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SYMPOSIUM
PAPERS: TITLES AND SYNOPSES
DAY 1:
MODERNITY AND MODERNISM: NOW AND WHEN
FREDRIC JAMESON
Reconsidering some Fundamental Categories of the Postmodern
The postmodern
categories to be discussed will include the end of art, cynical reason, the
volatilization of the object, discontinuity, national allegory, globalization,
dérive, subject positions, the punctum, the simulacrum, the uncanny,
etc. Reference will be made to the film The Hypothesis of the Stolen
Painting by Raoul Ruíz (1979)
BORIS GROYS
Topology of Contemporary Art
Speaking about
contemporary art we have to ask ourselves, first of all: What does it mean to be
contemporary? Modern art is (or, rather, was) directed toward the future.
Being modern means to live in a project, to practice a work in progress. Because
of this permanent movement toward the future modern art tends to overlook, to
forget the present, to reduce it to a permanently self-effacing moment of
transition from past to future. Postmodern discourse and art tried to avoid this
self-effacement of the present by presenting the Modern Project as finished, as
already fulfilled – and to focus on the criticism of this Project and its
consequences. But by relegating the Modern Project to the past, postmodern art
misses the present again.
It seems to me
that the contemporary artists who try to be genuinely contemporary still see the
Modern Project as unfulfilled, unrealized, ongoing Project. But relating to this
Project, as well as any other project, they concentrate their attention more on
its context, on the conditions of its fulfilling than on the project itself.
Through investigation and documentation of the context of the modern projects,
including their own artistic projects, these artists shift our attention from
the goal of the project to the present conditions of its realization.
Accordingly, the shift from the traditional art production toward the art
documentation takes place. These artists increasingly use in their practice the
typical means of media coverage. And they also increasingly use the installation
as an art form that gives a possibility to demonstrate a scene of devising and
realizing a project. Beyond that the space of installation is temporary – it is
nor a museum of the past, neither the future Kingdom of Light. In a certain
sense the question of the aesthetics of contemporary art and the question of the
aesthetics of installation are identical questions.
ROBERT STORR
Period or Ellipsis? Some Doubts about the Postness of Postmodernity
For a quarter
century the term “postmodernity” has been in more or less general circulation
among historians and cultural critics. Nevertheless its meaning not to mention
its conceptual validity remains open to question, in part because the meaning of
the root to which the prefix “post” has been attached is itself still a matter
of debate. Of what use at this point are terms so relentlessly disputed? Are the
disputes the essence of their interest to us? What distortions and dangers
inhere in code words that suggest shared understanding when in fact they signal
its opposite? Might it not be better to dispense with chronological full stops
and think in more complex temporal categories, so that we might replace periods
with ellipses?
SUELY BELINHA
ROLNIK Virtual Paradises: The religion of
integrated world capitalism
The cultural capitalism that took form in the late 1970s instrumentalizes the
forces of desire, invention, knowledge and action, transforming them into its
major source of surplus value. These forces disconnect from the movement of life
that calls them into being, and are invested in the creation and consumption of
the virtual paradises produced by advertising and disseminated by the media. The
new regime demands a flexible self, which renders obsolete the modern politics
of subjectivation, based on identity and centered on the ego. In between the
conservative who clamors for a return to identity and the neoliberal celebrating
the perverse flexibility of a self-for-sale moved by faith in its paradise,
there arises a politics of subjectivation that diverts flexibility in the
direction of life.
ROSALIND
KRAUSS Some Rotten Shoots from the Seeds of Time
A personal
review of the impact on contemporary art, architecture, criticism and critical
theory of Fredric Jameson’s major ideas, including those advanced in his seminal
books The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, and, especially, The Seeds of Time.
Day 2: INTERNAL
MUTINIES: HISTORICAL TRANSITIONS
GEETA KAPUR
With reference to a cultural conjuncture: art in contemporary
India
1. The proposed
paper positions itself in India 2004, along the cusp of the unexpected
turnaround the Indian electorate has just staged challenging the flourishing
rightwing ideology of middleclass India. At its most optimistic, this vote
reopens possibilities of pursuing the democratic assertion of neglected classes
and communities: dispossessed peasantry, unemployed youth, oppressed castes,
religious and ethnic “minorities.” It signals the need to define a radical
version of citizenship, one that goes beyond the mere protocols of civil society
and, more urgently, opens out the shrunken public sphere of an “idealized”
national culture moving dangerously towards a fascistic majoritarianism termed
Hindutva.
2. A
national framing of the social is not the sole option. I, for my part, do
choose a framing that positions the nation and the state as “irrevocable”
entities even as they are revoked in the rhetoric of the
communications-revolution and/or instrumentalized by transnational capital to
its own purposes. I underscore a secular state for a secular polity, and do not
wish to repeat the litany embedded in cultural politics of the muticulturist
variety which reduces representational drives to a programmatic plotting of
identities; which works with a minority-polemic that further marginalizes the
culturally disenfranchised. It is to emphasize the material contradictions, the
struggles and the demonstrable demand for political change vis–à-vis the power
structures in place, that the national is critically staged in the argument.
3. The 2004
churning of democracy in India can be shown to throw up volatile configurations
of representational demands from outside the urban. From the farming
sector, to be precise, linked by global exploitation to rural economies
everywhere else in the third world. (The farming sector is inducted into the
process of globalization characterized by unfair trade practices decreed by the
WTO; more properly, it is inducted into the neo-imperialist game-plan to
pauperize the rural sectors of the developing world by subjecting their national
economies to the expedient rhetoric of “reforms” and “structural adjustments”).
The current upheaval reveals at the same time a condition of metropolitan
entropy in India’s irreversible, often desperate urbanization, shredding and
restringing what appear like surreal fragments of the unredeemed “real.” These
are asking to be theorized (perhaps) into cultural terms; asking to be rendered
(perhaps) in new aesthetic practices.
4. A democratic
assertion, such as I signal above, has the potential to be read across a series
of political disjunctures; it simultaneously precipitates a cultural
conjuncture in the contemporary, a convergence of a peoples’
representational drive.
5. Can we claim
a “common culture” consonant with advanced notions of democracy that can be
hypothesized as an alternative? How do we distinguish it, even
conceptually, from the overtaken ideal of a “peoples’ culture” in the socialist
sense of the word, and the catch-all category of popular culture much valorized
in postmodernism but inclined to quick commodity makeovers that blunt the edge
of subcultures’ dissent. Can we hypothesize a common culture of the multitudes
(-in-arms) that the (new global) “Empire” supposedly yields as its own nemesis?
That is to say, do cultures of protest find a spontaneous communicability across
and beyond communitarian and national boundaries validating the utopian end of
capitalist globalism? Can we translate this interpreted/extrapolated concept of
culture to our purpose and in the form of contemporary art production?
6. If art in
the contemporary is driven by contradictions, art production at its most telling
can be read simultaneously as an index (of the hot-footed process of
globalization); as symbolic (of persistently hypothesized national
cultures); as a sign (of the surplus value generated in the smaller and
bigger markets of commodity exchange).
7. The paper
will propose that there can be no general category of contemporary art that can
suffice an art-historical or analytical scrutiny. We need to translate
contemporary art into crucial particularities: of the artist’s citizenship and
the strange contrariness of that status in terms of the artist’s perception of
her/his “autonomous” subject-position. How are the ambiguities, the obscurities
and elisions of an artwork seen to relate to esoteric and playful codes of
visual language-- available “universally,” so to speak, but then read back into
those very specific sets of social contradictions in relation to which the
aesthetic construct is reflexively poised. How is the meaning, immanent in the
matrix of the imaginary as also in the material object, transformed and
interpreted through the phenomenology of the encounter at different viewing
sites? How are the metaphors and allegories of the artwork, offering both
political irony and surplus meanings (with unsolicited pleasures) acknowledged
to go beyond recognizable forms of cultural representation? Indeed every
political circumstance will suggest to what degree we accept that the internal
logic of an artwork -- a formal equivalent of the structure of language and
properly placed in the realm of the symbolic – is always at one remove and often
disruptive of the social/cultural domain of responsibility to which it is
tendentially addressed.
8. In the wake
of such questions I propose a somewhat gratuitous riddle: is culture what
artists make? There is a straight answer to this. Culture is a field made up
of opposing representational interests that require to be kept in a workable
relationship of consensual norms. Traditionally a containing matrix, culture at
its most persuasive acquires a hegemonic status inviting a non-coercive and
participatory allegiance. Art is always made up of a set of paradoxes nurtured
in the imaginary and working (with, but always also) against the
norm -- to undermine its authority in favor of a new configuration of symbolic
meanings.
9. If, however,
we claim provocative sets of contradictions in and between art and culture, it
makes the above question tendentious. It is asking to be answered in a
double negative but with the slippages read into the negation serving as
critical clues in a failed equation. Culture has seeds of dissent inscribed
into its interstices that must be interpreted as such: confrontational
cultures/the culture of protest. Art, for all the autonomy it claims, acquires
an avant-garde status precisely at the juncture where it goes outside the
institution of art and connects with the more radical political movements of its
times or, at any rate, with the subversive aspects of the cultures in
opposition.
10. To give art
practice the resumed capacity of reflexive engagement within historically
unfolding cultures, we need to work through larger sets of (economic and
political) antinomies characteristic of late capitalism to a situational
analysis of art production in the vastly heterogeneous contemporary. I am
interested to see how artworks may (in the modernist sense) convey the
intransigence of linguistic codes and (within the scope of the postmodern) the
cultural specificities of aesthetic conduct. At the same time as they become
tokens of value-laden exchange in transcultural translations, necessary to
negotiate and critique an insistently extrapolated globalism. It is in this
sense I suggest we gauge the “holding power of the contemporary,”
both in a temporal and spatial sense; in the global “time of now” and across
the extensive topography of production sites.
WU HUNG
Constructing “Contemporary
Chinese Art” in a Global Space
Unlike other
traditions in current Chinese art that define themselves in terms of history,
contemporary Chinese art (dangdai Zhongguo yishu) derives its identity,
meaning, and value from forging multivalent connections in a global space. The
contemporaneity (dangdai xing) of this art thus does not simply pertain
to what is here and now, but must be understood as an intentional
artistic/theoretical construct, which asserts a particular temporality and
spatiality for itself. This paper explores basic concepts, mechanisms,
strategies, and participants in this construction, and further connects this
construction to a burgeoning “international art” as a new type of time/space in
art historical inquiry.
PANEL: ART AND
EXHIBITIONS NOW Moderator: LAURA HOPTMAN
IWONA BLASWICK
To be advised
NICHOLAS BOURRIAUD Globalization and Contemporary Art
GAO MINGLU
An Allegory of the Illusion of Modernist Presence:
Chinese
Modernism? A forgotten corner in the contemporary Chinese art world
Modernity has
never been a completed project in any developing country, particularly in China,
a country changing rapidly from an agricultural to industrial society. We need,
however, another “criterion” for reading the Chinese modernity, which in reality
may have produced new aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections and political
interventions different from those familiar in the West. Only through
establishing this criterion can an alternative Chinese modernity make sense.
Modernity in China - and perhaps in other developing countries as well - has
always been alternative, specific and ambiguous in terms of its intrinsic,
self-defined interests. Recently, its own cultural logic has been reoriented by
the present global world situation.
Investigating
the rapid changes in the Chinese contemporary art world and its active global
presence, I explore the driving force that has been shaping the concept and form
of Chinese modernity in the creation of contemporary Chinese art. To this end, I
have recently been involved in some exhibition projects framed by certain
particular themes. This curatorial shift of focus may help my audience to obtain
a better understanding of the real ground of contemporary Chinese art at a
moment when many survey exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art have been
presented, both in China and abroad. The thematic focus may also open a fresh
path for a better and deeper understanding of the meaning of Chinese modernity
in the works of Chinese artists.
The exhibition
Chinese Maximalism, which was concluded in 2003, and an on-going
project The Wall: Reshaping Modernity in Contemporary Art, are examples
of my recent curatorial approach. In this paper, I will particularly focus on
the former, which presented a
group of artists who have created a
kind of “Chinese abstract art” since the late 1980s.
This categorization has to do not
only with the artists’ positions vis-à-vis contemporary criticism, their
interest in a certain Minimalist-like visual language to express their personal
experience, or their approach to political discourse; it may also have to do
with the subtle influence on the artists of traditional Chinese or Asian ways of
thinking and recent attitudes toward contemporary art. The concept of
contemporaneity, because of its emphasis on spatialized rather than historical
time, may be very suggestive for a new understanding of the most recent
manifestations of modernity in China.
“Maximalism” constitutes one of the
most intriguing phenomena of the contemporary Chinese art scene since the
1980s. Despite this, because these artists are not interested in the
representation of the “Chineseness” on a phenomenal level, their works have been
under-represented both in China and abroad.
This newly emerged Chinese
“modernism” has never attempted to jump into the discursive system of the
Western Modernism, because its discourse is an alternative that does not aim for
either a “decidability of utopian meaning,” or to realize itself as a formalist
object. It is concerned, rather, with its own method, one that matches the
concern of the artists about themselves living in a rapidly changing environment
of modernization. In other words, it does not aim to be a form of modernist
thinking, rather to be an allegory of the illusion of a “modernist presence.”
HELEN MOLESWORTH Analog
Project Description
Zoe Leonard’s
Analog is composed of 387 photographs taken from approximately 1998 to
2003. As Leonard walked the streets of her native New York City, as well as the
streets of cities she has traveled to, she has been steadily documenting the
disappearing face and texture of twentieth century urban life. Using a
Rolleiflex camera, she has produced a poignant body of images, each
approximately nine by nine inches square, which, in a simultaneously personal
and systematic way, bring attention to the realm of hodgepodge displays in
storefronts, handwritten signs, and homemade arrangements of goods. Analog
is filled with images of shop windows and their commodity objects. Yet far from
the glistening allure of the commodity in well lit shopping malls or digitally
manipulated photography of mail-order catalogues, these objects are slightly
frayed around the edges, holding on tenaciously to their disappearing place.
And it is the tension between disappearance and tenacity that lay at the heart
of the pathos of Leonard’s project. Installed in an elaborate grid, the images
of Analog are a testament to what history is currently in the process of
leaving behind. As the artist has said “New technology is usually pitched to us
as an improvement….But progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we
give something else up. I’m interested in looking at some of what we are
losing.”
The dynamic
forces of globalism have brought many of us closer together. Brand-name chain
establishments have had the effect of collapsing time and distance such that the
regional differences that once defined American life are now largely lacking as
we increasingly shop and eat at the same stores. While this homogeneity has its
creature comforts, something else is being lost. “It was only as these old
shops begun disappearing that I realized how much I counted on them—that this
layered, frayed, and quirky beauty underlined my own life.” And so Analog
is a walking tour of the end of the twentieth century, a poignant record of a
fading way of doing business, a document of a slowly evaporating way of life.
Much as
multinational corporations have changed the face of urban life, so too
advancements in digital technology are transforming traditional photography. In
this regard, Leonard’s Analog is an attempt to preserve the photographic
realm of the analogic, meaning the photograph’s distinct ability to record
physical data into a corresponding image in the face of digital technology that
transforms physical data into a binary system. Analog then is a dual
testament to the increasing obsolescence of both mom-and-pop shops and
photography. As each image is meticulously composed, and richly printed the
individual works evoke such classic photographers as Eugene Atget, August
Sander, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Taken as a whole Analog is more
than the sum of its parts. It is, in many ways, our first comprehensive and
self-conscious document of the twentieth century as a historical period.
“Atget’s photographs provide a record of Paris, but they also document the shift
from a handmade world to an age of mechanical reproduction. I think he
understood something irrevocable was going on during his time—during his fin de
siècle. His archive provides us with a view of a world now completely altered.
We are now witnessing such a specific moment in history—the end of the
mechanical age, the beginning of the digital era. I think this is a unique
moment to document, and an important one to archive.”
Lest Analog
sound too nostalgic, the project ends with a dramatic example of the impact of
globalism on lived lives in the present. Westerners are all too familiar with
the process of donating their unwanted clothes to charity. Yet they are unaware
that the vast majority of those clothes are not subsequently donated to people
in need, rather they are sold for profit to vendors and markets in a large
number of African countries. This 21st century rag trade has
decimated indigenous textile production in Africa and has instituted new forms
of identity and commerce around western clothing. Leonard tracks these tee
shirts and other discarded clothes from a clearing station in her native
Brooklyn through to used clothing markets in Kampala. Markedly, Leonard follows
a commodity object through its dispersal through time and space, resisting the
objectification of persons. Yet by tracing the life of one commodity, Leonard
is able to show us the ways in which we are linked globally, allowing us to
understand, perhaps, the enormity of our urban and economic systems albeit
distilled through one type of object. In this regard Analog is not only
a document of a passing moment—the end of an era or century—but offers as well a
window onto the ways the forces of globalization have already begun to shape the
present—however far away or close to home.
JONATHAN HAY
The Otherly Modern and the Para-Modern: China and Africa
This paper takes issue with the normative assumption that Euro-American
modernity furnishes an explanatory paradigm that can be generalized to
the rest of the world. In the study of modern and contemporary art,
modernity as a condition tends to be collapsed into modernism as a
privileged form of participation in this condition; consequently,
critics and art historians operating in the Euro-American sphere
generalize to the rest of the world an ideology of innovation. Employed
as an interpretative lens, the ideology of innovation renders invisible
much of what is most interesting and specific about the modernity of
art in non-Western contexts. I argue that at least two additional
paradigms are needed. First, taking modernity to be a narrative, at
least one other area of the world--China--has its own long modernity
narrative, parallel to but not derived from that of the Euro-American
world. China is best understood, in these terms, as being otherly
modern. The modernity of contemporary Chinese art, which draws heavily
on the Euro-American paradigm, is structurally heterogeneous in ways
that normative criticism is unable to see, not least because Chinese
artists for their own reasons often deliberately repress this
heterogeneity. Second, as non-modern cultures in different parts of the
world have increasingly been brought into contact with Euro-American
modernity, they have selectively adapted existing art forms to suit the
needs of an outside market. In the process, non-Western cultures have
incorporated elements of Euro-American modernity and even modernism,
creating a phenomenon of highly localized para-modernities. In this
paper, with admitted mischief, I discuss as an example of para-modern
art the fake African mask, a genre with a history of more than a
century of production that has been grossly underestimated by
Africanists and modern art historians alike.
SYLVESTER O. OGBECHIE The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist
Metaphors and the New Global Other
My
paper evaluates the return of the modernist sublime in art history and how the
new discourses of globalization re-import some of the great modernist
dichotomies of the mid to late 20th century. It also looks at the construction
of significant “Others” (non-western populations) whose attempt to redefine
global power relations are now interpreted as a direct threat to the supremacy
of the West, represented in this instance by the "trans-Atlantic Alliance of
white Western European nations." Supported by the unilateral power of the United
States, which acts as a grotesque in the contemporary era, the trans-Atlantic
alliance signals the rebirth of the old colonial powers along with the
discourses previously invoked to justify colonization of non-Western
populations. Along with this rebirth, we see a great increase in the control of
technologies of discourse and surveillance, all of which are used to inscribe
new spaces of political and cultural domination of non-Western societies, as is
evident in the invasion of Iraq. The discursive and media interpretation of the
Iraq invasion brings to mind Conrad’s narrative in Heart of Darkness.
Once again, the trope of primitivism is being invoked to justify colonization,
under the guise of bringing “democracy” (read “civilization”) to the literally
dark places of the earth.
I
want to identify this return of the modernist ethos as “neomodernism” and also
to note that there is active resistance from non-Western societies to this new
attempt by the West to secure global control. This resistance manifests
politically as a struggle against colonial and occidental corporate control but
also culturally as resistance to occidental control of technologies of
discourse.
My
interest in the above global formation concerns the attempt to posit
“Alternative Modernities” as a way of attending to those formations of modernity
outside the normative space of white Western culture (see Bruce Knauft, ed. 2002
for a close examination of the literature so far). I am especially interested
in its impact on contemporary African art. In recent times, the idea of
“alternative modernity” has been used to inscribe a space to evaluate
reconfigurations of African art that emerged during the colonial and
postcolonial periods (mid to late 20th century). We can translate this as an
attempt to step outside the mythos of contemporary global order, to validate the
engagement of modern and contemporary African artists with local and
international contexts of modernist practice. In the past, art history has
defined all such attempts as “provincialism,” addenda to the primacy of white
western European constructions of modernity. However, it is becoming
increasingly clear that the ethnic practice of white Western European artists
can no longer stand in for the experience of modernity in Africa, Asia and other
parts of the world. It is therefore imperative that we study these alternative
contexts of modernity to see how they relate to canonical discourses and how
they in turn inscribe new discursive formations in the contemporary era.
In
this paper, I will argue that we also need to confront the unilateral power of
the West, represented mostly by American power, and its impact on our attempts
to inscribe “alternative” spaces of practice and discourse of modernity. Is
such an alternative possible given the increasingly totalitarian control of
technologies of discourse by the
West? What are the political and cultural requirements for the production of
visual culture in these alternative spaces? Above all, how does this desire for
discursive alternatives play out in the contemporary African art? I will engage
the above questions through analysis of recent exhibitions of contemporary
African art with special emphasis on the interpretation of artworks.
BRUNO LATOUR
Emancipation or Attachments? The Different Futures
of Politics
The differences between Good and Bad Government--as depicted in the magnificent
frescos in Sienna’s City Hall--bear not only on humans virtues and moral
rectitude but also on the things, the gatherings, with which they share their
common life: landscape, urbanism, commerce, arts, socialities. The problem is
that it is very difficult inside the Modernist Constitution to provide a place
that is at once political and respectful of the multiplicity and the specificity
of attachments to things--in spite of the old etymology of the word "thing." Every
effort at defining politics through the notion of attachments instead of
emancipation appears pre-modern or even reactionary. Is it possible to navigate
one's way towards a non-modern definition of politics that shifts its centre of
gravity from humans only towards the inclusion of non-humans? A possible
solution is to pay much more attention to the various techniques of
representation. The incommensurabilities between images, representations and
ideas will be explored with reference to, among other things, the recent
exhibition Iconoclash, shown at the Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, and the exhibition, Dingpolitik: Making Things
Public, to be presented at ZKM in March 2005.
Day 3: THE
CONTEMPORANEITY QUESTION AND THE POLITICS OF TEMPORALITY
ANTONIO NEGRI Time for Revolution
COLIN
RICHARDS The Violent present in Current South African Art
My
paper is part of a larger investigation into art, violence and the production of
new humanisms in recent and current South African art. The alien humanisms
experienced by once colonised peoples have been strongly associated with
imperial imperatives, and any new humanisms will need to come to some kind of
terms with the foundational violence in European humanism. In addition, a
critical assessment of both the cultural and intellectual resources locally
available for the making of new humanisms need to be identified, considered and
weighed. I am thinking here of the now very visible notion of ubuntu,
which is at base an ethical relation to an other. A frank recognition of some
difficulties relating to more indigenous forms of humanism would also be
necessary.
The
relation between “modernism” and magic would be a key part of transitional and
transformative “humanised” aesthetic processes. Also important here is the
current intense interest in South African art as socially
"restorative."
This is both creatively enabling and disabling for, amongst other things, the
development of more varied kinds of creative agency, and I will touch on some of
the implications of this in my discussion.
A
number of local artists produce work
that
not only recognizes
but in a sense performs cultural violence in such a way that sharpens our
consciousness of civil society, our ability to engage open contestation in a
well-developed public sphere, and the development of especially creative human
agency. It is here that (arguably) one of the strongest links with more
critical global art might be expressed, and it is in the crossings of these that
new humanisms become imaginable and indeed possible.
That sharper consciousness, sense of public contestation, and human creative
agency itself turns on various patterns of creative thought and practice. Some
examples would be forms of indigeneity and strangeness, the relation between
space and time, between the animal and the human, and the tensions between
material constraints and creative freedom. Imaginative and critical
articulations of such patterning often steer an unstable course between
fetishizing nomadism, mobility, post-human transience on the one hand and more
ossified, static, rigidly embedded forms of ethnicity and nationalism on the
other. Or, put differently, the course between an intense preoccupation with
“presentness” where history is purged from the present. Certain kinds of “new”
conceptualism - including carpetbagging conceptualism - is part of this trend,
as is a greater interest in what we understand as “new media.” Whatever new
humanisms we forge, they would be unstable and mutable in productive ways, ways
tonic for the development of agency.
The
following exhibitions provide a framework: Faultines: Inquiries Around Truth
and Reconciliation, curated by Jane Taylor, Cape Town Castle, Cape Town,
South Africa ca. July 1996; Graft, 2nd Johannesburg
Biennale, artistic director Okwui Enwezor, curator Colin Richards,
Johannesburg 1997; Authentic / Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary
African Art, Salah M. Hassan and Olu Oguibe, La Biennale di Venezia, 49
Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, 2001; Fault-Lines: Contemporary
African Art and Shifting Landscapes, edited by Gilane Tawadros and Sarah
Campbell, 50th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di
Venezia, 2002; Dokumenta 11 - Platform 5, 2002, Kassel, artistic
director Okwui Enwezor; New Identities: Zeitgenössische Kunst Aus Südafrica,
2004. Museum Bochum; A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa,
curated by Tumelo Mosaka, associated curators Sophia Ainslie and Thembinkosi
Goniwe, 2004; A Decade of Democracy: South African Art 1994-2004, 2004,
curated and edited by Emma Bedford, Cape Town, 2004.
PANEL: ART AND THE WORLD NOW
Moderator: BARBARA McCLOSKEY
MONICA AMOR Notes on the Contingency of Modernity and the Persistence of
Canons
JAMES MEYER The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism
DARBY ENGLISH The Trouble with “Black Abstraction.”
A
response to a provocative article, recently written by the artist Dawoud Bey,
that calls for the mobilization of black artistic forces away from critical
practice and towards abstraction. This movement is already under way, of course,
in the work of several young artists whose work has been labeled “post-black.”
Though the article acknowledges this, it leaves unaccounted the important fact
that the orthodox modernism underwriting Bey’s account of abstraction is
fundamentally incompatible with the postmodern practices from which he seeks
support for his claims. What kind of problem is this? Arguing that an intimate
relationship to abstraction is central to the very practices Bey condemns, this
talk will attempt to shed a different light on the value of modernist
commitments for even the most postmodern projects.
CHARITY
SCRIBNER The
Second World and Industrial Modernity
The collapse of
communism and the exhaustion of the welfare state marked the end of industrial
modernity in Europe. As the continent’s Eastern and Western halves converge
into a European Union, some critical minds are surveying their divided history,
searching among the fallout of those two orders for points of convergence.
Artists and writers on the left, in particular, have taken up as objects of
interest the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remains. These vestiges
point back to a peculiar “second world” culture that still links places like
Manchester and Magdeburg, where factories fall into decay, but have not yet been
fully supplanted by the informational economies of late capitalism.
Cities of the
vanishing second world stall in the shadow of heavy industry’s eclipse. The
literature and art that touch upon them disclose something that the new Europe
as a whole cannot afford to leave behind: a means of collective experience that
provides a singular perspective on its counterparts, the “first world” and the
“third.” As the traffic condenses between the first and third worlds, a new
“empire” emerges in which old boundaries dissolve-- including the second world
that once mediated between them. Yet today, when the forces of globalization
are smoothing over Europe’s industrial wastelands, some writers and artists are
trying to keep hold of the second world’s cultural memory and claim its
remainders as sites of reflection and resistance.
MCKENZIE WARK
A Hacker History of the Present
These are times of an emergent global instability. The proliferation of
communication vectors creates a virtual geography of events that is the opposite
of the rational and transparent space promised by neo-liberal "cyberhype."
This virtual geography is an event-space of both great danger and great promise.
Great danger, in that a new ruling class, based on control of strategic and
commercial vectors of information, a vectoralist class, is coming to power.
Great promise, in that a new subversive movement also arises, not to challenge
but to evade this new order. This I call the "hacker class" -- named after
its leading elements in software and hardware engineering, but which really
included all creators of the "intellectual property" that the vectoralist class
seeks to monopolize, including artists. The challenge for the hacker class
is to destabilize the unity of property and representation proposed by the
vectoralist order of commodified information. In the realm of the arts,
one can trace this emergent new terrain of class struggle in the gap between a
"neo-bourgeois" art-world based on new strategies of extracting value from
dematerialized art, and emerging practices within which aesthetic value arises
out of the hacker practice of freeing information from scarcity and constructing
instead of abstract gift relation.
NIKOS
PAPASTERGIADIS Spatial Aesthetics and Re-Thinking the Contemporary
The narratives
of place and displacement are now central to the definition of contemporary art.
New forms of cultural practices that have both transfigured the relationship
between the local and the global and mobilized the discourse of difference are
now common throughout the world. The characteristics of contemporary art have
now extended the spectrum that was previously defined in terms of
“dematerialization.” The temporal dimensions, site specificity and relational
experiences in contemporary art practice have presented new questions for the
understanding of artistic production and dissemination. If the material object
of art is not only shorn of its auratic power but also displaced as the ideal
destination point in the production of art, then this poses a range of questions
in relation to the status of collections in the institutions of contemporary
art, the role of the art historian, the function of the curator, the emergence
of the documenteur, the place of the witness and the dynamism of social
interaction. The coda for the contemporary artist is now defined by the desire
for being in the contemporary, rather than producing a belated or
elevated response to the everyday. To be in the place of the here and now, to
work with others in a simultaneous and concrete practice, to see the realization
of work in the experience of connection, is to raise, what Scott Lash calls the
“performative” aspect of practice and displace the reflexive role of cultural
production.
PLENARY: JAMESON, KRAUSS, STORR,
KAPUR, GROYS, AND LATOUR
Moderator: SMITH
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