Jan-Erik Lundström
Extrapolating from the present, through the prism of contemporaneity, towards a future art, illuminates that very present, exposes its cracks and contradictions. The future´s shadow falls long and heavy on our post-colonial and globalised now. But, as always, prophecies exploit the power of language and conceptualisation in the attempt to make dreams – and nightmares – come true. Turn towards the light, be blinded by the future, you have no place to hide. As the post-colonial entered the art world, a reconfigured geography was, within a generation, established. Notwithstanding backlashes, globalisation is here to stay; power lies now, so to speak, also elsewhere, and even class is slowly approaching the event- and awareness horizon. In the light reaching us from the future, globalisation may resolve to avoid the double trappings of the exoticised and fetishised other, as well as the mortal embrace of global family fantasies where difference is extinguished by aggressive inclusion. Not only origin and genealogy are part of the global, but also the very map of production. Multiply the centers of production! Multiply centers of distribution! Multiply art world events, such as biennials, to the point where their proliferation is their de-hierarchisation! Multiply them to the point where their very number makes it impossible to rely on status quo, institutional parameters. The power and the canon will, as such, continue to be destabilised by emergent discourses, by ambivalence and resistance, by negotiation and assertion. The crisis of public space is decisive for art institutions. The breakdown of genres and media and the discourses of transgression, translation and transfiguration are not sufficient changes. Followed by, perhaps, only the library as a sister site of vernacular power and access – knowledge is power –, museum and art institution are essential to the defense and renewal of public space. The artist as performative agent as well as the museum, performing institutional space, seek to employ, redefine, wreck and to wrestle with ruling discourses. In this process, the artist and, consequently, the art institution, embrace additional discourses that undermine the definition of art. This discursive embrace of more and more aspects of culture – a de-compartmentalisation of cultural action - means that the visual artist finds him/herself in the company of journalism, activism, theatre, literature, film, theory, consumption, health – to mention a few. Visual art collapses because of its success. The canon implodes, the insularity of art is broken down; it is no longer necessary to battle with definitions of art or genre (imagine to be relieved from discussing “painting” or “photography”) and the pinning-down of artists. The artist’s work is no longer legitimised from within the field of art, from within the canon or through history, but finds its space through content, the right to tell, the need to tell, enunciation, critical agency, empathy, issues, the tangible and the untangible, the concrete and the tactical and the liminal spaces of perception/cognition. The art work is able to mark the contours of its own space, to mark its intervention within culture; art slowly dissolves, replaced by the broader field of culture. Jan-Erik Lundström Umeå, Sweden |
