Art as a Method of Radical Contextualization Kateryna Badianova
Writing about today’s contemporary art practices, Jacques Ranciere makes no claim that art is a generalizing concept that unifies the different arts: “What is attacked or defended under its name [contemporary art] is by no means a common tendency that would serve to characterize the various arts of today.” Rather, he writes that as “the dispositif that renders Ranciere, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Transl. by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, pp. 22–23.
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them visible,” art and its practices are “a way of occupying a place where relations between bodies, images, spaces and times are redistributed.” He goes on to say “that art consists in constructing spaces and relations to reconfigure materially and symbolically the territory of the common.”1 I find this very specific use of the term striking; still, it demands clarification of the meanings put into the term “contemporary art” by historians, theorists, and commentators, as well as into the adjective “contemporary,” and of the way these meanings uphold certain ideas about the essence and specificity of art. It seems that the adjective “contemporary,” which has replaced “modern” and “postmodern” in the analysis of art, has taken too much upon it-
According to Peter Osborne, after World War II, the English word “contemporary” received its historical and critical connotations, when it first entered use as a more precise replacement for the word “modern,” and later, in contrast to the latter, as the name of a period. Only in the 1990s, when postmodernism was discredited for not being critical enough (as a concept), did the word “contemporary” obtain a sense not limited to denoting everything having to do with the present moment. Contemporary art is inconsistent in its chronological definition. Osborne ties contemporary art to the dominant position of the USA since 1945, which makes it possible to present American abstractionism as the authentic continuation of the European avant-garde and to relate it to the entire “Western” art tradition. Here contemporary art becomes a synonym for “postwar” art, chronologically extended through the 1990s. In another periodization (from the 1960s) contemporary art is post-conceptual art: “Here, contemporary art deploys an open infinity of means, and operates within an institutionally – and philosophically – grounded generic conception of ‘art’ that exceeds the historically received conventions that had previously defined artistic mediums. A significant amount of the institutionally validated art currently produced still fails to attain contemporaneity in this art-critically immanent sense.” The next periodization unites contemporary art from 1989 onward, from the end of the epoch of historical communisim and the emergence of global markets: “This corresponds artistically to three convergent features of institutionally validated art since the 1980s: the apparent closure of the historical horizon of the avant-garde; a qualitative deepening of the integration of autonomous art into the culture industry; and a globalization and transnationalization of the biennale as an exhibition form” (Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, 2013, pp. 18–21). Claire Bishop writes that all periodizations have an essential shortcoming: they are based on the Western point of view. For example, contemporary art in China is usually dated from the end of the 1970s, designated by the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of the democracy movement. She adds, “In Latin America, there is no real division of the modern and the contemporary, because this would mean conforming to hegemonic Western categories – indeed, a prevalent discussion there still revolves around whether or not modernity has actually been realized.” The main condition for the existence of contemporary African art is post-colonialism (Bishop, Claire. Radical Museology, or What’s “Contemporary” in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013, pp. 16-18). The group IRWIN, together with Eda Čufer in the project Kapital present an idea about the existence of two different modernisms: Eastern modernism is different from Western modernism and contests its claim to be a universal concept. They also point out key differences in the conditions of art production and reception (Badovinac, Zdenka. NSK: From Kapital to Capital / Neue Slowenische Kunst – an Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Exhibition guide, Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 2015, p. 27. Access – http://www.internationaleonline.org/media/files/mg-msum_nsk_vodic_eng.pdf).
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self, claiming to encompass the entire variety of artistic phenomena that emerged in the last half-century.2 Actually, this essay is a response to the widespread pessimistic mood of disenchantment with art and with the current state of the contemporary art system. It is a matter less of individual opinions than of a chorus of accusations hurled from all sides, primarily addressing critical art and its exhaustion and degradation.3 Therefore, in this essay I’ve gathered examples of concern for art, reflections that emphatically stress the urgent need to talk about contemporary art in a different way. Mourning for the intentions of the avant-garde, art critic Hal Foster observes that contemporary art no longer seems “contemporary.” He explains that contemporary art has been divested of “any necessary working-through of its own historically given problems”; it no longer has privileged or “symptomatic” purchase