Projection is at the heart of neoliberal structures. It forms the base of attempts to predict potential future benefits to be gained through the process of rendering financial and economic relationships into abstract constructs. Projection is also at the base of ecopolitical consciousness. Projection, therefore, is linked to two fundamental components of stress and anxiety within contemporary art. The first disconnects processes of production and consumption; the second produces speculative scenarios toward an understanding of a reduced environment. The combination of economic abstraction and ecopolitical projection cannot easily be represented within art—however, economic abstraction, ecopolitical consciousness, and projection have all been represented within contemporary art as separate components of a critical advanced art. Projection as a thing in its own right tends to be restricted to the formal use of projection as a tool: various projections projecting something.
It is hard to create artworks that address the
question of projection without them also appearing to support the dubious
logic of projection. Art engages time even when it is primarily focused on the production of objects. The battle over time that comprised the main labor battles of industrial societies over the last 150 years saw the victory of speculation over planning. Projection is the partner of speculation, whereas planning is the less agile sibling of projection. Projection is an essentially capitalist mode of analysis that is crucial to understanding the potential future profits and stresses of the contemporary corporation in context. Projection exists as a series of desires that all run in parallel—never coinciding—dividual and split. And parallelism is the structure of projection.
Artworks that generate descriptive potential within current advanced art cannot be reduced or consolidated. Descriptive potential means new forms or idea structures that can be used. While not necessarily didactic—descriptive structures tend toward producing a use value rather than recording a state or an abstraction alone. Such objects or structures with descriptive potential cannot be reduced or consolidated, for they include elements of self-awareness in their deployment that recognize limitations and contextual influence. These artworks are always incomplete but carry markers of their incompletion. There are always exceptions when trying to apply classically reductive narratives to such artworks. They cannot be simplified, as they are reified at their origin, their deployment, and their analysis; they are concrete and have a self-conscious thingness built in from the outset, a thingness not limited to form but that includes structure—both applied and anticipated. The decision to disperse something into the art context in this case does not produce a synthesis of ideas and forms but an endless series of strings that appear to cross and intersect. But such intersection is an illusion, the effect of the institutional, instrumental, and exchange component of the art context. When rotated and viewed from varied perspectives, the deployed ideas of art move through time as endlessly parallel lines with no possibility of cohesion or consolidation.
Further—the intention to produce an artwork that might, in whatever form, somehow carry a direct connection between the self-perceived ethical stance of the artist and the material, form, or lack of care for form within the work itself merely creates more parallel strings within the extant endless parallelism of the art context in particular and in general. There is no way to draw a logical conclusion about the political, moral, or ethical stance of the artist by attempting to resolve their rhetoric with what appears to have been produced. There is no moment of completion in any work. The point at which the artwork is released into a context within which it might be supposed to have some use value is not a terminal frontier—it is merely a moment when the endless parallelism of the state of art is exposed even more fully. The work at this moment becomes part of an unresolvable context, and it too exemplifies its status as a product of unresolvable drives that cannot be consolidated.
As they circle the work, the pressures of institutional, instrumental, and exchange aspects become part of the commodity aspect of the work. There is no work that can exist capable of evading this fact nor one that can ever resist the breakdown into endless parallelism.
Collectivity and supersubjectivity attempt to gather these parallels and force them to congeal through competing desires. Collectivity and subjectivity mask endless parallelism—they cannot replace or deny it. Collectivity turns the strings into clumps of overcooked pasta. Supersubjectivity pulls the strings taut but leaves them surrounded by clumps, merely creating a temporary supersubjective tension (irony).
There is no conflict between simultaneous realities and parallelism—they are perspectival aspects of the same nonresolvable phenomena. Simultaneous realities are fixed points at any moment within this parallel schema. Taking a slice at any angle—whether torqued or bent—through the parallel unresolvable strands of art will create this series of simultaneous realities but will not contradict the essential parallelism. It will merely represent it in a different form. Yet this sense of there being simultaneous realities is especially helpful for the artist who wishes to understand the context at any given moment, and therefore it has a serious use value. For at any other moment before or after the establishment of the terms necessary to map simultaneous realities, it is possible to create a new series of simultaneous realities. Such apparent realities do not contradict parallelism nor exchange with it or replace it. The notion of simultaneous realities is just another way of regarding art within the flow of time. Thinking harder about simultaneous realities rather than parallelism enables artists to have an engaged relationship with the current context from any perspective but does not do away with the essential parallelism of varied practices. Thinking too much about parallelism restricts the ability of the artist to deploy his or her inevitably unresolvable praxis within a given context; only focusing on simultaneous realities means that the artist removes him- or herself from the realization that, while appearing with all other artists, each specific practice cannot be melded.
The context is also a series of parallels: each view of the context is a slice through a constantly fluctuating set of parallels taken from an infinite number of apparently simultaneous realities. The parallel aspect of the context is the result of it being unstable and impossible to verify—a number of parallel and necessarily conflicting simultaneous realities taking different slices from a flow of parallel strings. Nothing conclusive can be understood from the position of the parallel in regard to simultaneous realities, or vice versa. The parallel appears less political (activated, conscious, agitated) than does a focus upon simultaneous realities. However, neither has an ethical advantage over the other. They are both systems of perspective.
In a social model that is dominated by projection and parallelism, contemporary art has adapted and masks a deep schism in terms of analysis and action.