Raluca Velisar
If the "unknown" refers to the future or the present/future, I can say I'm not an enthusiast of the strategy to invoke the past to combat the present/future, nor do I share the techno-scepticism so emblematic in western civilization ... . I also think the scenarios of professional futurologists or of the technocrats are more relevant to the machinery of interpretation than to the potential persuasive discourse on this topic. I don't want to be misunderstood: I have nothing against imagining, predicting or visualizing the future or utopizing it. But it's still premature to science-fictionalize every aspect of our present/future life just because the electronic money 'has effectively introduced us into the digital/virtual realm'. I know it's not a significant argument, but the future is not already an industry in all our countries. On the contrary, it is still (sometimes hilariously) constrained by social rules which connect it to the past. * Hence, "cultural heritage" continues to be an important task, and I'm not only referring to its ability to be endlessly recycled, but to hierarchical and linear discourse as "in the ruling conservative definition - at the level of world religions and anthropology" (Geert Lovink): especially the political one - and it's almost impossible to foresee a non-political future, even for art - seeking apparent continuity imposed into radical change. I rather prefer acceptance of "well-defined" absurdities (or, to be more precise, of the absurd consequences of antagonist suppositions) as a foundation for new theories. The change of generations, ideologies, social conditions and economic forces will always shape the option between opposite alternatives. Following the plurality of alternative explanation has become an imperative. Returning to the question, I don't think it is only about art - which is/will be conceptual, contemplative, subjective, performative, participatory and absent at the same time - but about the media it will adopt. Science will provide artists with a lot of interesting toys and they will ask, in turn, for science to produce the tools for new forms of imagining. It will expand into areas that have been excluded and the distance between the written world, sound and images will disappear (despite the statement "the image has become the world"). Different forms of art will eventually rival each other before merging. The next generations will manipulate the visual clichés created now, desperately trying to get rid of their influences. Even if the collective memory has been changing ("the humans submerge in thoughts and images" - Timothy Druckery), mnemonic help has to be increased. It is a paradox how contemporary art, even how it operates within popular and worldwide-marketed visual codes, still needs to be translated, explained and sustained by propping text. For the intervention to become clear, art must continue to be a minority interest, although working with a different "interface" which is the public. Does the "yet unknown" refer necessarily to the future? What happens in the present? With artists who haven't registered "appreciation"? "What happens with the art that doesn't enter the museums; that does enter the museum but those museums which are situated in a wrong geopolitical context; that is not registered, or does not enter into some financial or social system, a determined, safety one?" ** Where do they disappear? "What is cool and what is out? Welcome to the world of paranoia cultural producers." (Geert Lovink) "That Romanian art manifests the symptoms of mystical disappearance. And that's extraordinary. That the art of minor cultures disappears mystically is once again no news. That from the mystical disappearance perspective the art of major cultures has the same fate as that of the minor cultures, it's normal. And when you realise that disappearance seems to be a problem of meaning there is no difference anymore." ** It has been said that the Internet is able to overcome great distances, to create unsuspected simultaneousness. But it also makes the questions of the disappearance acute. In turn, it could be a transit-port for real-time approaches, for a dynamic system able to shift between sites and temporalities, subjectivities and "objectivities", potentially offering access, at least in the same way as "submitted art" - as Floe would say - doing now. In the end, it is all about "affordable spaces". It will be the work of everyone and of nobody only in the meaning of art as an "attitude". We'll only have to deal with risky borderlines. Raluca Velisar Bucharest, Oct. 9, 2002 ......... * Yesterday the Romanian Parliament voted in a law for "Using the Romanian language" which forbids official use of foreign languages without translation into Romanian. I wonder how much will cost the companies' changing of names and logos, packaging, etc. ... . What a rich language we'll have after inventing so many Romanian equivalents ... . Perhaps I will still talk about the future, or about the present/past ... . ** Excerpts from a text written together with Nicolae Comanescu and Florin Tudor for the project "The Mystic Disappearance". |
