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In order to hope for or imagine a yet unknown contemporary art I ask myself:
What is it to know contemporary art?
What contemporary art is known and by whom? Why?
What art is known by some but unac-know-ledged by others?
What art is acknowledged but remains unknown?
The future of contemporary art lies in the hands of artists, curators, critics and scholars of contemporary art. Their challenge is to dare to imagine beyond the limits of what is known and accepted, to push beyond learned boundaries, and to plumb the infinite potential of human creativity. In daring to imagine beyond what is familiar, challenging the lazy consensus, and in finding the courage to imagine or even re-imagine what is now un-seen, un-touched, un-heard, the tastes and smells yet to be experienced, my hope is that humanity might be moved and transformed in new and unexpectedly liberated ways.
At the heart of my vision of a yet unknown contemporary art is a
desire to reinvigorate the idea of art as a vehicle for offering
something fundamentally different to established knowledge and existent
art practice, to encourage a fundamentally different corpus of praxis
and poesis. My hope for future contemporary art is that it will
reflect a commitment to critical curiosity in art production and
representation; that art will provoke wonderment, elicit surprise,
inspire new imaginings, and fire passions, excoriate fashion and
fads, unmask modish ideologies, and exorcise the contaminants of
nepotism, cronyism and corruption that exist as ill effects of commercialisation
and commodification.
My dreamed contemporary art resists the prescriptive pull of categorising frameworks of interpretation and representation. It points to new ways of seeing and understanding accepted canons of the beautiful and the ugly. If art is thought to be a mirror of our society, then my hope is that a yet unknown art might evince a world of mutual respect, open-mindedness and honesty, sincere rather than feigned goodness, heartfelt commitment, inventiveness and boundless creativity. But if that future world will be ugly and angry, let that be reflected as well, making the injustice and foolishness of humankind visible.
My vision may not be the same as yours. And if it's not, I draw enormous satisfaction from knowing that in sharing our divergent visions, we might be stumbling towards that liberated world of my dreams.
Michelle Antoinette
Canberra, Australia
August 2002
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