Susette Min
In a cartoon featured in the November 2000 issue of "New Art Examiner", Adam "Music for Airports" Green depicts a couple in a plane holding on for dear life during air "turbulence." The woman says to the nervous man next to her "Brian Eno said, "In art you can crash the plane and walk away."" In bold capital letters above the cartoon, the artist writes 'DURING TURBULENCE, YOU REALIZE THAT THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A SEPARATION BETWEEN ART AND LIFE."' Three time zones away from the epicenter of September 11, 2001, driving across L.A.'s web of highways, passing cars along the fast lane, everything and everyone seemed to be in flight from itself, and we from ourselves, who watched all this happen from the sidelines. Yet we could not fly or walk away, in fact, we were unable to move at all, as the event made immobile not only NYC traffic, but also the imagination in its attempt to visually or verbally grasp what had happened earlier that fateful morning. The future of contemporary art has been more anti-climatic than anticipated. Yet the events of September 11th raised the stakes and pushed forward the momentum for unforeseen possibilities of contemporary art. The events in NYC reminded me of Michel de Certeau's essay, "Walking in the City" where he begins his essay from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center (WTC). Describing the view from the WTC as a " gigantic mass immobilized by the eyes " transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide – extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans ..." he goes on to remark that "unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future." (1) New York City functions as the art world of late and hence will remain the art center of the world. NYC is where the future of contemporary art will continue to unfold. (Despite recent efforts to "internationalize" the art world, to move its center west to Los Angeles, across the Atlantic to London or Berlin, in globalized terms, contemporary art = the NYC art world. It is similar to the mantra of the U.S. nation-state that promotes E pluribus unum; when the U.S. speaks, the world listens.) The events of September 11th were seen from the U.S. point of view as an attack on freedom. The rhetoric of freedom foregrounds ART as the exemplary transgressing of procedures because art is in and of itself the work of freedom. In the spirit of this "freedom", the spontaneity of makeshift memorials all over the country and the gesture of galleries to invite and show artwork by both professional and amateur artists and photographers of their response to the events of September 11th evoked in me a nostalgia for the future and a desire: -to encounter a work of art by that provides a glimpse of the much philosophically-discussed sublime - an overwhelming feeling that verges towards the limits of representation; -to see the merging of art and literature that goes beyond thematic concerns and semiotic comparisons; -to experience being part of a collaboration of artists, curators, designers, educators, and boards of trustees to create exhibitions that go beyond the dollar sign, the assumption of the public's poor accessibility and acuity of "high" art, and the safe and manipulated presentation and choreography of the already-seen; -to blur the boundaries between public and private spaces where art is seen and shown in ways that are currently forgotten and/or unforeseeable; -and lastly, along the lines of political and social imperatives, to see the prolific and profound interpretation of works of art that would normally be framed racially because of the color of an artist's skin or the unfamiliar spelling of a name. That is, I would like to see the works of these un/marked artists interrogated with the same rigor as other artists by paying attention to the nuances of form and content, pushing existing representational categories while opening up other spaces. To romanticize such a future of contemporary art goes against my current sensibilities in light of what I already know of the contemporary art world, of politics, of a war that at this very moment seems never-ending and indiscriminate. What I see the future of contemporary art to be: -The first casualty of this lost opportunity for an exciting and unforeseeable future will be the continuing racialization of contemporary art together, ironically, with the pervasive practice of exclusion; -instead of the merging of art and literature, art and architecture, what I see for the future of contemporary art is the intensification and blurring of art and technology, art and Hollywood, art and advertising in which publicity-stunt events of technological innovations are veiled as art openings; -the intensification of globalization will continue to enable the flow of privileged and entitled bodies across national borders as they gather to attend more over-determined biennials and symposiums now seen as celebrity-studded events; -and lastly, the relationship between art and the commodity will continue to grow as art becomes more beholden to the market rather than a good review or essay from an art historian, curator, and/or critic. Theodor Adorno describes "Art's Utopia" as "the counterfactual yet-to-come " a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe, which is world history; it is a freedom which did not pass under the spell of necessity and which may well not come to pass ever at all." (2) Rather than desiring art as utopic, perhaps we should look for the future of contemporary art in works by those artists who are already at the extreme and in the margins: artists who continue to produce work, despite the grind of the everyday and their invisibility, that gesture toward points of identification which are simultaneously suppressed and unconscious, playful and free. Susette Min Los Angeles .............................. (1) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 91 (2) Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London: Routledge, p. 196, quoted by Paul Gilroy in Dialectics of Diaspora Identification, in ed. Les Back and John Solomos' Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 496-502 |
