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Having been asked to write about the future of contemporary art and happily consented, I suddenly find that I am unable to do so. Perhaps this is due to the fact that at this moment I can only think about art in the present, art in real time. It is not that I do not believe that art has a future, on the contrary, but rather that there is a challenge to find a mode of engaging with the present which, slippery as it is, seems to require more urgent attention. This art in the present, this art in real time that I would wish for engages with the levels of political unease and disavowal we have been living with for some time, without pretending to either take on the mantle of political action nor to retreat to another mode of engagement in which the personal is declared political. Like everyone else in the world, I too have spent the past month reading papers and talking with friends obsessively and recognising that the unread writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Like everyone everywhere, I too have been thinking about how this challenge can effect my practice, the engagement with contemporary visual culture.
"Real time is truth time, the moment when the truth becomes real in time. Masks are removed and the repressed returns. Illusions are punctured and old lies are revealed to be just those." Real time is the moment in which some nebulous half acknowledged entity, previously no more than a vague unease or a partially avowed recognition, crashes into our own reality by becoming a reality itself. The events of September the 11th were an instant of suddenly being forced to live in real time. But with hindsight, many of us will confess to having been uneasy for over a year now; G8 summit meetings in Gothenburg and Genoa disrupted by increasingly violent protests, the Intifada in Palestine and Israeli response spiralling out of control, evermore exasperated spokespersons for international aid agencies trying to warn of impending disaster, open discussion of the consequences of slavery and racial violence across the globe taking place in Durban. With every day, our wariness seems to increase with the recognition that those who run the world order and the global economy have no perceived legitimacy amongst the billions of people who are simultaneously producing much of that wealth while suffering the crippling restraints of trade agreements and financial debts.
Most of us in the art world do not have advanced degrees in economics or international relations, but that does not mean that we are divorced from their problems. On the other hand, while desperately wishing to engage, we are all wary of reproducing the conceptual practices of the 1970s which took on the subjects and methods of concrete institutional, political practices. In that important phase of the critique of Modernism, artists actually needed to be investigative journalists, urban planners, social analysts and institutional scourges if the language of culture and the language of everyday political life were ever going to be brought into proximity. Similarly, in another facet of the critique of the modern era, those groups that had been outside representation, with neither a legitimated voice nor recognised subjectivity -- namely sexual and racial 'others' -- pursued a strategic embrace of articulating their own experience as a way of forcing culture to register their history and their presence. In both of these movements, loosely grouped around a notion of 'conceptualism', one experienced the influences of the cultural theory of the day underwritten by the need to redress injustice and to unmask dark and secreted histories behind whose facades business went on as usual. At present, my explicit desire for an art of unease is part of a recognition that if we keep asking questions in the name of the familiar institutions, practices and policies we are surrounded by, then we will achieve nothing more than their duplication. The issue is to try and find completely different questions that are not overwritten by pragmatic fantasies about 'solving problems' but about dragging our unease towards a level of consciousness.
Presently, we have gone beyond these efforts of pointing to injustice, because those marked by it have pointed to themselves, have usurped a god-given 1st World right to set the agenda for undoing historical wrongs they might be responsible for. We have gone beyond the exposing of wrongdoing and the allocating of blame. The main task which recent events have bequeathed to us is one of learning to reread the world from a different perspective and art surely is part of that rereading process. Arts practices that include curatorial, institutional and ad hoc contexts, discussions and texts, have the ability to pinpoint to our unease in places where it might not be so obvious as in foreign or economic policies. Last year, I came across a piece by photographer and installation artist Joshua Glottman, which was part of his retrospective exhibition at the Tel Aviv museum. It was a recreation of a family room from a Kibbutz ca. late 1950s. This was an aesthetic genre unfamiliar to the West which combined bad local copies of Danish Moderne furniture, high Zionist memorabilia, biographies of leaders and books on heroic military campaigns and the obligatory empty tank shell brought back from the Suez war in 1956 and filled with dried thorns and thistles. Time had stood still in this uncanny space, a petrified moment of idealistic belief written through a decorative language that I had never seen articulated. At the centre of the room stood a TV monitor on which documentary footage of an Independence Day military parade celebrated the Israeli victory in 1967 by encircling the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. All quite familiar, except that the loop was playing backwards, the soldiers frozen in a permanent retreat, reading the decor of the room as equally backward looking and frozen in time, not an innocent Eden, but the beginning of a tragedy. Art can re-write or re-read daily aesthetics as deeply imbricated and can provide us with a model for so reading a vast range of our gestures and cultural habits. It can instil unease about the simplest, most taken for granted habits, about asking a question or assuming a position and it can do so without the romantic flourishes associated with artistic style. Art in the present produces a question where none has been posed, and articulates an unease where none is being admitted to.
Irit Rogoff
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