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Not for the future, but also for today: Visual Art that strikes me could be termed unforeseeable. It attracts with facts and fictions which are overlooked, unseen or unconscious. It is multi-layered; it finds and gives no solution; it opens or exceeds the seemingly stable dimensions of manmade realities. It provokes re-reading and ongoing dialogues. It does not first of all want to be work but to provoke and to provide processes of perception and discussion. Thus, cultural, social and political engagement and responsibility of art and mediation, of artists and critics is my main issue.
Well, I'm not pc. And that is no contradiction. Only artworks with an unforeseeable outlet can provoke engagement and dialogue. Political correctness just effects the opposite. Political well tempered art becomes sort of classic, a question of taste. It calms the conscience; it leaves you with the satisfactory feeling of sharing the correct discourse, of being on the right side. Or to say: of having a good taste and being able to smalltalk about it. That's it. Art, yet, is of different matter. It is risky.
I learned my lesson by studying the art of the 60s and 70s and the post-theories. But first I had to overcome the deep frustration about the eighties' retro-neo work and genie cult which I grew up with. (Still I fear the next repetition of the repeated as a question of the law of fashion.) Step by step, by rediscovering the art of these two centuries – and very intensely the seducing and most differentiated ensembles of the German Anna Oppermann - I was entering a "sphere of difference". Here romanticism and enlightenment, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious were not simple dichotomies or dialectic poles but unsolvable and alternate parts in the passionate game of living, thinking, producing and debating.
At a first glance all of this might seem to spell old conditions for a future art. It seems to neglect the tremendous changes by digitalisation and globalisation in a postcolonial world. And it seems to inattention all newer media, strategies and sites that current artistic productions apply. Sure thing, there is always a difference which medium you use, where and from which position you address people, if and from where you are seen. And of course, timebased as well as digital media open up new options for producing, presenting and distributing art. Yet, no medium is the message. It is the very encounter of both, the question of the context and of that what one want to address to others.
Particularly by considering the increasing meaning of digital and bio-technologies and the following changes in the re-presentation of world, in (mis-)interpreting body and nature as well as the shifts in worldwide communication, I am convinced that there is and will be a strong need for something that disturbs, interrupts or exceeds not only the surfaces but also the "codes", the "programmer" and the "processor" behind these surfaces. Artists will always be asked to make visible - and negotiable - all the dysfunctional and irrational experiences of being human, of being vulnerable, mortal, sexual. Nothing – no perfect medium, no declared totality, no global net – can cover or repress persistently our being human. Artists and thinkers in general will have to go on in finding more different ways to show pleasure and violence, luxury and poverty, fundamental insecurity and injury which neither technological progression nor rational concepts ever will eliminate. And art critics will generate more different translations and modes of exchange between word and image, discourses and visual offers while reflecting the changing modes of production and re-presentation.
One of the most consequential tasks for the present and the future is to intensify an already begun give and take between art, research and mediation. This does not mark an outer or mere strategy, but comes along with the dialogical character and differentiating engagement of today's most advanced artworks. It also follows from current modes of critique / theory that is no longer trying to provide any truth or objectivity but has come to a more literary, fragmentary and opening style. All of them, artists and critics and people of new hybrid professions, will have to consider these transgressions without diminishing the differences.
Maybe one could call that, what is to develop, "chronotopia": gentle sites for encounters; seducing temporary offers which exceed the world's dimensions by cruising space and time, surface and ground, perception, reception and dispute. By opening the dimensions for the unforeseeable engagement and passions – of artist, artwork, mediator as well as of the recipient.
Ute Vorkoeper
Hamburg, December 2001
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