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# 19 in the series of "commented landscapes" by the Russian photographer Igor Savchenko shows a desolate, wintry plain under which is inscribed the notation: "That still distant and unknown, but already unavoidable event, to which the appearance of this photograph will have led".
It would appear that the "yet unknown" lurks at infra-thin, temporal and spatial distance.
The "context of contemporary art" is a layered convolution of operations that delay, withstand, evade, diffract or thwart definition. It is a ground against which no figure can qualify as such and cast a shadow, a medium ready to engulf any opposition. Art proceeds by shift, upheaval and disruption, articulating a vast mechanism of heterogenesis, a space for the meticulous staging of epiphanies and their subsequent derision. In terms which in recent years have lost some of their critical poignancy but are relevant to this context, contemporary art is a paradigm that includes its own paradigm shift, at least in the form of persistent reverie.
We can venture to say that art is a particular brand of knowledge production. Its epistemological engines are powered by contradiction, they create and devour discursive anomalies. Two examples suggest themselves here. For documenta 11, Maria Eichhorn set up a company whose only goal was to prevent the sum of 50,000 euro from being used in any way. Gianni Motti and Christoph Büchel proposed an exhibition concept to the Helmhaus Zürich in which the budget of 50,000 Swiss francs was to be hidden somewhere in the gallery. Frozen cash and the "finders keepers" establish a new connection between contemporary art and financial system, a logic that differs from that of investment and gain. In both cases, a fundamental premise of our vision of art (art is eternal, the artist is endowed with superior knowledge) is recouped and displaced, becoming a functional interface between two incompatible worlds, or a question without an answer. An event is born at the intersection of two grids neither of which is able to register it properly - the event of mutual contamination and turbulence, the two-way, unhinged-superhinged structure of a 11 rue Larrey redux.
I am tempted to say that extricating themselves from financial constraints seems to be a growing concern for contemporary artists; that they will increasingly interpret, represent, allegorize their budgets. That they will use financial constraints as Greenberg recommended painters should do with the two dimensions of the picture plane. Yet, such a statement would resemble a prediction. And your question does not coerce the respondent into projection, be it utopian or apocalyptic. The futurologist and the archeologist can give equally legitimate, even if tentative, answers. The question awakens and juxtaposes the two faces into a split personality, a two-way structure. There remain only the tonalities in which the words "foresee", "forget", "overlook" can be modulated.
The question revolves around the present moment with a haunting rustle. There is no answer because there is no question, only the intriguing resonance of one. "Your strange certainty still kept." (Olafur Eliasson)
Mihnea Mircan
Bucharest
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