Best to be circumspect about the question, which has the scent of unwarranted hope in art, in the production of newness, and in the category "unknown".
The question confirms (once again) what must be said with greater conviction, greater vehemence: art is intransigent, and will not dislodge itself from the age of discovery imaginary. For without the quantum reality of the new and unknown, art will be an extinct form and pretense. But without an outside to that imagination, we are quite dreadfully stuck in a world where, among our baroque torments, art exists in that it protests that it exists.
Art will not be radical enough. Not enough, to begin with, to scuttle
the pernicious operations of the new and unknown within an aesthetic
regime still built on the appetite for exotic ground (and the faith
that that ground is out there to be had). A Manichean reduction
of complexity shows up in the innocence of that hankering and presumption.
It is there, in that righteousness and child-like sense of entitlement,
that art is exposed as very small and vain indeed, in the face of,
say, Kim Jong Il's little bomb, or incredibly vast impact zone of
George W's (yes, small-minded) politics of demonology. Whatever
art says to the horrors visiting the world - however laceratingly
sagely exquisitely (Mahler's Symphony No. 9 comes to mind, for example;
or Enwezor's Documenta 11) - is snuffed by art's own backhand entanglement
with the horror machines. However art speeds up to the momentum
with which machinic interconnections generate a proliferation of
subjectivities today, art's acceleration builds up to hyper-drag
and meltdown - stranding complexity in, dooming complexity to, the
viscous space of history and tradition.
It is not possible to consider - In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art? - without intoning a weary litany:
What might be the point of another yet unknown art? Art is a set of trades distinguished by an overblown sense of its own significance; by its powers to preserve monolithic formations, and by its capacity to disguise this conservatism in phantasmagorias to novelty and celebrations of critical faculties. Art remains a technology for reproducing conceits that reproduce imperial ambition and the heroic subject. For these same reasons, of course, art is fabulous, fun, shattering in delicious ways, the best drug of all. (Better than religion, though surely the argument stands that art is the secularization of those three quest-driven, vision-addled religions that came out of the fertile crescent.) Jouissance - art's spirit, its energy and enticement. Feels correct: the ecstasy of difference, the sexual turn-on of yet-unknowns. Jouissance issues out of a different chemistry with each time, place, person, utterance - permitting art to be multiply construed; facilitating the perhaps too-easy acceptance of modernity as a plural term in postmodernity. In any case, because so, art persists in demanding the next high, gracefully.
.........
I am not interested in end-of-art propositions. (As in the case of the end of history, there is something ugly - because rabidly anti-critical - in biblical pronouncements. Anti-art strategies, obviously yoked to art, take on the features of intra-guild contests. Successive avant-gardes have not been known to breech the main wall: the structure of their rhetorical roots in military history. And the word "alternative" is fatuous in all circumstances I can think of. Besides which, I am art-addicted and can't live without it.) My inclination is to urge a radical sense of proportion. Qualifying, in the same breath: sure let's indulge, by all means fling ourselves at the next promising beyond that art might corner for its circular purposes; at the idea of art as autogenetic, rebirthing itself perpetually as unknown. However: the pleasures of flinging so, thinking so, must remain hedonistic to be moral.
Art's offer of pleasures - including its critical powers against oppressive and reductive regimes, those powers expressed as gladness in crafting counter-discourses out of angers and griefs - relies on the caveat that art must not, and in any case, cannot overreach its own ontological precincts. Precincts defined by those pleasures-by-reason-of-pleasure. By precisely those pleasures (of imagining yet-unknown reincarnations) that only sustains a metaphysics of arrogance if unmitigated by a political attitude holding that art encompasses precious little. Its universe of yet-unknowns will always be a priori known: dream-products of professional discoverers. The smallness and vanity of even their most acute work (the smallness and vanity acknowledged especially in and by the most acute, brilliant work!) - this is fine, then. But not the assumption of ethical and creative purpose in art's robust territorializing imperatives, that mapping and description of yet-unknown art, which operates on no less than monotheism.
It is no less than monotheism in its most malefic form when art's will to eternal renaissance in an abundance of yet-unknown art, constantly revivifies the grand lie: art as one hell of a universal category for grasping, remarking, and re-shaping everything-possible. Whereas, what urgently needs acknowledging are domains (in many cases not at all esoteric) that elude art; that art can only comprehend coarsely, in rude, paltry ways. Such acknowledgement is made impossible by art's hunger for territory.
What there might be outside art is outside art because no would-be totalizing technology totalizes totally. If only as counter-discourse to monotheism, then, what is unknown to art has to be held at a respectful distance from art; and, when that unknown quantity is ferreted out and reconstructed by art into instruments for its own self-regeneration - contemplated for what escaped the grasp, what went subterranean, what slipped, was mangled, was freed, in the appropriation. Whatever yet-unknown art there might be - might be happily discovered, sure, and most happily of all, if the yet-unknown art gives any of us an inkling of the fine, hard homogenizing features of "yet-unknown art", the features that preclude fascination in art's modest proportions, and that destroy impulses for conceiving universes that art cannot touch.
Marian Pastor Roces
Los Angeles and Manila, October 2002
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