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Contemporary art increasingly appears to be governed by three inter-locking but not necessarily mutually hegemonic domains: practice, mediation, and reception. These are broadly the fields in which artists, curators and other cultural entrepreneurs, and the audience are active.
In the DOMAIN OF PRACTICE, artists have in many cultures been freed from taboo and the teleologies of stylistic erasure or development to explore the body in the world in ways which would have been unthinkable a short time ago. Since we will for the fore-seeable future all have a body, although it is now conceivable we may not necessarily be born from one, the body and its representation in its life-world will continue to be the major subject of art practice. Whether this exploration moves outwardly in the direction of machine prosthetics and their digitally replicable analogues remains a feature of taste and demand on the part of the artist. Much of the outward movement could be further spun-off into quasi-art activities like computer games or simulacrous replication of children's toys, as is already the case in countries where relatively advanced technology is cheap relative to other costs of the life-world. Instead of earning money on the side, interior design artists may well do so by techno-interface design. In the inward direction, the ability to play with the micro-exploration of cellular forms may mean socially meaningful experimentation with life forms or their virtual replicas. Or as hitherto, it may mean an artistic retreat into narcissism and self-closure or negation.
Narrative is not dead nor is the wish to tell stories any longer conceivable as a social pathology - as it might have seemed to early modernism. It is clear, for many artists, that the subjects and technical bases of narrative representation have been freed of many former constraints. We can expect to see a much broader and richer exploration of folk mythologies, whether peasant or urban intellectual, and a much richer set of interactions in the sourcing and explication of narratives and their structures across what were previously fairly rigid visual culture and linguistic boundaries. If art is the creation of sensate forms which concretize groups of feelings but is not constrained to immediately interrogate them with the faculty of reason, then the penetration of art already into quotidian life will become the subject of much more art practice. If we have once seen political, religious, or ethical interrogations as sited in the museum, we may also now find much more art practice which museifies every day life in order to make it the site of such critical inquiry, a tendency already clear in a different technical and art market context in 'Pop' art of the late 1960s and 1970s.
In the DOMAIN OF MEDIATION, translation has advanced art exhibitions from a market of commodities paid for with money and with the concomitant store of value-bearing or criterion-announcing works in museums, into a mechanism of globally interacting sites which both create economic value and then simultaneously store it for onward circulation. Art mediation as the transfer of art works from the domain of practice to the domain of reception has clearly been transformed into an elaborate and highly complex economic activity on a world scale. Whilst those who mediate art works to the audience still generally operate from nation states, even if their activities are increasingly transnational in the area of curated international Biennales and Triennales, their activity can only be seen as part of a global culture business. Whatever aesthetic, intellectual, or ethical insight curators and other cultural entrepreneurs may have, and however much they consider themselves to be governed by rules or codes of discourse in their own field, they are overwhelmingly subject to the over-arching demand of the mediation process itself. Their behaviour clearly resembles that of international salesmen and women, marketing the same kind of product but with particularising performance/quality features in different national markets. The cross-national Biennale or the travelling theme exhibition functions along the same lines as a product show or trade fair in different cultures. Their national characteristics are increasingly less evident, and the techniques of market promotion are increasingly borrowed from - and some times designed by the same technical specialists as - the same international manufacturing conglomerates who act as sponsors of exhibitions. In this system, certain sites, be they transient exhibitions, bi-annual or tri-annual exhibitions, or super-museums with multiple national physical sites and/or networks, have begun to function as transcultural storehouses unlike the hitherto national treasurehouses. The acceptance of art works or relevant information about them into these storehouses appears to have become the pre-requisite, or at the very least a necessary consecration, for onward circulation to other sites. Very clearly many artists are now so aware of the importance of such mediation for their own economic survival, let alone general well-being, that they are increasingly shaping their practice to the demands of such mediation. In some respects curators now function analogously to aristocratic patrons before the rise of a middle class market for art in late 18th and 19th century Europe. Collaboration with curators may be indirect and often uneasy, and artists are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this phenomenon has become very marked in the late 1990s. It is shown in the repetitiveness of certain artist selections and the participation or intervention of curators and critics in the presentational framing of artwork.
However, despite this, the demand for new works and new mediators has had one unusual side-effect. Increasingly, the vertical relation between Euramerica and the Middle East, Asia, the Australo-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America is breaking down. Lateral relations have begun between a number of these continental agglomerations of disparate cultures, not all of which are based on post-colonial nation states. The circulation of mediators and their selected works has also begun between these areas and Euramerica on terms and with personnel which, despite many signs of atavistic ignorance and often latently racist resistance to other cultures, are no longer always set there.
In the DOMAIN OF RECEPTION, it is likely the audiences for contemporary art will increase, although not always at state-funded sites of reception like museums of contemporary art. This seems to be due to the ability of contemporary art to respond to the quotidian and to render problematic the facile images of daily life which are controlled in mass consumption societies by the producers of goods and their advertising servicers. While there is little prospect of art replacing sport as a target activity to be used in product marketing, in some urban situations art viewing and the participation in various levels of art spectacle have become major cultural recreations for significant sections of the population. In industrial societies, these sections are typically matched to class strata defined by access to tertiary education, but such education is expanding in many countries. One must also not ignore the significant linkage of some popular spectacles in agricultural societies to transient art production which includes works whose art values are habitual or local that are provided endogenously.
At lower levels of contemporary art flow between national cultures in, say 1900-1950, whether an art flow was generated exogenously or the result of internal discourses and brought about endogenously could be determined by the strength of various structures of external hegemony, including direct colonial rule. The audience for contemporary art could then only be imbricated within a colonial elite or the nationalist forces attempting to overthrow external rule. With the end of colonialism and nearly simultaneously of East European state socialism, the linkages between various audiences and endogenous art discourses have become less determined. At the same time, the exogenous processes in the diffusion of art styles, practices, and criteria of canonical status have become increasingly transnational, that is have become a feature of relations between multiple centres rather than a single relation with one externally dominant centre. Whereas before, say 1990, audiences may thus have been affiliated vertically with a dominant exogenous tendency - to be roughly called 'international style' - thereafter their horizontal affiliation with endogenous discourses may already have included some kind of vertical link but one already endogenously sited. Appraisal and enjoyment of art work thus became no longer the direct acceptance of an international style with a nameable and restricted set of canonical works, it could horizontally include many local works which could meet the very highest international canonical criteria even without that canonisation being externally accepted. There is room for audiences to accept a counter-canon of local significance, and that many local audiences were situated to realize this meant that resistance was possible to the increasingly irrelevant or restricted international canon accepted by transnational mediators. Acceptance of a canon means the restriction of the works used as the qualitative measure of other works. The audiences - and many artists -were able to agree on their own set which was not necessarily that of cultural entrepreneurs. This has meant that however much art was circulated transnationally in newly restricted sites, it could still endogenously enjoy a certain aesthetic autonomy beyond these.
The possible conflict between these vertically and horizontally determined canons has not yet been resolved in favour of the latter, nor will it necessarily be so. Either will require a compact in the domain of practice between artists and a new audience which will include setting the terms for mediation, that is accepting or modifying the participation in new canon determination by mediators. But I think it will be in the horizontal establishment of new endogenous canons that the future possibility of a contemporary art will lie.
John Clark
University of Sydney, October 2001
[email protected]
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