Stephen Horne
Abandoning The Future
Abandoning The Future
The future and power? Leave the future alone, it never did you any harm. Abandon your imperialist agendas, try something else like sleeping or going for long walks. Some artists have taken this way, engendering respect for the future as openness, a not-yet that is the place of dreams, of hopes and wishes. Through tact and restraint their works create that perpetual estrangement, that source from which we draw to resist the temporality of modern everyday life, that time of the production line which serializes its inhabitants. That time of the digital which puts nature's flux-world permanently in deep freeze, but available anytime anywhere. But, you say, doesn't the work of art always project a more desirable future? Better to face emptiness, the now that never is but also an "is never;" that reclining into process, the ephemeral and the movement of entropy, "failing" as Samuel Beckett puts it. Here, we find artists whose works refuse or fail to project closure on any moment, whose works recline on the present, into the past as recollection. These are the works we must consider in relation to your question of a vision for the future. These are the works within which we may get lost, go nowhere, or elsewhere, failing better. We find artists amongst us whose works refuse those ideas about time and history which construe time as a continuous line with causes and effects, and where the present is an instant in isolation, whose works engender a time and a history more properly cyclical where the condition of temporariness replaces "western" desire for permanence, and where each thing is seen to be in a state of becoming (or disappearing). Perhaps I am half dead, says Hiroshi Sugimoto. In place of the future write "repetition." Now we can end; the unforeseeable is embraced by relinquishing desire. Robert Morris once proposed that automating processes open the work and the artist's behaviour to completing forces beyond his or her total personal control. At around that moment, that year of future, 1968, Lygia Clark wrote, "When there is a struggle with police and I see, in Brazil, a seventeen year old killed, I realize that he dug a place with his body for the generations that succeed him. These young people have the same existential attitude as we, they unleash processes whose end they can't see, they open a path whose exit is unknown." (October #69, MIT, Boston) Lani Maestro's "a voice remembers nothing", 1988/95, displays a video image of the ocean on two side by side monitors. The two images are the same so far as we can say. The waves roll in, filmed frontally and so giving maximum reference to the rectangularity of the monitors and their plinth, and to the spatiality of the room. The double image of surf rolling in strongly contradicts itself, since this is as good an icon of nature's originality and uniqueness as we will ever find. Are we then seeing a mere demythification of nature here? Or should we be considering further the dilemma posed to nature by electronic technology? The conundrum posed by having two waves the same is at the source of the objectification which results from "our" technology's drive to secure and make permanent, to impose a closure, fragmenting the event from the ongoing flux of time, from disappearance. Where disappearance is itself "disappeared" by being made permanent. Mowry Baden and Tadashi Kawamata, two sculptors concerned with embodiment and its folding of future time past time into that now which never is, carry out their respective explorations within a context of participatory and architectural situations. For each, it is the body in motion that is of interest, that underlies their proposals, and it is the body considered as subject of a "narcissistic" concentration that paradoxically is manifested as self-dispersal, a simultaneous confirmation and loss of identity. Baden's sculptures are often called "task oriented" due to the way they engage the viewer/participant in a variety of simple, physical activities such as walking, lifting, stretching, pedalling, etc. He wrotes, "This body may be mine. That's enough to start with. This body (possibly mine) runs into other things, but more importantly it runs into itself." (in Jodoin, "Task Oriented Sculptures", Mercer Union, Toronto, 1987) Kawamata said about his sculpture at Evreux last year, "had the idea of digging up the memory of the town with the people in the past and present times, and expressing it as the thing to think about the present time." (in Catherine Grout, "Kawamata, Evreux", Steidl Publishers, Germany, 2000). In this work, we walk five meters above ground level on massive timbered walkways, paths that ring with the sound of one foot in front of another, a circuit that brings us into a gathering of this city's past and present. The future is not an empty land to be colonized, nor some void to be filled by idle projections. The future is already inhabited by folds and by liquids, by dreams and by gods. What's required now are artists who can refuse to be ahead of themselves, whose repetitions function to reabsorb duration in the reality of the present and for whom the continuity of ritual exorcises the discontinuity of existence. On Kawara has carried this to an extreme, such that we may even question the notion of "works" if we think of the work of art as a thing by which something else is accomplished, as something with an end. With his date paintings, begun in 1966, and his journals, maps and postcards, he has made his own, the systems and structures by which we direct and organize our lifetimes. Reduction to the most literal, an art of this minimal actuality entails a refusal of any figurative device. With a reverse mysticism, he plots the directly verifiable, the isolated, the perfected present. Temporal succession reduced to its literal inscription, marking time much in the way Buren marked space. In 1994, I curated an exhibition in Montreal which included a work by Mindy Yan Miller. I mention this work for its peculiar and ambivalent materiality which consisted, on the one hand, entirely of holes pricked into a wall with pin and hammer. However, the holes carefully spelled out a phrase, visible if one stood at an appropriate distance, "I Killed Jesus". The pin holes were not random but organized into vertical rows forming a "woven" pattern. Connecting labour intensive, repetitive, materials based work processes as a ritualized recognition of the present, she has drawn on a conception of time based in an experienced temporality; the tapping of her hammer manifested the experienced rhythm of self-temporalization. These artists all engage with the theme of embodiment and its relationship to the work of art. If the body has any essential characteristic, it is that of indeterminacy, of ambiguity, those characteristics so intimately bound up with any question of time's future. The body is not in time or in space like a car parked in the lot, the body is of time and of space, a condition of there even being history. If this is correct then we can't say that the body/subject is simply historically relative. There may be in its enduring a way out of the extreme relativisms of the postmodern era. The question doubly raised by your question is that of time. Contemporaneity and the future. In what does the contemporariness of any contemporary art lie? In the terminology of western art history, the relevance of a work is based on its variability, its indeterminacy which allows it to relate differentially. That variability, I would imagine, is founded on the notion of situation, and that allows a gap or void at the centre which any art which is to be here in the future must respect. Stephen Horne France & Canada |
