and identifications across the caves and condominiums of the "global ethnoscape", on the one hand, and the almost autistic attention to the minuteness of uniqueness and finitude as in the biometrics of the fingerprint or the iris, or the strain of virus or germ, and the intricate intelligence of surveillance, on the other. It is an art that is invisible, but palpable, spectral, and leaves a trace of scent or sound. It is an art that harbors.
The art of the future will be on the run, but settles inevitably on a planet that is in the throes of both ruin and hopefully of the renewal of its ecology.
Patrick D. Flores, Philippines
|
|
|