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When writers of science fiction write about unknown ways of living, working and operating, usually there is some element of established science underpinning their speculation. Art supposedly has much in common with science when it comes to making creative leaps of imagination, but it also differs fundamentally from science. Who could have foreseen what the Dadaist 'readymade' or even the 'readymade-aided' did for art? Not Duchamp, that's for sure!
Art has taken many a surprising turn in the last century. When asked to comment on my vision for a yet unknown art, I can't help but turn to art itself. Like WTJ Mitchell, in his notorious article "What do pictures want?", I give art 'a persona': someone is taking art somewhere, although it is difficult to say exactly where. Art is robust. Even when it was up against all the guns of America's cultural imperialists, and abstraction reigned, art did not vanish. It simply took a new turn suggested a few decades earlier, burying itself in language. And then, when the art-of-the-everyday looked like winning out, and installations seemed to be 'in', the painted surface reinvented itself. Art is ahead of us, with artists and theorists trailing behind. Perhaps the Greeks are responsible. Athena their god of wisdom, art and craft, and a warrior, has made sure that art persists today in its multiplicity of art forms.
What seems to animate art is the dialectical push and pull between the local and the global. In Australia, Aboriginal art in its many forms has given a new life to local art. Their relationship with the land has caused issues of landscape to be taken again, but with fresh eyes and minds. That chasm between the past and present is conjoined paradoxically by Aboriginal art, an artform which both belongs and does not belong to the contemporary, global mainstream.
In Indonesia, almost immediately after Suharto lost power in 1999, artists gave voice to their new political future and an extraordinary outpouring of contemporary art in all forms pointed to new freedoms. A number of those artists like Heri Dono are well known beyond the Asia-Pacific region, so the local folded immediately onto the global, and vice versa. That dialectical play between the local and the global, aided by the speed of information flow and the robustness of art itself to respond to change brings about a delightful element of serendipity and wisdom in representing in ways that seems to tower above mere mortals, and definitely above dealers! Ways of representing may change with technology but contemporary art continues to astonish. Sometimes art needs to reach back to go forward. To refer to the local again, Australia has recently witnessed an unleashing of xenophobia many had thought impossible to imagine. Issues of race and religion have surfaced under a conservative government. Art is responding, joined only by a few intellectuals.
It is this ability in art to be along-side new technology and ideas that keeps it ahead of the game, not in a modernist sense, but as a truly robust entity - and on its own. Perhaps art's guiding hand can guide us.
Catherine Speck
Australia, January 20, 2026
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