Adela Vaetisi
UNKNOWN ZONE
UNKNOWN ZONE
My reflection about yet unknown art has to start with a confession: I have been fearfully waiting for the death of art since about the time when its imminence was announced in the theoretical field of modernity. Not only that the event didn't take place, but it generates, as a kind of counterpart, the visionary discourse and it assumes the existence of a future and, even if it is not the brightest future, it is one that assures specific debates. Between these two fictions, which belong more to the theoretical sphere, say, that, trying to free ourselves from one obsession, we end up falling in the trap of another. Taking this initial caution, and being aware that a prediction is quite impossible, I will attempt simple and uncommitted speculation. Brutally said, art will be, I think, not the artistic object itself but the text related to the object, which can be the expression of the concept or curatorial project or any other comments about the object. Subjectivity breaks into so many fragments that everything becomes a game and an ars combinatoria of formula. The social and the cultural merge and everything is transformed into information, communication, and entertainment. All this happens because the society itself is dominated by information mediated through technology, which is now becoming the absolute capital. As a result, art will not mean the image but the textual scaffolding around it. This text can be the elated shape of a theory but it can also be the publicity for an exhibition or a gallery, e-mail exchange between the artist and the curator, or the social game called varnishing. The word will control everything and art will become a social practice or an ideological structure in which the word remains the last coagulant landmark, a residue of rationality and comprehension. This situation is due to the proliferation and dissemination of information in a world dominated by communication tools, as well as to the desire to control the chaotic expansion of the image. "Cyber" is etymologically rooted in "control", controlling a world through technology. As it has always been, the word interposes itself between the intuition of the image, its construction and its reception; but now (a "now" that is barely seen) more than ever, it is possible to jump over the image, to plan and create a link between the initial concept, the public statement of the artist, and the review from the most influential art magazine, so that the work of art doesn't require a materialization. The artist becomes a terminal in a multiple network in which various discourses are interposed, in which technological jargon merges with the international language of information technology, with old metaphorical residues, with sub-cultural idioms, and esoteric allusions to revolute artistic practice. The artistic object itself becomes limitative and constraining, such as the body, and escape is only possible through networks of signification and meaning in which SMS, database and e-mail - online communication systems - intersect each other. It is like liberation, like transcendence through words, a mystical aspiration for reaching what is beyond. Man, with his lap-top or his mobile phone, a proto-cyborg, in fact, will rapidly connect to anywhere in cyberspace, accessing incredible quantities of data, engaging himself in new forms of communication and producing text with amazing speed. The artificial matter of which a computer is made frees the organic matter as an idea that no longer needs the body, and so does the image when it can remain at the conceptual stage, without being a concrete thing. Historically speaking, we notice regression or the amputation of essential human dimensions as old as Plato's cave. But, at the same time, the word brought in and mediated by technology develops a form of power that comes from the sensation given by accessing new information, by engaging in new forms of communication, transcending images and products (artifacts). As a result, the artist will produce text, transmit information, elaborate projects, edit magazines, write books, assemble archive information, and produce more and more database. He or she will create less and less images - ushering in their apocalyptic disappearance in the post-conceptual technological age. Lacking an autonomous existence, art will die as an image in order to revive an idea, one last ephemeral luxury of the species. Adela Vaetisi Bucharest |
