Cary Wolfe
I am tempted to answer this question. And to be earnest about it. But I think I will do neither. I am sure I am not the first contributor on the theory side out of - what, 150 now? - to point out, as Wittgenstein might say, that the question is hobbled by a certain representationalism. (After all, this is in no small part what we critics, theorists, etc. do: sort out well-formed questions from those that lead down the usual blind alleys. To which I can imagine many an artist saying, "Get a life!" But that would be pedantic. On both sides.) What interests me here instead is this: if our moment - call it "postmodernity" with all the usual disclaimers and reservations - is, in an obvious sense, post-representationalist precisely in the way that post-structuralist philosophy says it is (but not just that - one could reference other theoretical movements here as well, e.g. pragmatism or systems theory), it is, in another sense, "hyper"-representationalist, not least, for example, in its intensification of and investment in the iconographic and the visual. And this is a question of the specific media of art (and theory). To take this into account when thinking about the strategies deployed by different artists in working on a particular question or theme - let's say, the question of the animal in Joseph Beuys vs. Diana Thater vs. Sue Coe vs. Eduardo Kac, to take only one example (or four!) - is to begin to see how this specificity bears heavily upon the question of one's "vision" of an "unknown" art in the current context. And it does so, moreover, asymmetrically, because under postmodernity, as is well known, we find the ever-increasing differentiation (what a modernist would call "fragmentation") of the different senses, media, knowledges, and so on. All of these become increasingly separated from each other in a "horizontal" sense and increasingly differentiated "vertically" within themselves (think here of the filmic vs. the televisual vs. video) in their attempt to make themselves ever more finely-grained and sensitive ways of responding to the ever-accelerating differentiation and complexity of the larger social context in which they operate. Which, of course, only increases that very complexity for "other" domains, "other" codes, "other" media, that are trying to ensure "their" viability by doing the same thing. And so on. This leads in turn to a second issue that is perhaps more easily missed: "time" and the problem of temporalization. Indeed, paying attention to the specificity of different media brings into sharp focus the asynchronous nature of time itself, as opposed to what Louis Althusser once called an "ideological" conception of time as homogeneous, continuous, and self-identical across all social spaces. Once we pay attention to specific media, the strategies of art become in no small part questions of how to coordinate, displace, or otherwise deal with the different speeds and velocities of the different media themselves. (This is obvious in areas like architecture, or in the work of a Smithson or a Serra, and coordinating these speeds and our relations to them is at the center of a work like Kac's "Teleporting an Unknown State"). Of special interest here, I think, is how loosely or tightly artworks couple their specific media to the temporal horizons in which they operate. (It is in this light - though I can't go into this here - that one might understand how deeply unsatisfactory much canonical "postmodern" architecture now seems. Wouldn't it be better if those facades had been made of paper or aluminum foil and not steel, glass, and stone? As it is, they purchased high impact at their moment of unveiling at the price of a mediumistic permanence that has already outlived their relevance, or so it seems to many. I would only add here - and again I can't go into this here - that one would find a very different engagement of this problem in projects like Koolhaas's and Mau's Parc Downsview Park design in Toronto, or Diller+Scofidio's "Blur" Building in Switzerland, or, in a different register, Samuel Mockbee and Rural Studio.) Here, it seems to me, projects that opt for a loose or weak coupling of their media and their temporal horizons are of special interest for this reason: If we expose the paradox underneath the question around which this anthology is built - namely, that the "unknown" ceases to be so the minute we talk about it and yet names the only thing that "is" unknown - namely the future - then the question really becomes about the relationship between art, temporalization, and complexity, in which "unknown" means something like, "continues to have a future". Niklas Luhmann captures this quite well, I think, when he writes, "a work qualifies as art only when 'it employs constraints for the sake of increasing the work's freedom in disposing over further constraints' - and 'these constraints result neither exclusively from the material qualities of the medium ... nor solely from the purpose for which the object is used'" ("Art as a Social System", pp. 34-35). From this vantage point, an "unknown" work of art would be one that could (continue to) be (un)known in ways not foreclosed by the strategies it uses at "this" moment, to respond to the world as it is "now" - a process in which the work of art might succeed more because of its "weakness" than its strength, and in doing so, portend not "the" future but simply "a" future. Cary Wolfe New York, September 2002 |
