Introduction
The Thing, Next
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
—Marcel Duchamp The Creative Act
It’s Nine O’clock
The Spanish avant-garde agitator Ramón Gómez de la Serna attempted to solve the mystery of the generation gap in a much-quoted one-liner: “It is difficult to determine when a generation ends and the next one begins. We would say that it happens, more or less, at nine o’clock.” This greguería1 jokingly points to the immeasurable dynamics at work in paradigm shifts, while revealing, at the same time, the vertigo experienced during periods of historical acceleration such as the one framing the ideas and practices of the avant-garde.
The commissioned essays gathered in this book are written from a comparable vertigo, stemming from the suspicion that we are on the brink of a drastically shifting worldview and that key features of the sensibility that will define this century as a departure from modernist and postmodernist sensibilities—are already emerging. The writers, artists, and thinkers gathered for this anthology also recognize that it falls upon the critical alertness of our generation to identify and to assess the potential meanings of these features and to come up with narratives that can account for this yet unarticulated shift.
Several books and documentaries in the fields of cultural theory, art criticism, and visual arts have appeared in recent years that could also be read as attempts at imagining the future of aesthetic sensibility. We could cite, among other references, the E-flux anthology What Is Contemporary Art? (note Hans Ulrich Obrist’s contribution “Manifestos for the Future”), Ingo Niermann and Erik Niedling’s The Future of Art: A Manual, the publications accompanying Documenta 13, as well as the PBS multi-series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. All these projects, although concerned with the idea of the future, mainly grapple with questions about the meaning of contemporaneity in art, focusing on either deconstructing the “contemporary” as a category, or presenting and analyzing current artistic practices that, in many cases, conform to a twentieth-century modern/postmodern paradigm. In The Next Thing, however, the contemporary is not only historicized but “story-cized,” conceived mostly as a pretext for a series of exercises in critical imagination and critical performance that attempt to tease out those features that may prove, in the future, constitutive of the sensibility that will define the twenty-first century.
However arbitrary the classification of time might be—in terms of generations, decades, or centuries—and even if the concept of zeitgeist as yet another “master-narrative” could be also skillfully deconstructed, there still seems to be an overarching mood, a number of coalescing traits that characterize the spirit of an age. Those are the defining features that prompt us to visualize the idea of a baroque seventeenth century, a neoclassical eighteenth century, a romantic nineteenth century, or a modernist/postmodernist twentieth century. A new sensibility, characterized by a pervasive sense of displacement, has been taking shape since the 1990s. In an attempt to capture and articulate this new sensibility, we keep adding meaningless prefixes to old cultural taxonomies. But how many “posts” do we have to attach to an aesthetic marker such as “modern,” “postmodern,” or “post-postmodern” to realize we are already trying to describe a completely different historically given phenomenon? We’ve arrived, once again, as we did at the time of the historical avant-gardes, to a post-prefix era. Indeed, departing from a view of contemporary art as belonging to a posthistorical period (a position held by many art critics, and most notably by Arthur Danto2), the contributors to The Next Thing explore narratives that could eventually become the pervasive form of understanding the aesthetic sensibility that will define our century.
Narratives. I bring this concept because the very task of selecting elements, features, works, or tendencies from the universe of artistic creations, and projecting them as meaningful seeds of cultural and historical relevance, entails, rather than a philosophical or even historical task, a mostly literary endeavor: weaving one story from the skeins of all possible narratives. According to Theodor Adorno, “Aesthetics is not supposed to judge art from an external and superior vantage point, but rather to help its internal propensities to theoretical consciousness.”3 This approach to art, which understands abstract concepts and sensuous particulars not as polar opposites but as dialectically mediated dimensions, brings aesthetic reflection one step closer to the realm of literary invention.
In his essay What Is Contemporary Art? Terry Smith enumerates what he thinks are the most common features of the art in 2010: “provocative testers, doubt-filled gestures, equivocal objects, tentative projections, diffident propositions, or hopeful anticipations.”4 This anthology, on the other hand, was originally inspired by a diverse group of artists whose works hint at a different underlying sensibility and evoke a new, transformed spirit—not of diffident, ironic representations but of experimental instantiations and assertive creations. Among some representative instances I could cite Stelarc’s bio-graphical performance “Ear on Arm,” involving the implantation of a cell-cultivated, Internet-capable ear in his forearm; Polona Tratnik’s work “Transpecies,” based on the transplantation of hair between species; or Joel Peter Witkin’s taboo-defying, beautiful photographs of dismembered, marginal, deformed, or otherwise dead human beings. If Duchamp were alive today, these works might prompt even him to denounce them: “That’s not art.” Indeed, if we could submit contemporary artworks to Duchamp for his disapproval, we just might have a litmus test for an aesthetic paradigm shift in the twenty-first century. For many people, some art critics included, these works do exist on that line at the edge of “the Duchampian test.”
Thanks to our contributors, who are not only proven cultural lightning rods but also writers, thinkers, and artists who embody the aesthetic shift of this century, that original inspiration expanded into this collection, covering more ground and exploring a more encompassing view of possible “contestable futures.”5 Whatever their narratives might be, in the wide spectrum ranging from analytical to creative writing, they will always preserve a literary spirit as they attempt to imagine the future of art—and that is why one could maintain that these texts, however diverse, participate in a new genre that we could call “aesthetic fiction.”
Art is not the realm of the imagination, but of the unimaginable, so attempting to fancy the future of art or even more boldly the future of aesthetic sensibility is a doubly impossible task. That is why, underlying these visions that border on the visionary, there is still a pervasive awareness that the most a foreshadowing text can hope for is to anticipate its own retrospective critique. When it comes to art, we cannot be prophets in our own age, since there is no foolproof methodology to fast-forward the prospective meaning of an artwork or to anticipate a zeitgeist that is still in the making. And even if one manages to safely jump that chronological hurdle, obsolescence is the next unavoidable destiny. Every essay collected here recognizes not only this, but also that the speed with which they may become obsolete is a testament to a defining feature of this century. We are living in the midst of revolutions that are swiftly redefining vast and diverse regions of our culture, starting with the concept of future itself, which suddenly appears as an uncertain proposition.
Revolutions. From the hyper-connectivity of cyber networks and the exponential migration patterns, both through virtual reality and the actual world, to the self-perpetuating fantasies of ecological and nuclear dystopias, and the prophesied Singularity of artificially engineered futures, there are profound changes operating in all fields. Revolutions upending geopolitical forces and internal political structures, revolutions in artificial intelligence and social communications; theories in the field of physics threatening shared beliefs in a one-dimensional, “monolithic” universe; and biotechnological applications that allow us to reprogram biologies and redefine the scope of nature.
If one of the fundamental premises of art history is that artworks contain decipherable marks of their historical context, this experimental discipline of “aesthetic fiction” could be seen as the other side of art history, as it posits that some trailblazing works may contain prospective traces of a context not yet fully realized. Interdisciplinary in conception and method, these texts explore a full spectrum of expressions and perspectives: pure fiction, academic paper, art criticism, visual essay, artistic manifesto, personal testimony, inner monologue, open dialogue, and extended roundtable. While some articles foreground socially ethical engagement, others travel the opposite direction toward an aesthetics of wretchedness or at least visualize postethical scenarios in which necrophilia, cannibalism, or “cross-species interplay” carry no moral value. While some explore the implications of artistic tourism as a form of “short-term migration for amusement,” others pay attention to the indelible traces of massive migratory displacements. Some reify discourse, while others vindicate silence. Some delve into abstract philosophical reflection, while others into sensual, unmediated fascination. Some could be read as scholarly analysis, grounded on objectifiable trends, while others as shots in the dark, fantastic ideas left by the nocturnal tides of poetic ravings. Still, there are innumerable echoes, resonances between them, and only after reading them all does one realize the extent to which they naturally emerge as part of an intricate series of communicating vessels. They all find different ways of transcending the dismantling of master narratives that characterized the twentieth century; they all attempt to explore, each in its own way, new stories projecting beyond the ruins of meaninglessness, the crises of identities, or the unsettling logic of injustice.
As an attempt to wrestle with the concept of future itself, Hagi Kenaan’s “Time Comes to Art from the Future” would make a first unavoidable stop. Kenaan’s essay offers, with a microsurgical philosophical language, an exploration of the main assumption behind The Next Thing; in particular, the assumption underlying the concept of future in art, which in Kenaan’s piece unfurls into a panoply of futuralities and perplexing temporal movements. Translating Heidegger’s existential understanding of futurity into the temporality of the work of art, Kenaan focuses on two fundamental questions: “How exactly is the future present in the artwork?” and “What kind of lesson can be gleaned by recognizing the future’s traces in the artwork?” Without spoiling the end of Kenaan’s beautifully crafted “story,” spanning from the mythical inception of drawing to the hyperrealism of photographer Stephen Shore, I will only reveal that his essay opens up a question that any speculation about the future of art and the art of the future will find itself attempting to address.
In sync with other contributors, Polona Tratnik sees twenty-first-century art as a field as socially and politically charged as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Tratnik’s “Manifesto for the Next Art,” however, the spirit of modernist theories supporting a revolutionary role of art is being essentially transformed. Although a critical theory of society presides over the “Tratnik Manifesto” and its insights on the market structure of contemporary art, the concept of resistant art should not be confused with the ideologically charged forms of social engagement developed throughout the politicized historical avant-gardes. On the contrary, the fundamental function of Tratnik’s resistant art consists of debunking all dominant ideology. Indeed, the Tratnik Manifesto will undoubtedly remain as a reference for the ideas and for the force in which they advance a commitment for Art and against Ideology. This is a powerful document and a unique take on what the author believes are the fundamental changes currently taking place in the field of art.
In “The Critical Art of the Future,” Glenn Harper makes a point in presenting his view of the present and future of art from the perspective of the critic as opposed to that of the scholar. Harper intertwines two parallel narratives: a revealing survey of the history of art criticism since the Enlightenment and a self-biographical testimony of the changes in the profession since the 1980s at the height of art criticism. Harper’s essay allows us not only to understand but also to visualize the extent to which the “social construct” dimension of art is connected to entire models of cultural dynamics. And it is in a critical relation to these dynamics that Harper finds the place for the future of art. As opposed to the repressive power of meaning, Harper vindicates the liberating influence of silence or ambiguity in both artworks and criticism—an unsettling ambiguity that, bringing together his seemingly contradictory passions for art criticism and crime fiction, he understands as forms of escape.
As both scholar and novelist, Mark Axelrod in his essay “Kindle, Kindle Burning Bright; or, Twenty-First-Century Fiction and the Poetics of Such” also offers an insider’s perspective—but in his case, on the future of writing. Axelrod’s piece is a detailed account of the philosophical and social implications of literary practices in the era of the electronic book. But beyond that, and probably more relevant to The Next Thing, Axelrod’s piece is the heart-wrenching testimony of a pen-and-paper, flesh-and-bone novelist, brought up in the old tradition of Cervantes and Beckett, Scott and Pessoa, facing the prospect of a virtualized, digitized fiction. To the readers of William Blake’s poetry, the title would remind of the opening line of “The Tyger,” a poem not only made of unanswered questions, like Axelrod’s essay, but also of the Romantic hope that nature, like the work of art, reflect the aura of its author. One image could easily sum up the pathos of Axelrod’s piece—but for that you will have to spot him driving through the deadly maze of Los Angeles traffic with his quaint vanity plate that reads “4GODOT.”
The spirit of Walter Benjamin’s disquisitions about the progressive disappearance of the artwork’s aura developed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) still echoes throughout Axelrod’s “diatribe.” Similarly, when reading the roundtable held in Pakistan by Salima Hashmi, Ayesha Jatoi, Huma Mulji, Naazish Ata-Ullah, Quddus Mirza, and Rashid Rana, we have the sense of eavesdropping on the conversation of six artists trying to grapple with the seemingly urgent yet abstract questions of where does the past stand in a future-oriented society, what is real in the age of the virtual, and who is the artist in the age of celebrity, technology, and design. In intimate connection to these questions, “Art/Aesthetics in the Next 100 Years—A Dialogue” can be read as an “open-source” conversation about identity: the ubiquitous politically charged question that, in this context, underpins all discussions about locale, history, and the site of the postcolonial subject.
The correlation between these ideas and Mieke Bal’s essay “Affect and the Space We Share: Three Forms of Installation Art” will be soon apparent, as Bal actively and consciously reveals the intimate connections between artistic and political sensibilities, as well as those between history and the future. As a privileged form of cultural expression, affect is the domain where artworks can act upon us as much as we can act upon them, thus transforming us into “political agents.” Bal explores the works of three installation artists, Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland), Doris Salcedo (Colombia), and Ann Veronica Janssens (Belgium), because they exemplify cases of future-oriented, political, and spatial art: all forms of contribution to a socially mindful ethics of non-indifference. Mieke Bal’s essay could be itself included into this category because, as is often the case with Mieke Bal, her writing does what it says, and here she spurs affective responses with her style and enacts through language this transport of her readers into the passionate space of political agency.
In line with Mieke Bal’s essay, and following Claire Bishop’s distinction between different types of social practices, Jan Garden Castro’s piece “Art Futurecast: Merging Object with Subject” develops the premise that objects may become interactive subjects. This is an original reversal of perspective intended to examine the sociopsychological directions in the works of Katrín Sigurdardóttir, César Cornejo, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. Jan Garden Castro’s essay is not only important today but will also prove valuable for the future reader of this book, as it offers a rich overview of current art practices and a detailed tableau of the mood and climate that pervades these first decades of the twenty-first century.
Departing from a theoretically focused approach, the chapter titled “Axonometry of the Future; or Prophecies of the 21st Century” was conceived as a divertimento. Not only aware of but also inspired by the “humorous charm and a sense of naïveté” that characterize most art predictions of the past, artists Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia playfully plunge themselves into the amaurotic waters of the future; and instead of a linear, static point of view they offer plural, awry, and contradictory perspectives that project a revealing series of contestable Next Things. Among other hypothetical scenarios, they explore installations that are “hardly distinguishable from life”; art emerging from postapocalyptic scenarios; and the aesthetic consequences of the multiplication of identities in a virtual world, in which the artist “ceases to be one in order to become many.” For our sense of security we would like to think this piece was written by Porter and Tiscornia, yet it shows all the signs of a text that resists classification, reference, or even subscription to a defined author—as if it were conceived, indeed, by the ineffable Alicia Mihai Gazcue.
Attempting to establish where creative/inventive “sensuousness” is supposed to lie, Johnny Golding begins by dispensing with identity politics, without dispensing with politics, social agency, and the political, and by dispensing with “representation” without dispensing with art, image, or meaning —and she does this by establishing a new term, ana-materialism, kinshipped to another fairly new label, fractal philosophy. Golding returns to sexuality(ies) and the matter of becoming “mouth-breast”—the political-aesthetic-fractal matter of being/ becoming/ sustaining erotics. Golding does this in the context of a critical assessment of three different but linked “frameworks” having to do with (1) the performative, (2) the logic of sense(s), and (3) the fractal. As much mind-bending as this sketch may make it sound, in “Ana-Materialism and the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast,” Golding embarks us on a conceptual, stylistic, and performative trip. Moreover, the prelinguistic, peristaltic rhythms of Golding’s text invites us to a form of reading that is itself a form of performance.
Sharing the understanding that we no longer live in a “paradigm of no-paradigms” as Hal Foster has called our times,6 I propose in “Interrupted Reading: The Aesthetics of Metastasis” assigning to the current production of a specific group of artists (Stelarc, Joel Peter Witkin, Floris Kaayk, Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, Polona Tratnik, Aziz+Cucher) the value of a clearly defined paradigm shift. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, artists have produced works that already point to the creation of new forms of perception, new forms of existence, and new, alternative worlds that destabilize the ontological status of this one. In some current contemporary tendencies, such as bio-art or tele-presence performance, this reconfiguration of the basic categories of existence is redefining both the boundaries of Meaning and what it means to be Human. This is what I call the ontological shift of the twenty-first century. Recognizing the discursive nature of reality has been liberating for the twentieth century. Inversely, recognizing that all discourse could participate in the ontological status of reality imports a form of responsibility that transcends ethics and aesthetics.
At least in one sense, this essay introduces the works and thought of Stelarc. With an extra arm and a third ear, Stelarc has always been one step ahead of his time, so it is no surprise that “ALIVENESS & AFFECT: ALTERNATE ART & ANATOMIES” proposes multiple scenarios where art (what some see as “the ultimate reflection of humanity”) is being outsourced to machines, or where “art itself will become alive.” In this age of gene mapping, body hacking, gender reassignment, neural implants, and prosthetic augmentation, what a body is and how a body operates has become problematic. Stelarc writes from this liminal space, not surreal anymore but trans-real, where the synthetic and the genetic, the cellular and the machinic, the living and the dead are not seen as conflicting dimensions anymore. Yet even this vantage point is dismantled in the recognition that “the future never is” and that beyond any idea of Singularity we are only left with a series of “contestable futures.” Above all else, Stelarc is a poet. And you will realize that after witnessing the spectacle of his imagination, and the sensibility of his expression.
Beyond coincidences and dissidences, there is a series of recurring metaphors throughout these essays: exile, deterritorialization, migrancy, dis-location, prosthesis, virtuality, metastasis, mutation, rhizome, and fractality, among many others. All of them refer, in one way or another, to a more encompassing allegory of displacement. As we are being taken out of our civil rights, out of our countries, of our roles, our bodies, our biologies, our senses, and even out of ourselves, it is the very site of this collective identity—around which we predicate the pervasive metaphor of displacement—what is most significantly being displaced.
In connection to this ever-receding horizon it is suggestive that the concept of defamiliarization, in the sense given to it by Viktor Shklovsky, reemerges in most of the essays of The Next Thing. This time, however, the formalist concept does not seem to point to the recovering of some primeval perception but to the grasping of some-yet-undefined-thing, some-yet-undefined-Other. In Shklovsky’s theory, estrangement is understood as part of a process that has an aesthetic end in itself . . . the uncanny. The uncanny as it is recast in these essays, points toward a process that seems to transcend the aesthetic and extend toward the ontological, closer to what in science fiction and horror is called “the Thing” . . . an alien form that we see moving in the shadows, yet we cannot make out its shape. The school of proper style recommends avoiding such ambiguous words as “thing,” always considered lackluster language. But if The Next Thing promotes this vague term to an eponymous protagonism, it is precisely because of those features: a vagueness formulated not in terms of the existence of the thing as object but in terms of its quality as a crouching possibility.
At the beginning of the movie Derrida (2002), we see traveling shots of the Seine River while we hear the voice of the philosopher talking about the future. There is, in this opening scene, an unspoken yet insightful connection between Heraclitus’s doctrine of flux and Derrida’s anticipation of the Other:
In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and l’avenir. The future is that which—tomorrow, later, next century—will be. There’s a future which is predictable—programs, prescriptions, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come), which refers to someone who comes, whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me that is the real future—that which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.7
This distinction between the future and l’avenir subtly frames the spirit of this book. While the future is that which is predictable, The Next Thing seems seduced by l’avenir—the real future, that which is coming but which we are unable to anticipate. The prospective history of the twenty-first century attempted here, from a mosaic of different perspectives, has been assembled not with “prophecies of the present” (as Danto would say) but as a preposterous art criticism of l’avenir, an avenir that is being intuitively grasped by some but remains intellectually undefined. Thus these essays, attempting the impossible and anticipating the unpredictable, occupy the eccentric space of speculative prediction and meticulous hallucination. Paraphrasing sociologist Erving Goffman, who preferred “a loose speculative approach” to “a rigorous blindness,”8 we do not claim any vision for this collection; on the contrary, we have painstakingly tried to connect all the blind spots as if they were the dots of a shadow evoking the edges and stretches of our critical imagination.
In 1870, Lautréamont, a writer whose work would later shape twentieth-century avant-garde movements, wrote: “At the hour in which I write, new tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them.”9 Tremors. As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are at a comparable junction; the narratives offered here intend to be a response, both creative and analytical, to this renewed historical foresight. They could eventually prove accurate or erroneous; but they will always retain a historical value and be bound to become an unavoidable reference, both in terms of its visions and its blindnesses. From this perspective, even despite itself, The Next Thing will offer, as a time capsule, a fertile reservoir of predictions and prejudices, of suspicions and premonitions, that will keep provoking different yet always rich readings as the decades go by. For one of the energizing factors behind this collection is the awareness of its being written for a reader that has yet to be born.
Los Angeles, 2013
Notes
1. Greguería is defined by its most notorious practitioner Ramón Gómez de la Serna as “humor plus metaphor.” These aphorisms had a significant influence on European and Latin American avant-garde sensibility. This genre resurfaces later, probably inspired by Williams Carlos Williams’s typewriter-length verses, in the American Sentences of Allen Ginsberg defined as a haiku-length poem of seventeen syllables; most recently vindicated and exhaustively practiced by the poet Paul Nelson; and mostly unsuccessfully tried today with the 140 characters mistyped by the masses of Twittniks.
2. In After the End of Art, Danto’s narrative develops as follows: mimetic art from 1300 to 1900, ideological art from 1880 to 1965, and then posthistorical art—that is, art beyond the end of art: “In our narrative, at first only mimesis was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. . . . And that is . . . the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story.” Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 47.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 453.
4. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2.
5. This last expression should be credited to Stelarc, who described this anthology in the following terms: “I guess another way of seeing this exercise [The Next Thing] is one of constructing ‘contestable futures.’ Of speculations that generate uncertainties and amplify anxieties.” In e-mail to the author, July 12, 2009.
6. See “This Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002).
7. Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (Los Angeles: Jane Doe Films, 2002).
8. This concept can be found in Erving Goffman’s Behavior in Public Spaces: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. The entire quote reads: “Obviously, many of these data are of doubtful worth, and my interpretations—especially of some of them—may certainly be questionable, but I assume that a loose speculative approach to a fundamental area of conduct is better that a rigorous blindness to it.” Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Spaces: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 4.
9. This was quoted by Breton in a lecture he gave in Brussels titled “What Is Surrealism?” (1934), and according to him, this remark, among many others, were to electrify Breton and his Surrealist friends fifty years later. Found at http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html. Accessed February 20, 2012.
Bibliography
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