Contemporary art is split and fragmented, and because of this it holds together against attacks both subtle and virulent and from both within and without. It is this simultaneous and constant splitting and fragmentation that gives contemporary art its strange endurance and prevents it from being transcended, at least for the time being. Contemporary art is a pile: it is essentially an accumulation of collapsed ideas in cumulative yet sometimes vigorous forms. Within this pile we have recently seen more splits than fragments. There is a distinct break between artists, curators, critics, and historians, all of whom are operating within an amoebic system of nodular subjectivities (seeing each art act as a moment, cumulative or not), and those who use documentary, research, and discourse as a way to attempt to keep alive the social and critical potential of art (seeing borders, boundaries, and paths). It is this rupture that drives most differences, disagreements, and claims for a territory of effectiveness in contemporary art today and stimulates the most profound discussions. These two positions might be represented as those who see chains versus those who perceive the proliferation of amoebas.
Those who recognize and decode chains see relatively clear borders, whereas those who are surrounded by amoebas see mainly moments, fragments, accumulations, reproductions, and secretions. Those who see chains perceive threads and connections toward a way through the pile; with the amoeba there is an accumulation of moments and meanings that float alongside one another but have no fundamental connection beyond splitting, reproducing, and enduring. The chain can bypass formal and aesthetic nuances in favor of messages, information, and communication. The amoeba amplifies minor nuances in order to differentiate, dislocate, and squeeze significance from heightened subjectivities. The chain is genealogical; the amoeba is archeological. The chain sees connections and relations in the here and now, and the amoeba sees layers accumulating where meanings may eventually be found. Neither can claim any hold over earlier discussions around identity and difference. Rupture and the accumulation—chain and amoeba—can both claim to be political and deny political agency from every perspective simultaneously.
The rupture caused by the chain puts the collective totality of contemporary art under stress. The chain sees amoebal art as an identifiable practice with its own slowly secreting, colonizing codes and unspoken repetitive values, and it rejects it. The chain tends to be more interested in the history of exhibitions; the amoeba remains focused primarily on the products of artists in isolation or loose combination. Crucially—whether chained or unchained—contemporary art lets nothing escape from its purview: once a set of ideas, propositions, or positions enters, it cannot escape. Even when a terminal border appears to emerge, contemporary art as an accumulation of amoebas and chains does not provide an escape route because of its excessive recognition of the node over the edge. It is therefore urgent to establish the origins of contemporary art and whether it has an endpoint. What period are we in? Are we permanently contemporary? It seems unlikely.
Can we use mainstream markers to establish a way to address these questions—art history, the curatorial, the history of exhibitions, or art as activism? How about looking at the art market, the education system, collaboration, participation, and community projects? The problem is that focus on these areas alone often produces a pseudoethical competition of instrumentalized justifications and excessive reflections in the face of an always-floating-free nodal, amoebal, supersubjectivity. This results in a continued false duality: that the art context is a perfect mirror of rampant neoliberal capitalism containing no resources to counter the complete reach of a marketization of every relationship pitched against an insistence on refusal and resistance via supersubjectivity, reiterated postformalism, and the superficially political.
Importantly here we are faced by the problem of philosophy—or, more accurately, the problem of the way theoretical writing of recent philosophers is embodied in and constantly reapplied to contemporary art. Whether art is searching for borders—chains—or accentuating nodalities—the amoebal—the philosophical writings of the last fifty years are both interior and exterior to contemporary art simultaneously. They are at the base of most attempts to produce advanced art, even when barely understood by the artist, and crucially are at the base of all attempts to analyze art once it has been produced, even when poorly applied or denied by the critic or curator or artist. Responsive conclusions about aesthetics, art, and ethics formulated by philosophers are deployed as instructional or attitudinal tools for the origin of new art, which is also influenced by all the other art that is more or less influenced by philosophy, consciously or unconsciously, assertively or in denial. These artworks then filter into the writings of enlightened or curious philosophers, who produce more writing, which produces more work and so on in a feedback loop. There is no contemporary art that can escape the circle of analysis and theory that both underscores and overwrites it. A philosophical conclusion is an artist’s starting point, and vice versa; an artist’s work is a philosopher’s point of departure.