THE TOPOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ART - PT. 4
The inclusion of a film shot in an art installation shows its transformative power in a particularly obvious way. A film or video installation exclaims the conditions of presentation of a film. The film viewer is no longer standing still, tied to an armchair and left in the dark, supposed to watch a film from beginning to end. In the video installation, where a video is moving in a circuit, the viewer can move freely around the room, and can leave or return at any time. This movement in the exhibition space cannot be stopped arbitrarily because it has an essential function in the perception of the installation. Here a situation clearly arises in which the expectations of attending a cinema and visiting an exhibition space create a conflict for visitors: should they remain motionless and let the film be projected in front of them in the cinema or should they move? The feeling of insecurity that results from this conflict puts the viewer in a situation of choice. The viewer is confronted by the need to develop an individual strategy for watching the film and the individual film narrative. The time of contemplation must be continually renegotiated between the artist and the viewer. This shows very clearly that a film is radically, essentially, altered by being put under the conditions of an installation (if it is the same copy, the film becomes a different original).
If an installation is a space where the differentiation between original and copy, innovation and repetition, past and future, takes place, how could it be said that an individual installation is, in itself, new or original? An installation cannot be a copy of another installation because an installation is by definition present, contemporary. An installation is a presentation of the present, a decision that takes place here and now. At the same time, however, an installation can not be really new simply because it can not be immediately compared to another, older or earlier one. In order to compare an installation with another one, a new installation would have to be created that would be the place of such a comparison. This means that there is no external position with regard to the practice of the installation. That is why the installation is such an omnipresent and unavoidable art form.
And that's also why the installation is truly political. The growing importance of the installation as an art form is very clearly connected to the repoliticization of art that we have experienced in recent years. The installation is not only political because it allows the possibility of documenting political positions, projects, actions and events, although it is true that such documentation has become a widespread artistic practice in recent years. More importantly, however, is the fact that the installation itself is, as I suggested earlier, a space for decision making: first of all, decisions related to the differentiation between the new and the old, the traditional and the innovative.
In the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkergaard discussed the difference between the old and the new using the figure of Jesus Christ as an example. Kierkergaard observed that for a viewer who was a contemporary of Jesus Christ, it would have been impossible to recognize a new god in Christ, precisely because he did not seem new. Rather, he initially seemed like any other ordinary human being at that historical moment. In other words, an objective viewer of that time, confronted with the figure of Christ, would find no visible or concrete difference between Christ and an ordinary human being, a visible difference that might suggest that Christ was not simply a man, but also a god. So, for Kierkergaard, Christianity was based on the impossibility of recognizing Christ as God, a function of the impossibility of recognizing Christ as visually different: just by looking at Christ it was not possible to decide whether he was a copy or an original, an ordinary human being or a God. Paradoxically, for Kierkegaard this implied that Christ was really new and not merely recognizable as different and therefore Christ was a manifestation of difference beyond difference. It could be said that, according to Kierkergaard, Christ was ready-made among the gods, just as Duchamp's chamber pot was ready-made among the works of art. In both cases, the context decides the novelty. In both cases it is not possible to rely on an established and institutional context, but rather to create something new as an artistic or theological installation that allows a decision to be made and articulated.
The differentiation between the new and the old, the repetitive and the original, the conservative and the progressive, the traditional and the liberal is not, therefore, only a game of differentiations among many others. Rather, it is a crucial differentiation that shapes all other political and religious options of modernity. Modern political vocabulary shows this very clearly. Contemporary art installations aim to present the scenario, context and strategy of that differentiation as it takes place here and now. This is indeed what can be called genuinely contemporary. But how does the contemporary installation relate to the recent controversy between Modern and Postmodern art practices?
End of part 4
Giuseppe Alletto