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Where is Art?
Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art
Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, Sean Lowry, Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, Sean Lowry
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eBook - ePub
Where is Art?
Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art
Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, Sean Lowry, Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, Sean Lowry
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About This Book
Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated.
While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question "what is art?, " a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become "where is art?" Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art.
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1 Introduction
Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy and Sean Lowry
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-1
Some experiences of art are not necessarily connected to a single image, object, time, or location. Indeed, certain works of art are presented as a complex aggregate of very different forms, locations, versions, and modes of delivery. In such cases, it might be limiting to expect a single object or point of entry to be adequately commensurate with the work as a whole. This diverse selection of contributions from artists, curators, and theorists explores new and emerging conceptions of art understood and experienced in relation to multiple and intersecting locations and temporalities, interminable reproducibility, radical indeterminacy, and the collapse of physical space. It considers new ways of thinking about aesthetics, historical malleability, and the distributive relationships that collectively sustain but do not delimit or define contemporary art. Emphasizing dynamic relationships between material forms and social contexts set against sometimes radically materially and spatially expanded conceptions of what might constitute a work of art, this book presents a range of ways in which art can simultaneously inhabit very different forms of transmission, spaces of relation, and modes of mediation.
At its core, this book seeks to broadly repurpose the still contested historical question âwhat is art?â via a marked shift in co-ordinates. Comprising a diverse selection of approaches and modalities, its fundamental thesis will suggest that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the significance of where and when it is situated. In short, it will suggest that where much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth century was aligned with the provocation âwhat is art?,â the key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century is instead âwhere is art?â
Given that many of the works and ideas discussed in this book inhabit very different forms, places, and modes of transmission while drawing upon diverse disciplinary backgrounds, knowledge systems, and ontologies, we see our editorial approach as extending upon the central theoretical tenets of the book by deliberately presenting a dynamic selection of different ways of writing about locational specificity and art. Accordingly, we seek to emphasize the contested and protean nature of artistic knowledges, communities, stories, and representations through a range of original perspectives on expanded and intermedial material thinking, exclusion, censorship, race, gender, place, and the political nature of exhibition environments.
Much of the art explored in this book is characterized by a radical indeterminacy that is both difficult to capture and potentially significant as a site of cultural production. While it might be political, the kind of activism that art offers is not conventionalânor should it be, lest it become what Theodor Adorno declared both bad art and bad politics.1 Importantly, art is a speculative and discursive realm with a distinctive capacity to engage social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical problems while resisting conclusiveness. It can also offer an antidote to divisive certainty by presenting something of how others see and experience the world. With this in mind, we are deeply thankful to all the extraordinary contributors that collectively made this book possible by presenting a range of very different responses to this âwhere is art?â conundrum.
The original genesis for this book developed in parallel with the global blind-peer-reviewed exhibition program Project Anywhere (2012â), an expanded exhibition model specifically designed to promote art outside traditional exhibition circuits (discussed in detail in the appendix). This unique global exhibition program has availed a range of valuable insights into how contemporary artists are thinking about the challenges of presenting, evaluating, and disseminating art at the outermost limits of location specificity. Although many of the ideas that underpin the radical spatial and material expansion of contemporary art have deep historical roots, it is also clear that unprecedented social and political circumstances invariably create new opportunities and challenges.
Much has unfolded globally while this book was developed. During 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 forced many of us to dramatically adjust our daily lives, priorities, and relationships with the world. As the pandemic limited physical access to museums, galleries, festivals, fairs, and auctions across the world, the artworld was only further incentivized to reimagine established approaches to creating, exhibiting, curating, writing, and thinking about art. Without dwelling on this point, it is probably fair to say that this experience of restricted access to physical exhibition environments, together with the forced mediation and dispersal of social relations, only accelerated an already well-established rethinking of the locational specificities of contemporary art. Meanwhile, this period has also been one in which radically divergent world views and progressively unstable political and social realities are forcing the artworld to face a series of long overdue questions related to representation, accountability, and sustainability. Consequently, we believe that the central thesis of this book is now only timelier.
The âwork of artâs worldâ is, in the words of Pamela M. Lee, âutterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates: a world MoÌbius-like in its indivisibility and circularity, a seemingly endless horizon.â2 Notwithstanding the complexity of this situation, there are nevertheless some givens. As Jeffrey Strayer puts it, at a minimum, something must be intentionally delineated from everything else, reconfigured or recontextualized, and then presented somewhere conspicuously apparent to a subjectâs consciousness.3 Importantly, as this book will variously reveal, this process of transmission could (at least hypothetically) involve anything and occur anywhere. And, in some cases, a more comprehensive or nuanced understanding of this process of transmission might require a dynamic constellation of direct and mediated sensory experiences presented together with a complex matrix of information and materials extending across time and space. Consequently, it is apparent that all we might require to interpret a work of art is not necessarily available simply by looking. With this in mind, we hope that this edited volume offers a complementary companion to deepening our understanding of materially expanded and spatially distributed conceptions of contemporary art.
Notes
- See, for example, Theodor Adorno, âCommitment: The Politics of Autonomous Art,â New Left Review (1962) in Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi, ed. Lee Morrissey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 8.
- This minimal requirement is analyzed at length by Jeffrey Strayer (also a contributor to this volume) in Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
2 Where Is Art?
Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-2
From a premodern European vantage point, questions concerning the ontology or location of art were empty and unnecessary. Art was largely configured for prescriptive orders of power. These ordersâthe religion and the state reciprocallyâprovided meaning, value, and access to art. They also helped to shape and define the content of works of art. Although there were always spaces of equivocation and contestation, the extent to which even these were determined is clearer in retrospect. In time, Western art would begin to transform in tandem with a series of radical recalibrations of the nature of relationships between the individual and society. From an Enlightenment perspective, such contours are constraints. From a contemporary perspective, the situation is however considerably more complex.
Today, an experience of a work of art is not necessarily tied to a single object, location, time, or event. Indeed, some works of art can be accessed in multiple waysâin person, online, across multiple versions, or as a complex aggregate of very different materializations and modes of delivery. Even the word accessed is contentious, a noun-to-verb term that in the digital age has usurped the more amenable and still anthropomorphic experienced. Although the material and spatial expansion of art is far from a novel idea, the nature and implications of this expansion for twenty-first-century artists are exigent if only for the velocity and extent to which they have been exerted. Setting aside the clichĂ©d use of the word unprecedented across our present moment as a descriptor for everything from pandemics to populism to left- and right-wing radicalism, it is well to remember that the significance of exceptional circumstances is found in ways in which they reveal and extend upon pre-existing structures and conditions. What then are the new, renewed, and emerging conceptions of artistic production, reception, and circulation? How are they to be understood and experienced in relation to multiple and intersecting temporalities, distributed materializations, digital reproducibility, and the dissolution of physical space?
At a time in which radically divergent world views are feeding progressively unstable political and social realities, contemporary art is also undergoing a number of long overdue re-evaluations. For its detractors, the contemporary artworld is underscored by an unsustainable addiction to speculative capital, ever-tightening hype cycles (aka fashion), precarious labor, and an insatiable appetite for freshly minted emerging talent with requisite institutional or culturally sanctioned credentials. For others, contemporary art remains an exciting and dynamic realm within which to creatively speculate upon the conditions of our present moment, to imagine new futures, or to rethink the past. Against a highly contested political backdrop, the gravity of the precarity and unsustainability of the contemporary artworld has been laid bare for many artists by the effects of a global pandemic, a sense of climate emergency, and a series of backlashes and reckonings centered on race, gender, and power. Although such frenetic and confusing conditions render many powerless and dazed, there are still artists who feel it is possible to imagine the world anew. It is in this spirit that we seek to repurpose the twentieth-century problem âwhat is art?â to consider where and when art is understood, situated in the twenty-first century.
So, how did we get here?
From the late twentieth century onwardâif we momentarily set aside a series of historical precedents beyond the scope of this bookâmany artists began to trade medium-specific categorizations and the production of discrete distributable objects for a reactionary emphasis upon the significance of site, event, performance, porosity, and relationality. A work of art was now less likely to be regarded as materially fixed in space and time or in an idealized sequestration from the outside world. Since at least the early twenty-first century, works of art have become increasingly accepted as open to continual transformation and recoding across multiple versions, locations, times, and even hypothetically infinite materializations. The condition of the proliferation of the work of art is no longer just an act of destabilization to escape its commodity status; it is a natural consequence of the iterative nature of digital technologies. Unsurprisingly, these marked shifts have also introduced a series of challenges for the interpretation, critique, and evaluation of art. These challenges require new waysâbe they expanded, qualitative, paradigmatically shifted, or a combination of theseâto rethink aesthetics, historical malleability, and the distributive relationships that collectively sustain but do not delimit or define contemporary art.
Beginning with Dada and developing in earnest since the Protest Era of the 1960s and â70s, artists and curators have been skeptical of the presumed objectivity and neutrality of the gallery spaceâmetonymically (and with mild sarcasm) referred to as the âwhite cube.â This assumption is traceable to the late nineteenth-century, to the rise of the one-person exhibition with artists such as Claude Monet, and to innovations in exhibition installation advanced by James McNeill Whistler, who is credited with the spaced, single-line hang (in his day sniffed at as aestheticist preciosity). The gallery environment began to be read as a site of unity and contemplation, as opposed to the stacked visual rowdiness of the salon and the Royal Academy. It is no surprise that this pristine gallery schema coalesced with the open commodity market, the sanctity of the modernist art object, and the entrenchment of the artist as celebrity that evolved out of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Other contributing factors included the catalogue raisonnĂ© and collecting culture of art books, together with the rise of magazines, journals, broadsheets, and feuilletons. Thus, white walls also implicitly echoed the white space surrounding the reproduction of works on a printed page. Such developments were seconded by parallel developments in twentieth-century modernist architecture and design that would transform museums and galleries. Modernist architecture, considered in its most Miesian or Corbusian modality, was deliberate and pan-temporal. Correspondingly, the modernist art object transcended time and language to portend an altogether elevated experience analogous to religion but for a secular society.
In 1976, Brian OâDoherty wrote a series of essays for Artforum, later turned into a book called Inside the White Cube (1986), in which he argued that this obsession with the white cube tended to sanctify the art object to a point of imperviousness and impermeability.1 For critics such as OâDoherty, the white cube had become a veiled ideology that foreclosed discourse (but very much benefited the commodity market). Doherty was writing at a time when any number of artists were subjecting the inviolability of these standards to dramatic scrutiny. In 1973, to cite just one of many historical examples, Michael Asherânow named within a rather loose grouping of conceptualist tendencies known as âinstitutional critiqueâ (more later)âcompletely sanded the walls and ceiling of the Franco Toselli gallery in Milan to expose the assumed neutrality of the white paint.
A generation earlier, a group of self-declared Marxist agitators that called themselves the Situationist International, who were in turn influenced by early twentieth-century avant-garde art movements such Dada and surrealism, were already intent on dismantling the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The salient legacy of this period was to stress that the museum is a provisional, historical, cultural, and ideologically inscribed idea and institution. However, its perdurance to this day is more than one of expediency. It speaks to the tenacity of institutional models complicit within capitalism, and the skill with which radical c...