THE TOPOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ART - PT. 3
The topology of today's communication, image generation, translation and distribution networks is extremely heterogeneous. At all times images are being transformed, re-written, re-published, re-programmed in their passage to these networks. They become visually different at each of these steps. Their status as copies therefore becomes only a cultural convention, as was previously the status of the original. Benjamin suggested, as we have seen, that the new technology was able to make a copy more and more identical to the original. But the opposite has been the case. Contemporary technology thinks and works for generations. Transmitting information from one generation of hardware and software to the next involves transforming it in a significant way. The metaphorical use of the notion of "generation", as it is now used in the context of technology, is very revealing. We all know how difficult it is to transmit a certain cultural heritage from one generation of students to another. The situation of "mechanical reproductivity" in the context of, say, the contemporary Internet, seems to be no less difficult, perhaps even more so.
We are as incapable of stabilizing a copy as we are of stabilizing an original. There are no eternal copies, just as there are no eternal originals. The reproduction is as infected by the originality as the originality is infected by the reproduction. By circulating through different contexts a copy is transformed into a series of different originals. Every change of context, every change of medium, can be interpreted as a denial of the status of a copy as a copy, as an essential break, as a new beginning that opens a new future. In that sense a copy is never a copy, but rather a new original in a new context. Each copy is in itself a flaneur, it experiences time and again its own "profane illuminations", which make it an original. It loses old auras and gains new ones. Perhaps the same copy endures, but it becomes a different original. This shows that the Postmodern project of reflecting on the repetitive, iterative, reproductive character of an image is paradoxical as was the Modern project of recognizing the original and the new. This is also the reason why postmodern art manages to seem very new even if -in effect, in reality- it is directed against the notion of the new. Our decision to recognize a given image as an original or as a copy depends on the context, on the scenario where that decision is made. And that decision is always a contemporary decision, one that belongs neither to the past nor the future, but to the present.
That is why I maintain that installation is the flagship form of contemporary art. The installation proves to be a certain selection, a certain concatenation of options, a certain logic of inclusions and exclusions. By doing this, an installation manifests here and now a certain decision about what is old and what is new, what is an original and what is a copy. Each important exhibition or installation is made with the intention of designating a new order of memories, proposing new criteria to tell a story and differentiating between the past and the future. Modern art was working on the level of individual forms. Contemporary art is working on the level of context, of frame, of background, of new theoretical interpretation. That is why contemporary art is less a production of individual works of art than a manifestation of an individual decision to include or exclude things and images that circulate anonymously in our world, to give them a new context or to deny them: a private selection that is at the same time publicly accessible and hence made manifest, explicit, present. Even if an installation consists of an individual painting, it is still an installation, since the crucial aspect of painting as a work of art is not the fact that it has been produced by an artist, but that it has been selected by an artist and presented as something chosen.
The installation space can, of course, incorporate all kinds of things and images that circulate in our civilization: paintings, drawings, photographs, texts, videos, films, recordings, all kinds of objects, etc. That's why the installation is often denied the status of a particular art form, because the question about the specific medium immediately arises. Traditional artistic media are all defined by a specific material for the medium: canvas, stone, or film. The material that constitutes the medium in an installation is, however, the space itself. This artistic space of the installation can be the museum or the art gallery, but also a private studio, a house, or a place in a building. But all of them can be transformed into the site of an installation by documenting the selection process, be it private or institutional. This does not mean, however, that the installation is "immaterial". On the contrary, the installation is material par excellence, since it is spatial. Being in space is the best definition of being material. The installation reveals precisely the materiality of the civilization in which we live, because it installs everything that our civilization simply circulates. That is why the installation shows the material support of the civilization that otherwise would go unnoticed behind the surface of the circulation of media images. At the same time an installation is not an expression of an already existing relationship between things; on the contrary, an installation offers an opportunity to use things and images of our civilization in a very subjective and individual way. In a way the installation is for our time what the novel was for the nineteenth century. The novel was a literary form that included all other literary forms of that time; the installation is an art form that includes all other art forms.
End of Part 3
Giuseppe Alletto