Lars Bang Larsen
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?
'Vision' is a term that resonates with a more or less urgent subjective wish and with what is potentially unrealisable. Or is it wishful thinking, inner visions, pipe dreams? 'Vision' seems to be regaining credence as a word conducive to production in the broadest sense. It appeals to the advertising world's drive for the commercially visionary, and it resonates with a contemporary preoccupation with digitisation, futurology and the feeling of being on the brink of something new and in flux. I talk about my 'vision' of a future art in this way as a mixture of hopefully objective analysis and the proactive; what I would like to see happen. Recently, a French art institution asked a number of art world people of all stripes 'What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century?' My answer was: 'It is telling that contemporary institutional competence seems to be increasingly organised according to flexibility and global effect. I'm not so sure about flexibility as a positive attribute for an art institution; in most cases, it means that the willingness to keep up production in any given scenario comes before the willingness to analyse that scenario. I expect an art institution in the 21st century not to be captive to market ideologies, to actively reflect the surrounding world, and to pursue strategies that give people tools for thinking.' According to Marx, and it seems like most left and right wing economists today agree with at least the basic assumption of this, profits will have a tendency to fall. Accumulated wealth will, at a certain point, be so vast that it can't be re-invested because it will have eliminated all competition. Accumulated capital then can't start something new because the population will have been impoverished. This will be the collapse of capitalism, also due to external pressure from pervasive social unrest under the yoke of the empire of global monopolies. It is doubtful whether this collapse will happen with the bang that Marx foretold. Even if quite a few people are back on the streets protesting more or less peacefully these days, the middle class is solidifying and becoming increasingly difficult to destabilise. In any case, an overheating is taking place that creates the need for ideological clarification, and there is no reason why visual arts shouldn't be part of this process. Contemporary art in its function as contemporary commentary should maintain a tension that seeks discourse and correlation outside of the domain that conventionally belongs to art, thereby counteracting the gravitational pull of specialisation, internal references and qualification by regressing into tradition. Art is one of the superstructures – along with gender, party politics and national identity, for example, which affect more people than art does – that need to be dismantled and diversified to avoid power concentrations and to encourage new ideas. As a privileged cultural sphere in a privileged part of the world, art has every possibility to create a professional ecology of small public spheres, microspheres, where a variety of different forms, discourses and subjectivities can thrive in the degree of complexity they wish, by themselves and by interaction and overlapping with each other. My vision of the art of the future is a 'new autonomy' for aesthetics, a re-thinking of aesthetics from the vantage point of non-tautological propositions while maintaining a space for aesthetic knowledge and its processes. In this 'new autonomy' (for lack of better words), critical rationality can be extended or transgressed or eliminated in playful action research. Institutionally speaking, this implies an art circuit where art and the discourse it produces have no external strings attached manipulating discursive or institutional superstructures, and where institutions work for the producers (= artists, theorists as well as audience) rather than the other way around. Perhaps this reflects today's ethics rather than an extrapolation or foretelling of a future situation. Lars Bang Larsen Copenhagen & Helsinki |
