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Flight of the Lacunae (into the arms of wonder)
LACUNA
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. la·cu·nae (-n) or la·cu·nas
1. An empty space or a missing part; a gap: "self-centered in opinion, with curious lacunae of astounding ignorance" (Frank Norris). 2. Anatomy A cavity, space, or depression, especially in a bone, containing cartilage or bone cells.
Your question is provocative. Although initially it puts me off,
i.e., great god – not another request for a wish
list – it is the quest for the "unknown" or not
"known" which, obviously, is what art is about. But for
the last decade there has been a more ardent discussion about what's
missing or lacking in contemporary art (a discussion which may or
may not be the same as asking for a vision of the unknown). The
superego asking again and again: what-hasn't-been-discovered-yet,
what is "new" (as if capitalism wasn't the sticky
flypaper surrounding anything "new" in the times we live).
Maybe I can only deal with your question as the problem, not the question of our time. For in some ways we live in an Age of the Lacunae (as opposed to the Age of the Renaissance). Culture and contemporary art are constantly hounded for having lost their way, lost their voice, lost their purpose. And so instead of the kind of dialogue artists and critics engaged in during -- in more modern times -- such moments as The Age of Smithson, we have scouts, pen (PDA) in hand, posted at cocktail parties and openings scribbling in hopes of answering the:
"Hey, you over there, what should 'it' be,
the thing that is not yet here?"
"Or you, are you the one who knows what will be?"
In other words, "Fill in the lacuna please." "Answer my prayers". "Give us your content, your daily bread". (Content is of course the egregious but emblematic buzzword of late great capitalism's '90s romp with the World Wide Web.)
My point is that once-upon-a-time art struggled with what was here, rather than asking what is not. This kind of art may have been too pressured by the culture around it, but perhaps, at a time when we are suffering simultaneously from information sickness and information black-out, it is time to put speculation behind (i.e. the end of the century's interest in the future, in prediction, in science fiction). Maybe it is time to do less asking and more engaging with the present (although clearly to be engaged in the present is to question).
Obviously, your question is deeper, more thoughtful, than the mere request for subject matter or content. Yours is an invitation to explore a "vision" (nice) of "a yet unknown art." What an extraordinary question. Who can know? An unknown ART ?!? I may just be playing with unintended semantics but it is precisely the syntax of your sentence that led me to take your question seriously.
I love the idea of imagining "an unknown art." The problem is, of course, art is precisely what is impossible to imagine before it appears. We can talk of where we feel and see the emptiness, the lack, the lacuna but honestly, what is the point of making predictions?
So what is my vision of a yet unknown art? One pulled from Robert
Creeley's: "Form is never more than the extension of content."
Such is the material of the age of Lacunae: all things known and
happening which has not been seen or heard or understood. Ignorance
and an absence of curiosity -- of pushing beyond the immediate level
of "I don't get it" -- has turned us into a ridiculous
species. We reside in a stupor of stupidity as Avital Ronell, author
of "The Telephone Book", has put it in her recent book
titled, "Stupidity". On a personal level, the horror resides
in the perpetual experience of bumping heads with those who don't
seem to care one hoot about what they don't know but are certain
about what they do know: That "it" (Freud, Marx, Virginia
Woolf, Maya Deren, Heidegger, Israel, Palestine ad infinitum) is
the problem, not me.
"Wonder" was the topic of an "Artforum" issue put out in 1989. Wonder may have been posed as a question of spectacle and the sublime then, but now it has a different veneer, a different purpose. It is our tool and not our state of mind. Listen to Descartes:
Of wonder, in particular, we may say that it is useful in that it makes us learn and retain in our memory things of which we were previously ignorant. For we wonder only at what appears unusual or extraordinary....
"Things of which we were previously ignorant" is just about everything these days (at least in America). Let us work with what is unusual and extraordinary, as well as what is outrageous and silenced, in the here and the now of what is unfolding at enormous speeds, volumes, and levels of complexity in the contemporary world. In other words, it is precisely the "known" which carries the promise of leading us to the unknown if we use what we know as a thick material to work with (and muss up) rather than a simple vehicle to get us somewhere.
Am I just asking for an art rooted in some kind of problematic notion of culture, produced within the confines of a hierarchical, intellectual environment where knowledge is both convention and fad, while passion is programmed to the march of propriety? Shit no. Am I just a romantic rolling out clichés and dodging the question with that old trick of questioning the question? Perhaps. But it is because I believe it is in what we already know or what someone somewhere sometime already knows where the unfathomable will emerge. And the art will of course evolve from this.
Postscript: To "know" by the way isn't to be filled with knowledge but to be overwhelmed by curiosity, wonder, a sense of purpose and quest. It is to be "one of the ones on whom nothing is lost" as Henry James once put it to the aspiring novelist – a phrase, I suppose, that's known by many, or perhaps, unknown by more?
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
New York
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