Stevan Vukovic: A sentence on the question of
"What could your vision, in the context of contemporary art, be, of an "undiscovered" art?"
"What could your vision, in the context of contemporary art, be, of an "undiscovered" art?"
The question of envisioning an "art to come", yet "undiscovered" but already effecting us by arousing the faculty of imagination, has both the capacity and an inbuilt inclination to unfold further into questions on the potential of the culturally and politically imagined and produced in general, inquiring what makes the transcendental framework for seeing something as paradigmatic cultural and social action at all, and as well as an actual legitimate component of the very particular setting of the isolated "artworld" cluster of contemporary society, and those questions get articulated either through the regulations of the market and the biopolitical agendas of great industrial and financial powers, producing not only commodities but also producers, agent subjectivities with industrialized needs and desires, social relations, bodies and minds, or, on the contrary, they become present through the radical cultural vision, a vision of constituting effective cultural, social and political alternative, of forming some new constituent powers by mediation of which the expansive networks of global exchange that can be transformed into agents of global emancipatory change, relying on practices that are simultaneously collaborative, cooperative and communicative, affective and responsible, conceptually grounded and self-reflective, libidinally charged and speculative, socially aware and context-sensitive but strongly subjective, historical and time based, resistant to the system which suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity, therefore always conflictual and agonic, programmatically non-hierarchical, egalitarian and counterhegemonistic, relying on activism, on intervening, always aiming at subverting hegemonic languages and social structures, prepared to become a tool for giving a voice to the silenced spots within the structure of identity-based discourses, pointing towards the incompletion of acts of political institution, keeping it's non-finished state, processual, emancipatory, critical, putting into question the culturally given norms, not ignoring nor denying but eluding to the system of oppositions as defined by dominant discourse, building on internal conflicts that each particular side of the opposition has in clearly defining itself, indexing distortions of the cause-effect relationship in reading back causality onto one's personal history and re-enacting to different senses of belonging, insisting on socially specific contexts, but avoiding being reduced to an anthrophological object, presenting a certain topology of the "non-realized", a topology of "blind spots, as empty as the purely indexical gesture 'look here'", insisting on keeping to the impossible, to the non-classifiable, going against technologies of difference management, contesting new regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, disclosing, interpreting and rearticulating the spatial divisions, paths and limits of new global flows, which tend to lead art towards becoming a means of simple social reproduction, framed through the deployment of assimilatory, disciplinatory and exclusionary strategies. So, therefore, it persists in reinscribing into the field of cultural representations what is left out during the process of accumulation and naturalization of authoritative discourses, in de-sedimenting layers of cultural and social identifications, reactivating buried potentials to imagine alternative worlds, to envision the horizon of radical pluralism, "heterogeneous, open and ultimately indeterminate", and to embody oneself as a bearer of that vision, in the material way of the one who, as described by Rimbaud, succeeds to "arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses", and lives it through everyday artistic social praxis. Stevan Vukovic Belgrade |
