TV Tower, Moscow, 2000. Artist: Serhiy Ilyin.


"The straight forward, short sighted view of the future is not what art is about. Nor should art project utopia on to a future which is indelibly engraved onto us by economic and technological laws and is already present in our daily experience. Art has to reflect its own process, think about itself and define itself in its own tradition. Art is a discontinuous work on self-consciousness, suspending chronological sequence and examining the past and the future through a cross-eyed perspective."

(Synopsis to Gianfranco Maraniello's contribution in Anthology of Art #01/26) **


Marta Kuzma – Response

Art as the infinite capacity of subjectivity requires for it to be completed in some way and not simply to exist autonomously. Art must be completed by a philosophical criticism that enables its truth to be displayed, substantiates its cultural authority and provides the means for the object to be infinite and timeless. The institution traditionally investing this art with its authority faces its own crisis in its ability to convey the particular essence of experience which validates the infinite nature of the work. By regarding art as autonomous and autogamous is to effectively render its end. In approaching the notion of futures, perhaps it is sufficient to consider new interpretations critical in communicating why an object, and I refer to the material of this object as being infinite, is art rather than mere cultural representation. In exhausting the discourse of the medium (painting, sculpture, video) and discussions around the Duchampian tradition that purport there is effectively nothing that separates art from any other object, a language must evolve around other types of cultural representation without resorting to traditional discussions.

If the art discourse has collapsed, perhaps it is time to once again reconsider the artist, not as genius, but as a producer of an entire cultural infrastructure investing the capacity to convey experience that is no longer possible within the institution. Already enabled by the fashion and celebrity industry, the artist centers production not as supplemental to or in support for advertising but by virtue of an unmediated entanglement. The artist has the possibility to effectively substitute the entire industry without having commercial product placement as a goal. This introduces the artist as conglomerate, or monopoly, in situating the culture industry as a replacement to ideology which has, for all practical reasons, already ended. In this way, reconsideration as to the validity in the concept of pleasure is introduced after its lengthy disregard within past art and literary theory.

The format of the group or collective provides for a more logical space for art production without the traditional aspirations in producing a manifestation of utopian ideas. Instead, the artist(s) as cultural producer assumes the role of architect, urban planner, or surveyor who drafts a framework and the possibilities therein that lend to flexibility in re-entering territories, disciplines, cultures, industries, and even political parties. This guarantees the mobility of each of the group's components, be that a physical subject or an idea, or object, responding to the peripatetic and malleable demands of the present world. Art will depart from being collected and exhibited within an intimate or even grandiose manner in the form of galleries and homes, but instead, may initiate the remapping of territories around it, determining inevitably the shape of homes, domiciles, and even cities based on the premise of endlessness. In such a schematic, existing art institutions, specifically museums rather than more generic cultural institutions, evolve anthropologically exhibiting masterpieces of contemporary art from the 20th and early 21st century within temple-like structures that serve as monuments onto themselves. The curators will remain as whirling dervishes who serve as emissaries exhibiting wares and examples of production from other centres of the world.

I agree in the author's premise that constructing or imagining a future or future art remains futile. However, the reasons lie not in the lack of importance in its imagining but our inability to fathom such a future without the very concept of future having been fetishized. In fact, our past notions of future had been constructed around the entire machinery of imaginings generated by the Cold War, the fear of nuclear catastrophe, and aspirations of the Space industry. Consequently, our fears, tribulations, aspirations were clearly constructed in fantasy space and in the media. As that polemic advanced beyond East/West, contentious territories are no longer as geographically visible, and the notion of struggle develops as a rhizome whereby the notion of invasive agent is amorphous. The daily reality of abnormal glips, permutations, aberrations, and the appearance of "sleeping cells", becomes a regular nuisance impeding the sedimentation and bracketing of ritual, leading to a breakdown in the sanctity of tradition. For this reason, the very notion of future as a system of vectors applauding progress and utopia is a void characterized by the cacophony of simultaneous frequencies and mixed transmission systems.

Marta Kuzma
London

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** Editor's note: The English synopsis to Maraniello's Italian contribution to the Anthology of Art #01/26 which is cited here was written by the editors. Under pressure the author was not consulted.