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Entering this debate at this advanced stage was somehow disquieting. My first impulse when presented with the question of "as yet unknown art" was to pull it apart, to expose its historicism, its representationalism, its romantic utopianism and (most of all) its confident assumption of contemporary art as one context in relation to which all other phenomena would stand out in sharp profile. Yet this impulse was quickly tempered by the thought that this was probably a feeling shared by many. Glancing through those parts of the project available to me seemed to strongly confirm this. The fault lines of the question - they had already been repeatedly exposed - show, if nothing else, an art community united in deep-felt scepticism and self-doubt.
And yet. Being haunted by the desire to articulate a future is not inherently utopian. "The future" is simply one of several words that indicate the limits which separate us from what can not be articulated, and images of the future are approximations to those limiting conditions. Perhaps the shared antagonism towards the "art/future" question was not just an expression of scepticism, but also fear of the approximate and the inexact, the incompetent and the irrelevant, fear of banal fascination and dumb stupefaction. In fact, it is very hard not to wonder what, if anything, will pass for "art" in globalized, multi-ethnic communities some years from now, how (for instance) images of the social and images in the social may come to be understood in totalitarian, capitalist territory without outsides. Here, the only real problem I see with the art/future question is the word "vision" - exchange it, and its metaphysical, unifying and surveying implications, with materialist and Deleuzian "invention", and a tiny step - perhaps - is ventured towards the constitution of potential outsides.
Ina Blom
Oslo
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