The TOPOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ART - PT. 1
Nowadays, the term "contemporary art" does not only designate the art that is produced in our time. Rather, contemporary art today demonstrates how the contemporary exposes itself (the act of presenting the present). In that sense, contemporary art is different from Modern art, which is directed towards the future, and different also from Postmodern art, which is a historical reflection on the Modern project. Contemporary "contemporary art" privileges the present over the future or the past. Therefore, in order to adequately characterize the nature of contemporary art, it seems pertinent to situate it in its relationship to the Modern project and its Postmodernist re-evaluation.
The central idea of Modern art was that of creativity. The genuine Modern artist was supposed to make a radical break with the past, to erase, to destroy the past, to reach that zero point in the artistic tradition and, in doing so, to give a new start to a new future. The mimetic and traditional artwork was subjected to the iconoclastic and destructive work of analysis and reduction. Abolishing traditions, breaking conventions, destroying old art and eradicating obsolete values were the slogans of the moment. The practice of the historical avant-garde was based on the equation "negation is creation", which had already been enunciated by Bakunin, Stirner and Nietzsche. The iconoclastic images of destruction and reduction were destined to serve as icons of the future. The artist was supposed to embody the "active nihilism" of nothingness that gave rise to everything. But how could an individual artist prove that he was, in fact, genuinely creative? Obviously an artist could show this only by demonstrating how far he had come in destroying and reducing the traditional image, how iconoclastic and radical his work was. However, to recognize any image as truly iconoclastic one would have to compare it to traditional images and icons of the past. Otherwise, the work of symbolic reduction would remain unnoticed.
The recognition of the iconoclast, the creative and the new requires, therefore, a permanent comparison with the traditional and the old. The iconoclast and the new can only be recognized by historically shaped art and a trained eye in the museum. That is why, paradoxically, the more one wants to free oneself from artistic tradition, the more one remains subordinated to the logic of the narrative of art history and museum collecting. A creative act, if understood as an iconoclastic gesture, presupposes a permanent reproduction of the context in which the act was performed. This type of reproduction infects the creative act from the beginning. It could even be said that, under the condition of the modern museum, the novelty of the new artistic productions is not established post-factum, as a result of the comparison with the old art. Rather, the comparison takes place before the emergence of a new, radical, iconoclastic work of art. The modern work of art is re-presented, re-recognized before it is produced. Hence, modernist production by negation is governed precisely by the reproduction of the means of comparison, of a certain historical narrative, of certain artistic procedures, of a certain visual language, and of certain fixed contexts of comparison. This paradoxical character of the Modernist project was noted and described by a group of theorists and was reflected by many artists between the 1960s and 1970s. The recognition of these repetitivities within the Modern project led to a redefinition of the project in recent decades and to the post-modern thematization of the problems of repetition, iteration and reproduction.
It is no coincidence that Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction became so influential during these postmodernist decades. This happened because, for Benjamin, mechanical reproductivity -and not the creation of the new- constituted modernity. As is well known, in his essay, Benjamin introduced the concept of "aura" to describe the difference between the original and the copy under the conditions of perfect technical reproductivity. Since then, the concept has had an impressive philosophical trajectory, mostly as a result of the famous "loss of aura" formula, which would come to characterize the fate of the original in modern times. The "loss of aura" was described by Benjamin as the loss of the fixed, constant and reconfirmed context of a work of art. According to Benjamin, in our time the work of art leaves its original context and begins to circulate anonymously in the reproduction and distribution networks of mass communications. In other words, the production of mass culture operates as a reversal of the "high culture" strategy of modernist art: the "cult" (high) modernist art denies the repetition of traditional images, but keeps intact the traditional historical context of art; while the "low culture" (low) art reproduces those images while denying and destroying their original contexts.
In modern times, either a work of art or its context is denied, but never both simultaneously.
End of Part 1
Giuseppe Alletto