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The question that is posed already contains a series of other questions.
To what extent can we imagine the unknown? Unknown in the context
of what there is now? These are questions about the relationship
of the future to the present. About the shift of paradigms, the
basis for which is taking shape today. About the programme of the
future in science fiction, about the error of anticipation.
Two aspects of the development of art can be pointed out: the ideological
and the technological. By the technological aspect both the perfection
of digital technology and the development of a new sensibility are
invoked. The still unknown art will have to do with a still unknown
life, with the manifestation of a certain sensitivity which will
be characteristic to the human beings contemporary with it. This
new sensibility will be conditioned by the fact that people will
be subject to an increasingly denser bombardment of images, sounds
and pharmacological reactives. It can be proposed that the still
unknown art will be a sense of experience as such. Thus, in the
area of performance, we can propose a merging of the artist-performer
and the viewer, immersed in a certain milieu and thus becoming an
artist. In addition, it is a matter of creating the environment
in which there will be an opportunity for experience, acquisition
of new experience, collision with the unknown. Any setting is defined
by space-time parameters, therefore it can be said that further
development of the media-installation genre awaits us, with a multitude
of projections. The ecological aspect of such an environmental,
sensory art must also be noted. Such productions need not to be
preserved, or more precisely, their preservation is facilitated
to the utmost, for example, on CD ROM. Obviously, art will increasingly
transfer to spacious vessels and be transformed into a certain space
under the supervision of the artist.
The ideology of the future will be post-traumatic, related to the
trauma of social, political, but above all, personal trauma. Already
trauma is subject to increasing aesthetization before our eyes.
And art will partly play a healing role for traumatic experience.
The question of trauma poses yet another question: what will be
the trauma of the future? The problem of trauma, the practice of
creating a certain setting and viewing unknown art, is related to
a symbolic human being included in a symbolic space. During the
20th century, the symbolic casing of trauma changed. Now trauma
is already associated not so much with the external environment
(the relationship with a partner) as with reference to the relationship
with oneself. This type of art, which perpetually examines narcissism
as such, will be very important. Obviously, art will also be concerned
in part with treating these narcissistic disorders, and, at the
same time, it will present its own kind of narcissistic screen.
Interaction, presupposed work with one's own identities, is present
in virtual space. Therefore the computer environment will be another
indispensable part of the construction of the future environment.
And thus already the process of future mechanisation, automation,
and robotisation of human beings is duplicating itself. On the other
hand, the possibility of an infinite choice of desires and the possibility
of endless representation of that which is the desire, on the one
hand, no longer can be satisfied, on the other, it always was already
satisfied with some substitute objects which are, or will be, present
in virtual programmes. Therefore, trauma will bear a depressive
character. One more aspect of the still unknown art must be pointed
out. Art that is "post-towers". At the moment when the
population observed the collapse of the two World Trade Centre buildings,
everyone perceived this as a blockbuster. The difference was that
an ideal was destroyed, that is, no hero came with whom one could
identify. A certain complex problem arises which is formed from
the symptoms of a depressive condition. First, this is loss and
particularly loss of an ideal. Second, it is a feeling of guilt
as another fundamental syndrome of depression, related to the joy
that seizes a person who has seen the latest blockbuster, and afterwards
understands that this is not a blockbuster. And coming up against
the reality of trauma, he is obliged to experience a feeling of
guilt in connection with the exultation that takes hold of him,
even if within, the exultation may be unconscious, and the future
compensation of this trauma will be presented in order to show one
of the depressive symptoms.
If the symptom of the still unknown art is depressive then it, like
depression, will be related to the changed attitude to time. Depression
stretches time out. The extension of time, struggle with desire
(consumerism), and dysfunction are all signs that will possibly
be expressed in expansion of the period of contemplation on art.
Video art, for example, is now already demanding a certain expenditure
of time. But "reasonable limitations" of the video production
still exist, set in a museum. It can be proposed that the duration
of the unknown art created by social anarchists, who suffer from
depression, will be increased. Everything that we describe is what
exists today. It is impossible to imagine something completely different.
There are some tendencies, projects, that we construct. Speaking
of time, it must be pointed out that if it is stretched out during
depression, then time now is increasingly accelerated. Over steadily
decreasing intervals people surmount space, they receive constantly
more information.
Will the still unknown art retain its critical function? On the
one hand, yes, but on the other hand, judging by what we imagine
the future to be (not in the sense of prognosis), and on the basis
of what there is today, society is turning itself into more brutal,
more totalitarian structures with a more powerful state machinery,
surveillance, control, and all of this fuses with capital. According
to futurological movies and books, in the future totalitarian state,
a zone of anarchy will always be preserved. It is desired that this
zone will not be a zone of crime as the mass media predict, but
a zone of contemporary art. It is important to imagine in what direction
the symbolic development of society and art is going. Will it be
the predominance of a certain idiom, a regional one, so to speak,
or will it be principally a political imagination?
It is clear that artists will be different, some will make tattoos
for bandits in a zone of anarchy, some will create works out of
chemical elements in order to transfer it to the area of hallucination
for one of the local junkies. It is important to understand whether
capital will still present itself within the spheres of visual art.
If we look at the structure of totalitarian society, then we can
understand exactly what is in demand there - advertising for pills
and products? - yes. Why will artists be necessary? Once they were
necessary for magic, at one time for decoration, for use, for criticism.
Those fields are absolutely obvious - environment, therapy, advertising
- in which art may still find itself. Everything that is related
to the sphere of desires may be absent. The question arises of what
the desire of the future will be. This will depend on the structure
of society and the system of demand, the system of advertising,
as parts of this sphere of demand and ideology.
Whatever this desire might be, it will be constructed. This construction
will be, on the one hand, increasingly camouflaged and, on the other
hand, it will be displayed. Probably, artists will work on the mechanism
itself of creating desire. Obviously, it is just this mechanism
that will be demonstrated, the mechanism of generating desire.
When there is talk of desire, it is impossible to withdraw from
one's own desire. It is clear that in everything that we have talked
about, there is an element of what we want art of the future to
be, or of what we do not want it to be. Desire with a minus sign
is the way we fear to see it. But we fear society. And we try to
either save art in it at the price of betrayal of the critical function
or, on the contrary, we want the critical function to be maintained
and do not want art to help to turn some people into robots and
others into anarchists, so that not everyone is a Mad Max or president
of the USA.
It is also important that a constant post-traumatic feeling in a
totalitarian society permits the individual to again and again feel
like an individual. Perhaps feelings can be programmed. But will
traumata be programmed? Possibly the field of trauma will remain
free. One would like to see art as an opening, as a surprise, as
perplexity, dislocation, which makes one review his feelings, revealing
what is now an unseen, blind area.
Olesya Turkina, Viktor Mazin
St. Petersburg
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