Scott McQuire
One of the characteristics of modern art is that it rarely BELONGED to its time. Baudelaire charted this course in the mid-19th century when he castigated his artistic contemporaries for their belated and nostalgic vision, manifested in an inability to express the ephemerality of modern urban life. By the early 20th century, what Lissitzky and Arp dubbed the 'isms of art' took it as axiomatic that art should play a leading role in inventing the future. Art was to be the promontory from which distant horizons could first be glimpsed, the laboratory in which the old would be sacrificed and the new generated, by force if necessary. Over time, the linearity of this heroic vision has become more questionable in many circles, as the heterogeneity of sites and trajectories of artistic production in any era has gained better recognition. The hegemonic claims of metropolitan centres such as Paris and New York, while not entirely vanquished, have receded to some extent as new frameworks for thinking about the politics of art and cultural difference and have demanded a re-appraisal of dominant art history. As Nikos Papastergiadis pointed out, the most interesting contemporary art is marked, above all, by the condition of cultural hybridity. Yet, somewhat perversely, a frozen image of the modernist avant-garde is fast becoming the intellectual support of the many politicians, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who are now seeking to redefine contemporary art as the R&D arm of the digital economy. What is most significant about this shift is the way it reveals the marginal social position of contemporary art, outgunned by Hollywood, corporate PR and the media machines. For much of the population, contemporary art is largely invisible, flashing into view only when the odd Biennale or 'scandalous' blockbuster manages to capture fleeting attention in the crowded round of media events. In this context, the few business and government leaders who still throw funding crumbs to the 'creative arts' are applauded, while those, such as Tony Blair, who extol the tie-ins between art and the emerging network society are regarded as positively far-sighted. Perhaps they are, at least compared to others of their ilk who no longer see any social role for art whatsoever. However, where 'enlightened' patrons once looked to art to provide handsome trophies for boardroom display, they now want a more direct return on their investments. Artists, we are now told, are one of the keys to creating wealth in the new economy, whether by generating original 'content', or fashioning new interfaces, or creating new models of 'interactivity'. Even in the wake of the dotcom bubble, this is the direction in which much government enthusiasm points. As I write, the Australian government has announced the appointment of Dr. Terry Cutler, whose professional background is largely in the telecommunications industry, to head its peak art's funding body, the Australia Council. Cutler exemplifies the new artspeak when he talks of shifting the basis of arts funding from sponsorship to collaboration with industry. Such a position creates both possibilities and dangers. On the one hand, the current pressure to further integrate art into the IT and media industries helps lay to rest the old shibboleth of 'art for art's sake'. On the other hand, it also further embeds a purely instrumental notion of creativity into contemporary consciousness. Equally, it heightens the leaning towards screen-based art, which has been such a marked characteristic of the last decade. If Virilio's description of social life lived under the 'dictatorship of the screen' is an overstatement, the possibility of marginalizing non-screen based forms cannot be ignored. More generally, the relationship between art and technology is clearly one of the key contexts for future art. Paik's memorable staging of the first technological accident of the 21st century has been overtaken by numerous real accidents of contemporary technoculture: Y2K, Big Brother as popular TV culture, genetic engineering, the human genome project. Art of the future cannot simply opt out of this context. While a complacent art will be content to accommodate itself to the new exigencies of funding and display, any critical art will need to find new strategies to negotiate the tensions it creates. It is important to understand that it is not a matter of rejecting either the IT sector or the business world in the name of aesthetic purity, but to recognize that official attempts to integrate art with contemporary information technologies offer artists a strategic position. Art can become a lever to introduce a wider political discourse where it is currently most lacking. Crucially, this discourse needs to engage the limits of liberal free-market ideology in which the art-technology alliance is currently proposed. Such a stance will also require sustained endeavours to recognize and facilitate new spaces and contexts for communication and collaboration (one example is this project). In the same way that mass-media screen technologies of the 20th century exerted new pressures on geographical and cultural borders, generating national cultures but also blurring them, transgressing boundaries between the public and the private, exploding the confined space of the gallery and illuminating the everyday in new ways, network society is likely to be BOTH more standardized AND more diversified. On the one hand, it looms as the century of Microsoft and AOL-Time-Warner. Yet the very existence of decentralized communication networks also creates the potential that the sort of cultural cross-fertilization initiated in the mass migrations of the 20th century might reach their fuller potential as everyday interactions of the 21st. Artists can play a vital role in creating these new exchanges, not by serving the efficiency of the IT industry, but by addressing the cultural, political and economic inequalities of the current phase of globalisation. This might bring the promise of a democratic global culture closer to what Langston Hughes long ago wrote about the myth of the United States: 'The land that never has been yet. And yet must be'. Scott McQuire Melbourne, Australia, June 2001 |
