Ana Devic
Could the vision of the yet unknown still be modest in a way? The question about the vision of a yet unknown art for so many reasons seems unanswerable to me. Not only because of numerous contradictions, traps and paradoxa connected to the critical reinterpretation of endlessly overloaded notions of "vision" or of a "yet unknown", but simply because the very essence of art is spontaneous and unpredictable, the creation of an open process, searching for autonomy within, against or apart from the system, appropriating a particular space or form. Obviously, art works were and are, and almost certainly will occupy a particular place within history, society, institutions, and mass media, and the art world itself ... . Art cannot be purely abstracted, thus it cannot be regarded apart from its context, only understood or observed in relation to it. I would like to pass up outlining some new possible forms of "arthood" and guessing about the new context for its production, but rather to trace some evident tendencies and conditions of art production as well as its possible implications. Not creating a new substitutional "great vision", but rather reconstructing the conditions of its creation and failure seems to be the most intriguing issue. From the very beginning, framing the idea of future is a paradoxical gesture; one way or the other, one cannot escape talking about a past or present moment, and at the same time, inevitably one begins to create a draft of a still vague vision. As Hal Foster suggested in his concept of temporality: "the past is returning from the future and the futures can be anticipated by reconstructing the pasts." In those terms, art cannot be devoid of its utopian potential, regardless to the remoteness of its actual realizations. Speaking about some general tendencies in contemporary art, it is most likely that in the future art will also continue to seek out its affiliations with other practices and disciplines. As a consequence of this open process, could art evaporate and remerge into new amalgamations and completely different contexts of use? It is hard to guess but I would like art to remain a living organism, "a matter of being" which is constantly in flux, evading clear definition, resisting predeterminations and challenging its own limitations. The answer to the unknown thus lies in the question of what, and how can or might something - and who could - make art or take part in the process? Maybe the realm of the ephemeral, banal and everyday can be a fertile ground, a 'spectacular' space for redefinition of forms as we know them, of group, collective, and individual identities and their growth into the new models of authorship and participation. Ana Devic Zagreb |
