World Art
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Currents of world-making in contemporary art
Terry Smith
To cite this article: Terry Smith (2011) Currents of world-making in contemporary art, World Art,
1:2, 171-188, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2011.602712
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World Art
Vol. 1, No. 2, September 2011, 171188
Studies: research article
Currents of world-making in contemporary art
Terry Smith*
Contemporary art issues from a new sense of what constitutes ‘the
world,’ and from a radically expanded sense of what constitutes
‘art.’ It is distinct in these ways from art produced in any earlier
period, including modernity. A limited number of specific worlds
are contemporaneous with each other in contemporary life, and in
contemporary art. This article offers some methodological ideas as
to how we might understand the relationships between these
worlds from an art historical perspective: as a worldwide but
regionally varied shift from modern to contemporary art that has
configured, at present, into three contemporaneous currents.
Keywords: contemporary art; contemporaneity; world-making
Can we say that contemporary art is perhaps for the first time in
history truly an art of the world?
Putting this proposition in these terms is to pose a question about
the prepositional relationships that might hold between art and the
world. Doing so in a rhetorical mode is to imply an answer as to what
might be distinctive about those relationships when it comes to
contemporary art. I will suggest that contemporary art amounts to
something at once much more (significant) and less (encompassing)
than the art that the world just happens to be producing today. I will
argue that it is more than the latest chapter in the centuries-long
History of Art, however defined although it is also, partly, still that.
Above all, I propose that it is an art that issues from a very
contemporary sense of what constitutes ‘the world,’ and from a
radically expanded sense of what constitutes ‘art.’
‘How does one bring [about] the entire representation of the world
inside one’s head?’ With this question, itself a response to a question
asked of him in 1989, South African artist William Kentridge expressed
his anguished recognition of the existential challenge that his art, and
his world, demanded of him (Christov-Barkargiev 1998, 136). He had in
mind the multiplicity of forces that bore down to shape his experience
*Email: tes2@pitt.edu
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# 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2011.602712
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T. Smith
and that of those around him. How might an artist make these forces
visible? How else but as effects on that which is observable? We
might characterize Kentridge’s individual approach as one of incessant
collage: the world’s forcefield is registered as it happens to him, as it
impacts on those around him, and as he imagines its effects upon
those distant from him. It constantly changes shape, even in its equally
constant repetitions. His art, in its modes as much as in its details,
suggests that because the world in all its complexity is too much for
human vision to encompass, the actions of any one of its particular
inhabitants, or even more any group of them, is manifestly incomprehensible, often to the point of absurdity. Yet this is our world, and we
are entirely within it.
A favorite Kentridge image is that of a globe staggering, unsteadily,
on tripod-legs, across a blasted, desultory landscape. Sometimes the
place is recognizable: the hinterlands of Johannesburg, the environs of
Elephant River to the artist a featureless interzone between the city
and the tribal lands beyond, as well as the domain of Soho Eckstein’s
bewildered wandering, and the terrain of the people’s uprising.1 At
other times, his use of this image evokes the improvised settings of the
silent film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) by Georges Méliès, which
famously concludes with the out-of-control rocket lodged in the eye of
the moon. In Kentridge’s hands the unsteady walker suggests the overambition of those who strive to imagine the world, but succeed only in
creating more and more absurd scenarios of their falling short. In one
version, Drawing for Il Sole 24 Ore (World Walking), (2007; Figure 1), the
Italian business daily referenced in the title the sun, 24 hours is
shown as a symbol of globalization itself, pierced by struts like a
wounded matador, signs of its connectedness trailing like unearthed
electrical wiring. Blinded by self-absorption, its absurd bow tie signifies
that this worldview is all dressed up but has nowhere to go. Instead, it
wobbles through the widespread devastation that its policies have
created.
Despite its modern lineage, this is a distinctly contemporary image.
Its distinctiveness, I suggest, has everything to do with its worldliness.
Close readers will have noted that there are at least three distinct ideas
of what counts as a world in play in the description I have just given as there are, I suggest, in Kentridge’s art. Close attention to the
particularities of place: ‘my world,’ ‘our world,’ in the close-to-hand,
material sense place as an immediate, intimate setting. In contrast,
there is also present an urge to imagine the world in a larger sense,
‘the wider world’: the shapes of distant power, which seem to follow
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Figure 1. William Kentridge. Drawing for II Sole 24 Ore (World Walking).
2007. Charcoal, gouache, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 213.5150cm.
Collection of Doris and Donald Fisher. # 2010 William Kentridge. Photo credit:
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
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T. Smith
general laws, supraspecific logic, or just exercise their wills randomly.
These forces often impact on me and mine in my place: the two worlds
can collide, or more gently interpenetrate. This suggests a third sense
of what the world is like: necessarily connected, in a multiplicity of
ways, and with varying intensities thus the term ‘the world.’ This last
is the least theorized relationship within modern philosophy and
political theory, although it has become the sense of ‘world’ that is
most important in contemporary conditions. It is also the sense that is
proving most difficult for artists to imagine, although the best of them,
such as Kentridge, are instinctively drawn to the task. (Thus, we might
note, the prepositional nature of his art, filled with figures moving
through time and across space that is, between worlds.)
As European and US-centric perspectives decline in dominance, and
awareness of the agency of others penetrates even the cultural
citadels of what used to known as the First World, it becomes more
and more difficult to maintain the presumption that art is in essence
universal, its objects timeless and the experiences that it offers
transcendental in other words, that it is fundamentally unworldly.
There will continue to be situations in which these terms make useful
sense, but, in contemporary circumstances, such sense will be very
specific to the actually existing relativities of time, place and power. To
the greatly reduced extent that it remains unworldly, today’s art is, as I
will show, deeply embedded in new, contemporary kinds of worldliness a condition in which the contemporaneity of many different
kinds of world has become the definitive experience of our times.
As biennales have for decades attested, art now comes from the
whole world, from a growing accumulation of art-producing localities
that no longer depend on the approval of a metropolitan center and
are, to an unprecedented degree, connected to each other in a
multiplicity of ways, not least regionally and globally. Geopolitical
change has shifted the world picture from presumptions about the
inevitability of modernization and the universality of EuroAmerican
values to recognition of the coexistence of difference, of disjunctive
diversity, as characteristic of our contemporary condition. Contemporary life draws increasing numbers of artists to imagine the world understood here as comprising a number of contemporaneous
‘natures’: the natural world, built environments (‘second nature’),
virtual space (‘third nature’), and lived interiority (‘human nature’) as
a highly differentiated yet inevitably connected whole. In this sense,
from what we might call a planetary perspective, contemporary art
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may be becoming an art for the world for the world as it is now, and
as it might be.
So the first thing to be said about contemporary art is that it is
essentially, definitively and distinctively worldly. The next is that, from
our position at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first
century, art seems markedly different from what it was during the
modern, or any other, era: it is above all, and before it is anything
else contemporary. Beneath this awkward tautology lies a profound
historical shift, of which the new worldliness of contemporary art is
an important indicator. Once modern, or striving to become so (in
however differentiated a way), art everywhere now is made within
situations where distinctive temporalities coexist in their contingent
otherness, move in different directions, and mix in unpredictable ways.
Modernism, while still resonant in some contemporary practice, is
an historical style. Postmodernism seems to have even less purchase
on the present. Unlike the commitments to progress, to universal
human development and utopian possibility that inspired modernity in
all of its aspects, in contemporary conditions no singular direction,
however dialectically driven or internally various, encompasses the
present or looks set to shape the future. Globalization, decolonization
and fundamentalism are incommensurable, mutually exclusive ‘universalisms,’ destined to fall short of domination, severally and
together. In this changed context, modernity’s preoccupation with
distinguishing itself from ‘the past’ as a generality, and with periodizing
ever-narrowing clusters of activity (including, eventually, itself), has
come to seem self-circumscribing, historicist, itself a practice from the
past. Modern modes of inquiry are becoming oddly out of place when
it comes to understanding the present.
Alertness to the now has become so pervasive in art and in the
general culture that thinking about the future, or possible futures,
has receded as a concern. This is, of course, a paradox: a companion to
the growing fascination with specific moments in the past, as if their
contemporaneity could be lived afresh, or, at least, visited for a time.
To say that art, and life, has become more contemporary than ever
before is not necessarily although it may be, and often is a
concession to the superficiality of up-to-datedness, the banal sense of
being contemporary, of perfectly, instinctively, matching one’s time.
A broader historical perspective shows that the present has thickened
considerably: no longer a distraction on the way to utopia nor, from
the opposite, conservative political perspective, a fashion-following
intrusion upon the persistence of a perfectly adequate past it has
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T. Smith
become a temporal domain of considerable scope, depth and
complexity.
It is no accident that terms associated with ‘contemporary’ have
come to replace those associated with ‘modern’ as the default
designators of new ideas, institutions and art. It may be the case
that the concept has finally come into its own; to realize, perhaps, the
potential that attended its origins, in the Latin-based languages at
least, as a combination of the words con and tempus, that is, ‘with’ and
‘time.’ Taken as a source of internal definition and differentiation,
‘contemporary’ connotes a multiplicity of ways of being in time, of
feeling in accord with one’s time or at an angle to it, and of
experiencing each of these relationships either separately or at the
same time, both individually and with others.
Of course, these meanings of the word ‘contemporary’ are ancient.
They have long histories throughout human civilization and were at the
core of what it was like to live in modern societies. However, I would
argue that it is definitive of our contemporaneity (‘a contemporaneous
condition or state’) that they occur to us, nowadays, at the same time,
that we have become more intensely aware of this presence of
difference all around us (and in us?), and that this quality of
contemporary experience has come to override all other factors as
the most central thing to be explained when we wish to characterize
what it is to be alive today. Similarly, contemporary art is no longer one
kind of art, nor does it have a limited set of shared qualities somewhat
distinct from those of the art of past periods in the history of art yet,
fundamentally, continuous with them. It does not presume inevitable
historical development; it has no expectation that present confusion
will eventually cohere into a style representative of this historical
moment. If you are waiting for the next master narrative, you are
probably doing so in vain. Contemporary art is multiple, internally
differentiating, category shifting, shape changing, and unpredictable
(that is, diverse) like contemporaneity itself.2
The condition of contemporaneity my understanding of what we
mean when we say ‘the present’ is the world, broadly understood, in
which contemporary art is made, and from within which it is already
journeying through space and time, both of which are being conceived
differently than they were during modernity. In contemporary conditions, therefore, ‘world’ means something rather different from what it
meant during the modern era indeed, as I have begun to suggest, it
means a number of different things. Yet not an infinite number, nor
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even a plurality: rather, a specific cluster of different things. Let us
explore these a little more closely.
From modern to contemporary art
In a number of recent studies I have argued that alertness to
contemporaneity, while always available to art and often taken up (in
the case of Caravaggio, for example) with show-stopping brilliance, has
mostly been an occasional factor within it. This started to change during
the modern era, when contemporaneity became the necessary entry
point for art of the highest aspiration but was never sufficient for its
accomplishment. These developments have been placed in the shade,
however, by a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary that was
prefigured in some late modern art during the 1950s, took definitive
shape in the 1980s and that continues to unfold through the present,
thus shaping art’s immediate future (itself the ongoing sometimes the
self-circling of the thickened present).3 While this is a worldwide indeed, world-historical change it does not follow that it occurred in
the same way, much less at the same time, in each cultural region and in
each art-producing locality across the globe. Nor that it spread from a
major center, disseminating itself in the manner of the great style
changes in art during modern times, and provoking the provincialist
circuitry that characterized the metropolitan/peripheral exchanges of
that era. Given recent geopolitical history, which is characterized above
all by incessant conflict between peoples with different world-pictures
and distinct senses of their place in the world, it would be naı̈ve in the
extreme to expect anything approaching uniform change.
To grasp this change in its specifics, therefore, requires us to
understand the intricate connections between the local and the global
in a planetary sense that is, to think regionally in the context of a
vision of the actual, historical development of the planet and of all who
live upon it. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly demonstrated, this is
something that we are still learning to do (Chakrabarty 2009). It seems
to me that three assumptions are necessary if we are to see more
clearly the kinds of art that are being produced within the emerging
world (dis)order.
Although worldwide, and thus entailing all visual art, the shift from
modern to contemporary art occurred and continues to occur in
different ways and to varying degrees in each of the art producing
centers of the world, shaped of course by local inheritances and by the
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T. Smith
position of each center relative to relevant others. This assumption is
about the specificity but also connectedness of locality.
As a consequence of the geopolitical division of the world into
power blocs during the mid-twentieth century itself a manifestation
of major historical forces such as late capitalism, decolonization and
globalization these differences and variations in intensity were also
shaped into regional currents. These continue to be relevant, although
of course they change constantly. This assumption is about the
specificity but also connectedness of regionality.4
It follows that the historical shift from modern to contemporary art
cannot be seen as occurring in the same way all over the world, nor at
the same time, or even at similar rates. Indeed, these variations
generate the typical condition in which changes of a different kind,
occasion and rate are contemporaneous with each other. In turn,
this condition enables awareness of such differences, an awareness
heightened by the recent acceleration of communications. So, this
assumption is about comparativity, the contemporaneousness of
difference. It updates previous thinking about provincialism vis-à-vis
metropolitanism, about centers vis-à-vis peripheries, in cultural theory.5
It also suggests that contemporary art’s present diversity might owe as
much to the emergence during the twentieth century of distinctive
local, vernacular and alternative modernities in art-producing locales
across the globe as it so evidently does to the radical experimentality
that broke apart late modern art in the EuroAmerican art centers
during the 1950s and 1960s. Here is a story waiting to be fully told.
These assumptions underlay my major proposition about world
connectivity in contemporary art today: in contemporary art, the local is
connected to regional and global forces through the contemporaneity of
three distinct but contingent currents. These currents are different from
each other in kind, in scale, and in scope. The first prevails in what were
the great metropolitan centers of modernity in Europe and the United
States (as well as in societies and subcultures closely related to them)
and is a continuation of styles in the history of art, particularly
Modernist ones. The second has arisen from movements toward
political and economic independence that occurred in former colonies
and on the edges of Europe, and is thus shaped above all by clashing
ideologies and experiences. The result is that artists prioritize both
local and global issues as the urgent content of their work. Meanwhile,
artists working within the third current explore concerns that they feel
personally yet share with others, particularly of their generation,
throughout the world. Taken together, I suggest, these currents
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constitute the contemporary art of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. My proposal, then, is a historical hypothesis, an
outline of how, in general terms, art throughout the world has
changed since the later decades of the twentieth century, that is,
about how modern art become contemporary. Let me offer a
summary description drawn from the more detailed accounts offered
in a number of recent publications.6 I will emphasize those aspects of
my proposal that bear on artistic world-making, and on making art in
terms of worlds-within-the-world. In deploying concepts of ‘world’ in
this way, I evoke of course famous theorizations of the concept, such
as those of Martin Heidegger and Nelson Goodman, but also point to
other, more immediate usages, such as the book Place by artist Tacita
Dean and critic Jeremy Millar, and to the much-used international art
website: universes-in-universe.7
Currents within contemporary art
The first current official, institutionalized Contemporary Art might
be seen as an aesthetic of globalization, serving it through both a
relentless remodernizing, and a sporadic contemporizing, of art. It has
two or three discernable tendencies, each of which are perhaps styles
in the traditional sense of being a marked change in the continuing
practice of art in some significant place that emerges, takes a shape
that attracts others to work within its terms and to elaborate them,
prevails for a time, and comes to an end. One internal tendency is the
embrace of the rewards and downsides of neoliberal economics,
globalizing capital, and neoconservative politics, pursued during the
1980s and since through repeats of previous avant-garde strategies,
drawing from both the early twentieth century ‘historical’ avant-gardes
(yet lacking their political utopianism) and from the mid-century neoavantgardes (yet lacking their theoretic radicalism). Damien Hirst and
the YBAs are the most obvious examples, but the trajectory has also
been pursued by artists such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons in the US,
and by Takashi Murakami and his followers in Japan, among many
others. There is considerable depth, and world knowledge, in some of
this work (that of Hirst as it relates to industries of death; and
Murakami as it relates to histories of post-War Japan, for example), but
much of it rests content with a kind of in-your-face blatancy. With
reference to its overtly retrograde strategies and to the 1997 exhibition
at which this tendency, in its British form, surfaced to predictable
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T. Smith
consternation on the part of conservatives but soon acquired mainstream acceptance, we might call it ‘Retro-Sensationalism.’
This tendency has burgeoned alongside another: the constant
efforts of the institutions of Modern Art (now usually designated
Contemporary Art) to reign in the impacts of contemporaneity on art,
to revive earlier initiatives, to cleave new art to the old modernist
impulses and imperatives, to renovate them. This tendency might be
called ‘Remodernism.’ Distinct variants of it appear in the projects of
Richard Serra, Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter, to cite some outstanding
examples. If Serra invites us to enter the precincts of his sculptures as
if we were engaging with elemental materials unfolding in space
according to an intuitive ‘logic’ unique to each configuration, then
this is a deeply modernist impulse, carried out against the ghost of its
disruption during the 1960s (not least by Serra himself) and its
apparent historical exhaustion. Wall’s tableaux to be photographed
are ‘small worlds’. Intense concentrations of observable reality
inflected with noticeable strangeness, an element of which is their
service as vignettes in an implied narrative of modernist picture-making
being carried out again, as if from its mid-nineteenth century
beginnings, but in a fresh fashion and in present-day settings. Richter
evokes a complex memory world, a house of memory, that consists of
the fraught, self-denying imagery of post-War Germany and of the
visual memory of every avant-garde art movement since the 1960s, and
then subjecting both to each other’s radical doubt. Remodernism, as
I understand it, is not simply about tired repetition, or reluctant
nostalgia, or even melancholy negation. If it were so, it would be in
decline. Instead, it is alive because it is about contemporary practices
such as these.
In the work of artists such as Matthew Barney and Cai Guo-Qiang,
both aspects come together in a conspicuous consummation, generating an aesthetic of excess that might be tagged (acknowledging its
embodiment of what Guy Debord theorized as ‘the society of the
spectacle’) the Art of the Spectacle.8 In contemporary architecture,
similar impulses shape the buildings designed for the culture industry
by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and Daniel Libeskind, among
others, above all their museums, such as Gehry’s Guggenheim
Museum, Bilbao; Calatrava’s entrance pavilion for the Milwaukee Art
Museum; and Libeskind’s extension to the Royal Ontario Museum,
Toronto. In these projects an international architectural language is at
work, a system of cultural self-replication that can erect edifices
anywhere, and have them count as nodes within a global network of
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destination points. Sensationalism takes many forms, and tends to
create its own cultural capsules. As a visit to any one of the burgeoning
private collector museums for example, Inhotim, in the jungles of
Minas-Gerais, Brazil soon reveals, it can inflate the work of artists
who I would normally see as being committed to other values and thus
representative of other currents. Which goes to show that these are,
after all, currents in the same stream.
The second current which I call ‘the transnational turn’ emerges
from the processes of decolonization within what were the Third,
Fourth, and Second Worlds, including its impacts in what was the First
World. It has not coalesced into an overall art movement, or even two
or three broad ones. Rather, the transnational turn has generated a
plethora of works of art shaped by local, national, anti-colonial,
independent values (identity, critique, diversity). It has enormous
international currency through travelers, expatriates, new markets but
especially biennales. Local and internationalist values are in constant
dialog in this current sometimes they are enabling, at others
disabling, but they are ubiquitous. Cosmopolitanism is the goal,
translation the medium. With this situation as their raw material,
artists everywhere have, for decades, been producing work that
matches the strongest art of the first current. Examples include the
collective paintings produced by Aboriginal peoples in Australia to
demonstrate their millennia-long relationship to their land; Georges
Adeagbo’s accumulations of detritus that amount to traces of history
in his part of Africa; the very different evocations of the anxieties of
being white during apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa by
William Kentridge, Susan Williamson and Kendall Geers; the subversion
of official Soviet imagery by the Russian Sots Artists, or that of Mladen
Stilinović in Croatia; the outrageous reverse historicism (Retroavantgardism) of Laibach, Group IRWIN and the NSK in the imploding
Yugoslavia and since; the conceptualist strategies of South American
artists during the dictatorship periods; the self-conscious politics of
parody (of tradition, national expectations and external stereotyping)
in the work of many contemporary Chinese artists; the ascendency of
women among contemporary artists in what was the Middle East.
To artists participant in the early phases of decolonization for
example, those being asked for an art that would help forge an
independent culture during the nation-building days of the 1960s in
Africa a first move was to revive local traditional imagery and seek to
make it contemporary by representing it through formats and styles
that were current in Western modern art. Elsewhere, in less severe
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conditions, for artists seeking to break the binds of cultural provincialism or of centralist ideologies, becoming contemporary meant
making art as experimental as that emanating from the metropolitan
centers (thus the proposition about comparativity). Geopolitical
changes in the years around 1989 in Europe particularly, but also
in China, and then in South America, opened out a degree of access
between societies that had been closed for one and sometimes two
generations. The work of unknown contemporaries became visible,
and the vanquished art of earlier local avant-gardes suddenly became
pertinent to current practice. Frenzied knowledge exchange ensued,
and hybrids of all kinds appeared. The desire soon arose to create and
disseminate a contemporary art that, toughened by the experiences of
postcoloniality, and by the break-up of the empires, would be valid
throughout the entire world.
During the 1990s, those precipitating, interpreting and undergoing
these changes frequently evoked the term ‘postmodern.’ Yet there are
some important distinctions to be made between their usage of the
term, especially if we apply the principles of locality, regionality
and comparativity proposed earlier. In Euroamerica, during the 1970s
and 1980s, postmodern critique was directed primarily at the
presumed universality of the Enlightenment project and was arguably,
at least in part, a direct result of the early impacts of postcolonial
critique upon intellectuals in the West. In the arts, however, this was
scarcely evident at first. In architecture, postmodernism quickly
became a matter of hollow pastiche of historical styles. In painting,
it soon became a byword for appropriation, quotation, simulation of
spectacle culture, and, eventually, absorption into it. Certain photographic and installation artists developed a resistant strain: among
them Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman.9 Elsewhere in Central Europe, Cuba, and China in particular postmodernism
offered an aesthetic umbrella for imagining a post-socialist culture
(Aleš Erjavec 2003). In each of these cases a national culture was
undergoing transition from one state to another, usually into a
situation where different models of possible modernities were in
open competition, and soon became suspended in antinomic contemporaneity with each other. These examples only begin to sketch
the outpouring of alternatives that occurred in different parts of the
world during the 1980s and 1990s. ‘Postmodernism’ is too thin a term
for this great change, one that is still in its early stages. Indeed,
postmodernism, wherever it occurred, now seems nothing less, but no
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more, than a pointer to the first phase of contemporaneity in that
place. Now, this seems true on a general, worldwide level as well.
Attempts to save modernism as the basis of significant art today
have appeared within this current as well, sometimes in places where
they might seem least necessary. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud has
suggested the term ‘altermodernism’ as ‘a leap that would give rise
to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism’ (Bourriaud
2009: 1213). A broader view shows us that the transnational turn
during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century a shift
into transitionality, especially with regard to concepts of the nation has led to the art of the second current becoming predominant on
international art circuits, in the proliferating biennales, with profound
yet protracted effects at the modern metropolitan centers. It is a
paradigm shift in slow motion that matches the changing world
geopolitical and economic order as it increases in complexity: the
entire constellation is post-colonial.10
There is a third current in contemporary art, and it is different in
kind yet again. It is the outcome, largely, of a generational change and
the sheer quantity of people attracted to active participation in the
image economy. As art, it usually takes the form of quite personal,
small scale and modest offerings, in marked contrast to the generality
of statement and monumentality of scale that has increasingly come to
characterize remodernizing, retro-sensationalist and spectacular art,
and the conflicted witnessing that continues to be the goal of most art
consequent on the transnational turn. Younger artists certainly draw
on elements of the first two tendencies, but with less and less regard
for their fading power structures and styles of struggle and with more
concern for the interactive potentialities of various material media,
virtual communicative networks and open-ended modes of tangible
connectivity. Working collectively, in small groups, in loose associations
or individually, these artists seek to arrest the immediate, to grasp the
changing nature of time, place, media and mood today. They make
visible our sense that these fundamental, familiar constituents of being
are becoming, each day, steadily stranger. They raise questions as to
the nature of temporality these days, the possibilities of place-making
vis-à-vis dislocation, about what it is to be immersed in mediated
interactivity and about the fraught exchanges between affect and
effect. Within the world’s turnings, and life’s frictions, they seek
sustainable flows of survival, cooperation and growth.
Postcolonial critique, along with a rejection of spectacle capitalism,
also informs the work of a number of artists based in the metropolitan
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cultural centers. Mark Lombardi, Allan Sekula, Thomas Hirschhorn, Zoe
Leonard, Steve McQueen, Aernout Mik, Alfredo Jaar and Emily Jacir,
among many others, developed practices that critically trace and
strikingly display the global movements of the new world disorder
between the advanced economies and those connected in multiple
ways with them. Other artists base their practice around exploring
sustainable relationships with specific environments, both social and
natural, within the framework of ecological values. These range from
the ecological non-interventions of Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin
through to the environmental activism of the Critical Art Ensemble. Still
others work with electronic communicative media, examining its
conceptual, social and material structures: in the context of struggles
between free, constrained and commercial access to this media, and
its massive colonization by the entertainment industry, artists’
responses have developed from expanded cinema and Net.art towards
immersive environments and explorations of avatar-viuser (visual
information user) interactivity. Charlotte Davies’s Osmose (1995) is a
classic example of this desire: it offers immersants a virtual tour
through ‘a boundless oceanic abyss, shimmering swathes of opaque
clouds, passing softly glowing dewdrops and translucent swarms of
computer-generated insects, into the dense undergrowth of a dark
forest,’ to a virtual tree made of visible code (Grau 2003, 193).11 Many
other new media artists, including Louis Bec, Thomas McIntosh, Christa
Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, have pursued this fascination. All
of these approaches, whatever the format, medium and situation, are
efforts to see clearly what constitutes a world within societies
saturated with surveillance and secrecy, to re-imagine known worlds
differently, or to imagine possible worlds.
The same range of concerns inspire the dystopian scenarios favored
by Blast Theory and the International Necronautical Society, the graffiti
bombing of Banksy and the Argentine group Blu, the countersurveillance activity of Trevor Paglen and the Center for Land Use
Interpretation, Daniel Joseph Martinez’s fervent protests, Paul Chan’s
symbolic shadow profiles, Jeremy Deller’s re-enactments aimed at
countering social amnesia, the mass media smarts of Candice Breitz,
the transformative immersive environments of iCinema, the interactive
public art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, to the insouciant receptivity of
Francis Alÿs. An important strand is that much of this activity is at once
subjective and collective: thus the shared knitting of the Institute for
Figuring, installations by Zulu artists that display the principle of ubuntu
(‘I exist because you do’), and the watchful optimism of young, social
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media immersed artists such as Rivane Neuenschwander, Shaun
Gladwell and Cai Fei. Other work takes the form of long-term
collaborations with specific local communities, as we see in the activity
of groups such as Superflex, Dialogue, Huit Facettes, Ala Plastica,
Wockenklauser, Park Fiction, Global Studio and many others. These are
direct instances of small-scale, close-valued placemaking.12
Contemporaneous worlds
Taking these three currents together, as contemporaneous with each
other, they are manifestations within contemporary art practice of
deep currents within the broader condition of contemporaneity itself.
In the twenty-first century, nation states no longer align themselves
according to the tiered system of First, Second, Third, and Fourth
Worlds. Multinational corporations based in the EuroAmerican centers
continue to control significant parts of the world’s economy, but, as
the global financial crisis demonstrated, can no longer manage the
whole, and remain inclined to uncontrollable self-mutilation. New
corporations with global ambitions located in South, East, and North
Asia may be subject to the same impulses. Manufacturing, distribution,
and services are themselves dispersed around the globe, and linked to
delivery points by new technologies and old-fashioned labor. Some
have argued that, with globalization, capitalism achieved its pure form.
Certainly, the living standard of millions has been lifted, but only at
enormous cost to social cohesion, peaceful cohabitation, and natural
resources. Some national and local governments, as well as many
international agencies, seek to regulate this flow and assuage its worst
side effects so far without conspicuous success. The institutions
that drove modernity seem, to date, incapable of dealing with the
most important unexpected outcome of their efforts: the massive
disruptions to natural ecosystems that now seem to threaten
the survival of the Earth itself. Awareness of this possibility has
increased consciousness of our inescapably shared, mutually dependent existence on this fragile planet.
The most recent generation of contemporary artists has inherited
this daunting complexity. Their responses have been cautious, devoted to displaying concrete aspects of this complexity to those who
would see it, and to helping in modest, collaborative ways to
reshape the human capacity to make worlds on small, local scales. For
all its modesty, and pragmatism, theirs is a hope-filled enterprise. Their
efforts allow us to hope that contemporary art is becoming perhaps
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for the first time in history truly an art of the world. Certainly, as
I have tried to show, it comes from the whole world, from all of
its contemporaneous difference, and it increasingly tries to imagine the
world as a whole, precisely in all of its contemporaneous difference.
Notes
1. Processional figures have been foundational to Kentridge’s art from his
early days as a set designer, notably in Ubu and the Truth Commission
(1998). An earlier version of this image appears in the 2007 series of
intaglio prints, L’Inesorabile Avanzata (The Inexorable Advance), at #1: The
World (Collection of the Middlebury College Museum of Art). A variant,
World on its Hind Legs (2009), was commissioned by an Italian newspaper
seeking to commemorate the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1934: it shows
the image drawn in ink across an issue of The Illustrated London News of
1870. In 2009, Kentridge collaborated with the sculptor Gerhard Marx to
create a metal version for the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, where it
was shown in 2010. In another variant, the figure appears wearing a
gasmask. I discuss the artist’s recent touring exhibition William Kentridge:
Five Themes in Smith (2011b).
2. For further discussion of the concepts ‘contemporary’ and ‘contemporaneity,’ see my ‘Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,’ in Smith,
Condee, and Enwezor (2008). This volume also contains other reflections
on the topic, by Antonio Negri, Boris Groys, Nancy Condee, Wu Hung and
others. Giorgio Agamben has recently offered a poetic reflection on this
topic in his ‘What is an apparatus?’ and other essays (2009), and in 2006
Jean-Luc Nancy speculated about a variety of resonances between art,
contemporaneity and worlds in his lecture ‘Art today’ (Nancy 2010).
3. For example, Smith (2010).
4. On the limitations yet, on balance, positive potential of a regional
approach see Lewis and Wigen (1997, 186).
5. Early examples include my essay ‘The provincialism problem’ (Smith 1974)
and Samir Amin (1977).
6. See Smith (2009b) and my contribution to ‘A questionnaire on ‘‘The
contemporary’’’ (2009a, 4654). The most thorough exposition may be
found in Smith (2011a).
7. Heidegger (1977), Goodman (1978). See also Casey (1998, ixxv, 33142),
Tacita Dean, Joseph L Koerner, Jeremy Millar and Simon Schama, ‘Talk,’ in
Dean and Millar (2005, 18292), and Mitchell (2005). Universes-in-Universe
is accessible at http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/index.html.
8. Debord (1967, Paris; 1995, 2nd ed.).
9. As argued by Hal Foster (1983); and by Craig Owens (1992).
10. See Enwezor.
11. Osmose is accessible at http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/osmose/.
12. Grant Kester has explored these in his recent publications, including
Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art, and
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The one and the many: Agency and identity in contemporary collaborative
art (2011).
Notes on Contributor
Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA in Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art
History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture
at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National
Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South
Wales. He is the 2010 winner of the Mather Award for art criticism conferred
by the College Art Association (USA), and is the 2010 Australia Council Visual
Arts Laureate. He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the
Modern : Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press,
1993; inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize 2009) and Contemporary Art : World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011).
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