Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Art of the future
Art of the future
I find it difficult to be asked to imagine an art that doesn't exist, since if one could imagine it one presumably might try to make it. That said, two thoughts come to mind. One has to do with the probability that there will eventually be a world art, which we hope will not be monolithic and simply the product of a wholly triumphant imperialism, and therefore will be so diverse as to require a far more sensitive and varied definition of what art might be than is available to us. The other has to do with quite another kind of question, having to do with the tendency of things to dematerialise into electricity. The art of (either kind of) future is as likely to be made on the computer as out of or on linen and wood or paper or steel. It is hard to think of a world art that looks like something other than more of what we have now. But what we have now is art which all responds to the same geopolitical centre. There is, then, an art of the near and an art of the far. This simply extends and elaborates the familiar dialectic which allows things and events to be theorised by art historians (as historically significant) and sold by art dealers (as exceptional examples of historical significance). The market and art history remain singular, however international they become. Money is always just money, and even when art history subdivides itself or, more radically, insists on more than one history, it cannot help but imply a final institutional meeting in oneness. I think a world art of the sort we don't have would require several centres rather than one. It would, for example, have found a way of accommodating those cultures in which art has not been aestheticised. Elsewhere, including in the west, it would have managed to become something other than an self-perpetuating, anthropological symbolism of reactivity. It would, in short, be an art of immense variety which wasn't always about the west or about how art shouldn't always be about the west. We can glimpse this condition only to the extent that we can imagine a world in which wealth has shifted around in way in which it shows no signs of shifting. So that doesn't get me very far with regard to imagining an art that doesn't yet exist. What exists at the moment is lots and lots of art about the techno-capitalist subject, hypothetically placeless and deracinated, and quite a lot of art about how it's better not to be one. I can't predict what future varieties of the stuff will look like; I am prepared to predict that we shall continue to get plenty of it. I certainly hope so. I am eager to see other approaches take the place of an historicist connoisseurship of responses to responses, but I don't wish to see any art forms disappear. I am confident that no one can do without things when it comes to symbolic activity, because one can only really address indeterminacy in the presence of something which is obdurately and irreducibly an object. No video image can manage indeterminacy as well the most heavy handed painting, because video is so indeterminate to begin with. Because it's automatically and technologically made of flickers, it cannot really use flickering to produce doubt, essential to the excitement without which it can't be art. It has to use intensification instead, the doubt of the more real than real, hyper-clarity, or of the blurred or fragmented, nineteenth-century possibilities which have found a permanent after-life in photographically derived electronic media. They are the only forms which offer any thoughts about the future, for the most part because they are not necessarily art forms. In the computer, the photographic has become linked to the possibility of an art which responds and interacts and exhibits a mind of its own, which is not open to what Heidegger meant by reflection. This may point to an art which doesn't have to be art. The computer has not been aestheticised. As a technology which is currently in use, it belongs to a force too powerful to be the sole property of the museum. One wants to continue to have painting and sculpture not least because so much is the province of video, film, and photography. There may not be a world art but there is a world image, and it's a photographic one. One supposes that some parts of the world should also continue to end in a book, or a painting or a sculpture, as opposed to on a screen. The screen does, however, seem to be where Hegel's vision of a future art of time but not of objects has come to be realised. But I don't see any reason to expect the future to be a nineteenth-century one, except of course, that the nineteenth century certainly played a large part in determining what would happen in the twentieth. I admit that my imagination is limited and leads to contradiction. A post-post-colonial art will have to be something other than an emanation, one stage further removed, from its nominal starting point. It will have to be something else, probably something(s) which started elsewhere albeit that was a place to which a self-consciously post-colonialist art brought it. But post-post-art can't start from somewhere else. And it can't, thank God, be a synthesis. There is no synthesis of Matisse and Duchamp, of Pollock and Warhol. Art could disappear into something else and there are many who think it already has, but if it doesn't, then it can't be other than what it already is. A future art would, therefore, be different if the future were to be something other than more of the same. For that to happen, the camera's irreducible relationship to the real would have had to have mutated towards a different reality, which didn't consist of the west and the rest, but of a multiplicity. The photographic having become a Latin which had survived Rome's collapse, I think it would continue to be a world in which objects remain indispensable because they would be the only place where one could escape the photographic and rethink it as something other than itself. That is, however, not very far from the world we already inhabit. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Los Angeles |
