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One of the reasons I'm not an artist is that I do not presume to foresee or imagine what is yet to come (which will, undoubtedly, remain "unknown" forever). I ruminate on the past and in so doing make my own future (and perhaps, if I'm lucky, touch or in some minuscule way color with rosy or otherwise evocative hue the futures of others).
This caveat aside, who can pass up the invitation to pontificate
on the future? The difficult part is to do this without being prescriptive
or ludicrously self serving. Here goes a try at imagining, which
I can only phrase in terms of what I'd like to see happen since
I believe no one can know what will, given the glorious unpredictability
of human and posthuman behavior (not to mention the possibility
of global political collapse or radical, life-stifling ozone depletion)
.....
* * * * *
I have a dream ....
That someday, the breakdown of distinctions between high and low
so bravely sought after by the Dadaists will manifest itself as
something other than an embrace of global capitalist excess. That
an antidote will thus emerge to the Warhol-inspired willed excess
that has come to characterize the mainstream European/U.S. art world
- something like an expansion of the street-wise projects of Suzanne
Lacy or Krzysztof Wodiczko? more internet interventions? corporate
takeovers by artists? - a profoundly lived, rather than simply artificially
proclaimed, relinquishing of European or American arrogance about
the meanings and forms of culture? .....
That somehow, in spite of, or because of, our acknowledged lack
of importance in the face of global terrorism and warfare, artists
and art writers (those we might call art theorists) will regain
a clear vision of how to make a difference, recognizing the effectiveness
of coalitional thinking. That we will thus nix the YBA approach
of feeding off of or into the puffed up art celebrity system, and
adopt instead shifting identities and names that throw the media
off scent - this would involve disavowing our will to power, our
hunger for attention and remuneration ....
That a healthy skepticism towards the way things are going politically
(which, from the U.S. in February 2002 when I'm writing this, looks
pretty bleak) will motivate stridency and productive rage rather
than nurturing complacency as it has been doing since the beginning
of the Reagan-Thatcher era ....
That art theorists will find a way to use these new strategies to
begin to heal or even to reverse the ravages wrought by global capitalism
and to expose and so put an end to the socially sanctioned greed
that motivates and is bred by it ... . That we might thus create
newly conceived artistic projects aiming: to sabotage oil company
propaganda and motivate the use of public transportation? to develop
new modes of non-capitalized networked visual communication over
the web? to organize artist-run secondary schools that subvert the
rigid suppression of creativity common to today's educational systems
and help produce new generations of art-workers? ....
That in making culture, those of us living in what used to be called
"Western civilization" will come to a greater understanding
of the connectedness of all creative forces in the world, jolting
us out of our (capital-driven) individualism and our desire simply
to make something "new" and gain market share (a lesson
from Carolee Schneemann and her Fluxus colleagues, from the Gutai
artists, from Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, or from the Situationist
International would be helpful here) ....
That corporatized, wealthy white men of all sizes, shapes, incomes,
colors, and anatomical dispositions will stop dominating cultural
and political discourse in Europe and the U.S. so that we can stop
acting as if any points of view other than this dominant one are
"politically" motivated or dismissable as those of "special
interest" groups. That all of us can embrace the "queer",
"feminine", "lower class", and/or "colored"
aspects of our inevitably failed selves, accepting our anxiety and
lack rather than projecting it outward, while continuing to recognize
specific differences between and among the representatives of global
cultures ....
That art theorists will truly embrace (rather than theorize or only
rhetorically privilege) the madness that makes us human, that forever
prevents our being or becoming centered or coherent or otherwise
"phallic" subjects of being and knowledge; rather than
producing culture as a means of sublimating or disavowing our mortality,
our radical uncertainty, and our terrible fear in the face of the
other (and ourselves), art theorists could then produce culture
as an act of embracing rather than disavowing the terror that motivates
us, releasing a productive madness into the world ....
That art theorists will do more work in the world (for example:
make rippingly vibrant photographs or paintings that speak to a
broader public than the hip urban intelligentsia; make ads to heal
world hunger, rather than ads for Absolut Vodka) and less work that
skates over the surface of what happens every day on the streets
of the world's cities and beyond ....
That this work in the world could take the form of a lived culture
that could be installed, pictured, enacted, danced, channeled, bit-streamed,
or otherwise dangled in the visual field such that new networks
of global dialogue would burgeon ....
And, last but not least, that prescriptive ideas about what makes
"good" art, or "progressive" postmodernism,
or "art" altogether will finally wither away. That, correlatively,
we will stop writing and reading criticism as if it is a map for
what "should" or "will" happen. (That this brief
array of somewhat incoherent thoughts would thus be entirely obviated
is to the point ....) ....
Hope that is clear.
Amelia Jones
Los Angeles, February 13, 2026
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