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In my view, the future of art will be defined by a desire to reach the unknown recipient – from the consumer of culture to the man in the street, from the girl next door to the man in our dreams, from the global village to aliens in outer space. Already, museum programs and funding policies commit ever-increasing funds and intelligence into developing new audiences, outreach initiatives and community development. Indeed, for many artists, the reception of the mass audience to their work is either germane; as in the hyper-paced vernacular of manga used by a number of leading Japanese artists, integral; as in the work of ‘The Tokyo Recycling’ project and the performative rituals of Lee Ming Wei, or evoked cosmically through the ongoing series of ‘Projects for Extra Terrestrials’ by Cai Guo Qiang. Together, such examples of practice ask: is there anybody else out there? Art is finally coming out.
In the future, contemporary art will reach audiences too large and illusive to profile.
This future will be premised on the creation of scenarios and prototypes, which will be exhibited, distributed, launched, published, inserted, whispered, directed, performed, exchanged and packaged not into the art market nor the art world, but the universe at large. If the universe has, in the past, been gnomically sent to test us, in the future contemporary art will send messages back the other way.
The future of contemporary art will do a spectrum of cultural surfaces, from the physical to the virtual. It will appear in a variety of viewing spaces, from the permanent to the temporary, and will tour and be distributed as anecdotes, adverts, gift-giving and via mail order. Cultural and geographic borders will be crossed and in the process a dissolution of the prototype and scenario will be altered. The future of art will shirk responsibility towards the precious and the pure, but will find renewed value in the crafting of knowledge, which will necessarily bring forth moments of lucidity and insight that will make us draw breath akin to the aura ascribed to art of the past.
The imprint for such a future will involve artists working in one of two ways. In the tradition of making unique works of art, they will construct prototypes of objects and ideas. The role of craft will play an all important role in this process, introducing aspects of the everyday, which have already been gathering ground within recent developments of contemporary critical practice. The production of prototypes will see a revival in the hand-made, which will gratify the audiences desire for consuming virtuosity and the artists desire for indulging in radical pleasure. The artist’s palette of materials will continue to expand and borrow across cultures, disciplines, traditions and resources – real and imagined. The utilitarian aspect of craft-based work will also carve out a suggestive course of applications for contemporary art as it moves in search of wider arenas of supporters, aficionados, and message receivers and responders. Prototypes will remain with the artist, and permission to reproduce, build or fabricate will be bought by an individual, a fashion house, a publisher, a manufacturer or a municipality. The future of contemporary art might appear as a button on a shirt, a brick in a building, a light on the street, a font in a book, the dial tone of a phone or as an image in the front room of a quarter of a country’s population.
Parallel to making prototypes, artists will also be involved in constructing scenarios which they will license for distribution in the form of films and still images using the existing patrons of local and global business firms and corporations. In the future, art will have a much more direct relationship to these industries and will use them to reach unchartered territories. All importantly, this move will see an embracement of artist’s as cultural thinkers, able to effect change on a visual level through images, sounds and words. Foremost in this process will be the conceptualising of scenarios by artists, to promote not only the products or brands of a business but something of their own style, views and aesthetics. Great museum collections around the world have, after all, striven to brand themselves through artists they collect in this way for centuries. As the course of contemporary art strides more steadily in the direction of moving beyond representation into the realms of the hyper-real, the extraordinary and the imagined, the future of art will increasingly find and require outlets that can support the presentation of time-based scenarios in the form of lens-based stills or moving images. Media creatives and big business will become the new collectors of such an art, and their collections will be circulated via ad campaigns, cinema trailers and hoardings, terrestrial and satellite television stations and surreptitious packaging schemes.
If the future of art is to be defined by its consumers, then its makers will also direct it. Will there be compromises at stake to assure the later? Possibly. Will this be the future of art? Inevitably.
Sharmini Pereira |
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