Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization

A Transregional Perspective

Octavian Esanu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary."

The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called "contemporary art" – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, and Moldova.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, globalism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

Part I

1 Toward a Historical Understanding of Post-Soviet Presentism

Angela Harutyunyan

Introduction

The recent debates on world historical periodization in critical theory, philosophy, art history, and theory as well as in historiography have been increasingly engaged with interrogating the “contemporary” either as the cultural face or logic of global capitalism, or as a term possessing a certain conceptual and periodizing power in the wake of the supposed demise of “postmodernity.” Remarkably, these debates – while not confined to any particular field or discipline – have most actively evolved within discussions of art historical periodization: art, in both its mode of production and its institutional status, is thought to have seen a shift first from modernism to postmodernism, and then from “contemporary art” to what some even call “global contemporary art.”¹ What is instructive about these debates is that they situate this shift within the art world in relation to broader epochal changes, even if some voices argue for art’s relative autonomy vis-à-vis world historical periodization. While in this chapter my focus is not art per se, these debates are helpful for historicizing the “contemporary” as a presentist quality of historical time, one which, I argue, cancels historicity.²

By engaging with the recent debates on the historicity of the present and the quality of time in the contemporary, this chapter presents the argument that, if considered from the perspective of the Soviet historical experience, presentism – as the quality of historical time marked by the omnipresence of the present, or by what Terry Smith calls “a permanent seeming aftermath”³ – doesn’t simply arise out of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991. Instead, the chapter argues that in the post-Soviet condition, contemporary presentism ties together three temporal orders: the long disintegration of the Bolshevik revolutionary project; Stalinist presentism defined by the freezing of the revolutionary dialectic in the space of the Soviet State as a permanent formation; and the neoliberal regime of temporality, where time stands still in the order of deadlines, fiscal “futures,” the exploitation of nature, and the looming planetary ecological catastrophe. After outlining the debates on the contemporary and describing the specificity of presentism in historical theory, the chapter pursues an outline of the specific character of Stalinist presentism. It puts forward the argument that this presentism was to haunt the temporality of life in the Soviet Union beyond Stalinism, where Stalinism is understood as a historical time that results in the teleological fulfillment of historical necessity in the Soviet state identical with the party and the leader. The supposed completion of the logic of history in Stalinism is analogous to the supposed completion of history in the logic of late capitalism that triumphs in the 1990s as a global condition. Thus this chapter makes the argument that the post-Soviet contemporary was not simply born of the collapse of the USSR and its subsumption into the market economy so much as an already-existing arrest of historical temporality in Stalinism was conjoined with the formation of the neoliberal project. But if the post-historical ideology of the “end of history” declares history as such to be fiction and narration, in Stalinism the post-historical consciousness is “arrived at” in the name of History. The supposed triumph of History in Stalinism was anchored on a conception of synchronicity between the means of production, the relations of production, and consciousness that guaranteed the completion of socialism (the correspondence of the means and relations of production, as well as consciousness, was ratified in the 1936 Soviet Constitution).

The completion of historical movement in the one Party-State was to facilitate the identification of Stalinism with the Soviet experience as such. This identification was precisely what was taken up by the dissident intelligentsia that acquired a public platform during Gorbachev’s programs of perestroika and glasnost in the 1980s, as a ghost to be expelled. To break from official orthodoxy, the semi-official and unofficial artists sought a rupture from the permanent triumph of history, a breakthrough or escape to the other side of the Curtain, in the consumer paradise of capitalist democracies. But this rupture was a spatial rather than a temporal one. The futurity that the perestroika “avant-gardes” envisioned was ultimately a spatial futurity. The dreamed-of freedom to be actualized was conceived as existing in space rather than in time, as the realized utopia of the dreamworld of Western freedom and consumerism. Perestroika’s cultural and intellectual “avant-garde” imagined the content of the new art in and through the freedoms and lifestyles denoting all that was non-Soviet. Often, the semi-official and unofficial artists in the Soviet Union sought the form of new art in the styles, methods, and techniques that official Soviet criticism designated as “bourgeois formalism”: abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, the objet trouvé, performance, and other forms repressed by socialist realism. Nevertheless, at the structural level, this new form of (anti-Soviet) art that in the 1990s would be institutionalized as “contemporary” was prepared in the interstices of the Soviet experience, and was made visible because of glasnost’s calls for transparency and freedom of speech. And as such, it conforms to the late Soviet dissident vision of a contemporary that exists on the other side of the Soviet historical experience, in Western liberal democracies. To be contemporary in the late Soviet and post-Soviet world means to treat the Soviet historical experience as a ghost to be expelled.

The Presentism of the Contemporary

Art historian Bill Roberts distinguishes three approaches in recent debates on the theorization of the temporality of the present, whether a “postmodern” or a “contemporary” present: gradual, differential, and ruptural. To these, I can also add the anachronistic and achronistic approaches that are prevalent in philosophy, cultural studies, and new art history.⁴ The question that is often asked is whether contemporaneity has supplanted postmodernity, and the positive or negative answer determines where the speaker stands in relation to the question of the transformation of the mode of production.⁵ Fredric Jameson still maintains the formulation of postmodernity as the cultural logic of late capitalism that has gone global since the fall of the Berlin Wall.⁶ This implies that capitalism has not undergone drastic transformations since it entered into its “late” stage marked by globalization, the dominance of the financial and knowledge sectors over the productive economy, and so on. As opposed to this form of periodization, many of those actively involved in the debates on periodization put forward the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, accompanied by intensifying signs of the disintegration of the USSR, as the year of the advent of the contemporary as a world historical condition.⁷

In his article “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity” and subsequent book What is Contemporary Art?, Terry Smith views the contemporary as an indeterminately extended present moment.⁸ According to Smith, the contemporary is qualitatively different from both modernity and postmodernity because of the conflicting and plural temporalities of the premodern, modern, and postmodern that coexist within it. If modernity and postmodernity are products of the West, with the first as a broader epochal notion and the second as an outcome of a specifically Euro-American culture, Smith upholds that contemporaneity is a global condition, one that is a mosaic of disjointed temporalities that heterogeneously coexist. According to this view, contemporary is the new modern, but without the future-directedness of the former – the condition of a “permanent-seeming-aftermath.”⁹ If this last formulation might sound like a nightmarish eternal return of the same for some, for Smith it is a liberation from the ruse of history conceived as synonymous with totalitarian ideologies. Unlike Smith, for whom the contemporary is a permanent presence in the post-1989 world, for art historian Alessandro Alberro it has no ontological ground. Instead, the contemporary is an episteme, and the word doubles as a periodization tool that enables thinking about social formations in their structural sense, under the sign of the hegemony of global capital and neo-liberalism.¹⁰ In a Foucauldian move, Alberro proposes thinking about subject positions under this hegemony, both those that reproduce and those that subvert the existing social order.

Philosopher Peter Osborne discusses the contemporary through a philosophical lens, posing the question of the epoch’s consciousness of itself.¹¹ For Osborne the contemporary, as the temporality of transnational capital, is a fiction insofar as it is a conceptual “umbrella” notion that subsumes differentiated temporalities within it, but it is also a reality that structures one’s very engagement with the world. As a historical phenomenon, the contemporary for Osborne is not merely a periodizing concept but a philosophical engagement with time, wherein the three main periods of the contemporary – post-1945 (the advent of US hegemony), the 1960s (the dissolution of high modernism), and post-1989 (the collapse of the Berlin Wall) – represent different intensities of contemporaneity. Unlike Smith’s and Alberro’s approach, Osborne’s is differential: the contemporary, another name for the historical present, is “a temporal unity in disjunction or … a disjunctive unity of present times.”¹² For Osborne, the contemporary incorporates futurity in the structure of its temporality, even though this futurity is disavowed within and by the very concept of the contemporary. Even if there are differences in the above-mentioned conceptions of the contemporary, they all share a fundamental assumption: the contemporary is the temporality of transnational capital and of the latest stage of globalization. In any of the above theorizations, the contemporary comes to displace the progressive temporality of modern political and aesthetic projects.¹³

Whether one adheres to the Jamesonian formulation of the persistence of postmodernity or conceives of the contemporary as a novel epochal designation that displaces the postmodern, these debates take up the demise of the Soviet bloc as a watershed historical moment. The disintegration of the USSR signals a shift from the Cold-War-era battle of rival ideologies to the post-ideological moment of the so-called “end of history” and the triumph of presentism understood as time emptied out of the past and future alike. It is this presentism that has come to designate contemporaneity, as both a quality of historical time and a theory of history which takes the present as incommensurable with past and future, without a unifying narrative logic and thus precluding the possibility of normative rupture. The quality of our contemporary time is the ruptured time of the perpetual loop of the now that stands as infallibly singular. Whether we adopt postmodernity or the contemporary as a periodizing category for our present, they both share a quality of time that is ultimately presentist, where the present appears as a “permanent-seeming-aftermath.”¹⁴

As recently as the early 2000s, the historian and theorist François Hartog dedicated a book to “presentism” as a conceptual and historical category. In his Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time,¹⁵ Hartog discusses the advent of contemporary presentism as a regime of historicity where the present is both “omnipresent and omnipotent.”¹⁶ According to him, presentism is preceded by two modalities of historicity: if before the French Revolution of 1789 the past dominated the future, modern historicity is marked by the domination of the future over the present. The prime example of modern times’ future-directedness for Hartog is the “Manifesto of Futurism” of 1909. However, if one looks at some of the symptomatic shifts in the latter part of the twentieth century (such as the proliferation of heritage discourses and of “global architecture”), it is not hard to detect a transformation from the modern regime of historicity to our contemporary world where historical time is seemingly suspended, and where the present dominates over the past and the future alike. Hartog characterizes presentism as “permanent, elusive, and almost immobile,” though it nevertheless attempts to create its own historical time. Whether we conceive of presentism as an exit from modernity or not, it is clearly, according to Hartog, the crisis condition of modern time.¹⁷ Hartog’s periodization is rather Eurocentric, or perhaps Franco-centric: for him the modern regime of time encompasses 200 years, from the 1789 French Revolution to the 1989 commemoration of the Revolution’s 200-year anniversary, as well as the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Even if descriptively convincing, Hartog’s presentism is not anchored in concrete historical and material forces and their development, and thus remains somewhat “hanging in the air.” In a sense, Hartog updates Reinhart Koselleck’s discussion of historical time in modernity as a specific spatio-temporal conjunction and brings it to the contemporary present, even though his account differs from Koselleck’s more systematic endeavor.

In his influential work Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Koselleck conceives of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I:  
• PART II:  
• Combined Bibliography and Selected Archival Material
• Index