Betti-Sue Hertz
What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future/undiscovered art?
What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future/undiscovered art?
A “future” art will make clear the subtleties of the various cultural and natural worlds that impact on daily lives and daily world views, through means more transparent (accessible and knowable) than those available to previous generations. It will break any still existing divisions that inhibit the communicative aspects of art. There are two platforms that collide and elide, overlap and explode, where the future and the undiscovered come together in contemporary art: new technologies, and the low-intensity social/political conflicts that are redefining the global context. The contradiction between archaic spectacles and those of the ever becoming present exist in simultaneous and contiguous spaces. The deep and the transitional may be psychically uncomfortable with each other, yet they are not unfamiliar in their togetherness. This new art will reveal a desire for transcendence as well as historical specificity. The dematerialization of art – evaporation, temporality, and theatricality – all language associated with conceptual art of the 1960s, can now be re-configured for the 21st century. Morphing, continual flow, constant flux and predetermined contingencies, all suggest an edginess of materiality, especially as it has been received historically as a central demand of art. The unfixedness of things is not only another inscription of molecular energetic activity but a trajectory that can only suggest the undiscovered in art and in its technology of being. Historically, it is evident that with the advent of printing or oil paint, the means to communicate had drastic and revolutionary effects on the forms of art, which in turn became historically specific. At the same time, visual languages emerged out of ones that were already known, later to become separate, and unique, but never taking on a character of its own in isolation. In the fast-paced world of new technology, the possibilities for new art forms are just revealing themselves. Through the efforts of artists working in low and high bandwidth cyborg fantasies, streaming media, participatory chats, form design software, and the attack and destroy strategies of cultural activists, artists are learning how to subvert digital as well as cellular, wireless, and solar technologies to transmit ideas. The challenge for the near future will be to evolve a level of comfortability with these forms so they are imbued with the complexity and dense resonance of the most successful works in more traditional forms. The social implications of the deterioration of national borders and the increasing migrations both internal and external, the effects of political and economic pressures, cause new configurations for the production of works of art. The increasing spread of the globalization invasion is redefining the boundaries of cultural identities and difference, now made up of ever new combinations of local and global elements. Resistances to gross standardization, including subjective interpretations of highly globalized messages, serve unique world views informed by cultural and geographic specificity. Caught between utopic and distopic realities, artists are not only emerging from the major cosmopoles but from far flung geographical sectors, with at least a partial knowledge of their contemporaries and current ideas and practices in contemporary art. This gap-filled knowledge is gleaned from the leveled and flattened reproductive capacities of print, electronic, and digital media. One no longer needs to see art in the flesh to obtain a transmission from it. It is contingency and a fully destabilized concept of place that will bring about dramatic changes in art, generating new subjective constructions through an intense concentration on the inevitable confluence of the subjective, real, and virtual worlds. Betti-Sue Hertz San Diego |
