Juan Luis Moraza
What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future art?
What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future art?
When someone talks about 'Egyptian Art' or 'Dogon Art', he is using an anthropological term, absolutely different from talking about 'baroque art' or 'contemporary art', which has a disciplinary sense related to a particular world & industry and a field of specific categories. Actually, these are two different meanings of the word 'art', for these are two different kinds of art. 'Art in a disciplinary sense' comes from post-renaissance European culture, and this sense of 'art' is substancially supported by the so-called 'art system', 'art world' or 'art industry'. On the other hand, 'art in an anthropological sense' refers to some activities and material remainders hardly related to survival as a priority. So, when someone talks about 'Egyptian Art', it seems somewhat anachronistic, since Egyptians did not have something like what European-post-renaissance calls 'art'. What is labeled as 'Egyptian Art' was, in fact, part of funeral industry, imperial advertising, furniture design and legal statements. In the opposite, we do not include current funeral industry, advertising design, legal statements, etc. as being contemporary art. Only using the anthropological meaning of the word 'art', we can name these things as 'art', being Egyptian or contemporary art and therefore encorporating many social activities and material remainders in the category of 'art'. If we don’t know when we are using one meaning or the other, we are extending a deep misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is profitable for the International Art System. Its increased value is supported by symbolic inertias which, in fact, protect – in a pure colonial or colonistic style – this specific idea of the word 'art' (European-post-renaissance-industry culture field) over 'other' cultures, including Egyptian, Dogon, popular culture, etc. – This colonial aim is and has been characteristic for the Art System from the XIVth century Rome to the XXIst century N.Y.C., and, after having appropiated all the past and outer cultures, a kind of self-appropriation in the name of an 'art & life fusion'. This is the way modern and postmodern art are deeply related to the laissez-faire liberal theory which claims a progressive reduction in the political (for individual profits which – supposedly – will benefit the whole society). As a double consequence, while its categorial field becomes more and more polemic, the Art System (including structures, people, finances, etc.) becomes more and more powerful as well. On the one hand, the categorial field of art is widely extended to the whole world, to everything – and simultaneously reduced to nothing, because there’s no real difference between art and other things. Yet, on the other hand, the Art System is widely extended over art practice, placing the artist at the lower level of the social pyramid of labor, making real the XXth century’s dream of the fading aura. The question about the future of art can be answered in a prospective way, in terms of statistical computation – observing social, economic & political tendencies. This is always tedious, as Goethe pointed out in his ‘Faust’: "what you call the Spirit of the Times is actually the Spirit of the Owners." The artist of the present is more and more involved in looking for his place in society, but always related to contemporary forces: to this strange, impossible arrangement between financial capital and pseudo-popular legitimacy, so-called ‘late capitalism’. The Art System doesn’t need art as a field of knowledge, nor art as a categorial system. The Art System only needs the Art System, which means exactly a world wide web of cultural intermediaries, industries, supporters, and capital movements; and the symbolic inertia of an always romantic, mythic idea about art. In this sense, the practice of art will continue searching for a place in contemporary society, and, completely out of sciences, out of religions, out of politics, it will continue trying to go into show business, or absolute-chic-design, fashion business, or the pseudo-political-art-simulation of the institutional-intermedia-art centers. Without any proper place in science, free from any knowledge responsibilities, trapped in a logic of self-expression and charisma, including the so-called 'political artist' who becomes part of a peculiar show business as a "social worker in the tertiary sector" (A. Sampson) in a spectacle society, art looks for self-legitimation which justifies all its increased values. The high strength of the International Art System confirms that this self-legitimation works in terms of self-conviction, and so the artist tries to go into show business, simulating some legitimate figures and characters: simulating being a performing actor, simulating being a social activist, simulating being a team leader, or business man, simulating being a new religious master. Context is supplanted by contest. This future makes art an International Ego Contest, the art of achieving profits and goals: art will embody the ideal of a fusion between art and life, but with a kind of life that was never imagined: neither immediacy nor spontaneity, neither the rich experienced nor the revolutionary instant, but the tedious repetition of the daily furious jungle fighting for survival, the ideal of savagery, the way in which civilization becomes incivility. Another response is an active desiring project. There’s still a way of recognizing a place for art, not only in the anthropological, but in the disciplinary sense. Not in the enterprise or show business direction, but by the desire for knowledge. Not as an investment, but as research. The question is: is there a place for art in research? Some of the things treated by art in the past are treated today by psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, iconology, ethnography, mathematics, topology, fuzzy-logic, theoretical physics, advertising research, cognitive biology, genetic epistemology, or hardware & software engineering. The only remaining sort of research for artists – being prepared for it without any other specific training – is conscience phenomenon. In the field of consciousness, mental images, inner cartographies, alterated states of the mind, heuristics, imagination, fantasy and projection/production, artists can even accomplish more than psychologists. It can be imagined an art being as it has ever been a field of research. Actually, contemporary science is close to this understanding of art. Art will not be science, but consciousness, that is, a way of producing knowledge, introducing the inner space as a non-determinist factor of knowledge. This future requires a radical change of perspective, another standpoint, a courageous and humble spirit for rehearsing a proper epistemological statute for art. Juan Luis Moraza Madrid [email protected] |
