This volume comprises newly commissioned essays on contemporary art since 1989. The contemporary art world has expanded exponentially—in size and complexity—over the last two decades, precipitating a general uncertainty as to what matters and why, much less how we should look at, write about, and historicize these recent practices. Admitting from the outset the implications of this profound and often antagonistic situation, we have eschewed producing a descriptive text of our own and have instead brought together nearly fifty leading international creative, critical, and curatorial voices to examine what contemporary art is today. This book follows the principle given poetic shape in the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which a company of individuals feels a single region of the elephant’s body. One might grope a leg, while another the tusk, or an ear. Each touch yields a different tactile experience, as well as a distinct vantage from which to extrapolate the contours of the whole. Precisely because of the variability of the animal’s features—much less the horizon of one’s perception—the resultant points of view are at once catholic and incommensurate.
The history presented in this book is necessarily partial, and the better for its aggregation of conflicting opinions, interpretations, and approaches. It goes without saying that Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present is neither meant to be absolute nor prescriptive, but investigative, even speculative. It aims to generate a picture of a heterogeneous whole through the specificity of positions moored in disparate practices, locations, and philosophies. It is with this goal in mind that the essays in Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present emphasize the virtues of partisanship in the task of understanding the recent past, and the book’s success depends upon the vigor of debate it generates—debates we hope will provide the groundwork for successive histories of contemporary art.
While the essays themselves establish a discussion of the contemporary quite apart from our brief introduction of them, one basic point of structural and historiographical organization is our periodization of the contemporary from 1989. We do this for a number of reasons. The unprecedented growth of the contemporary art world coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the tumultuous events surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity Movement in Poland, and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc irrevocably modified the landscape of contemporary European Art; it also provided the economic means for local collectors to become highly influential players in the international art world. Meanwhile, the contemporary art scene in China, post-Tiananmen, evolved into an economic and cultural phenomenon independent from Western critical and economic systems of distribution, and as such represents a willful excision from, or the complete indifference to, the New York–Western Europe “hegemony” of contemporary art.
No matter the importance of such cities as New York, Berlin, or Beijing, the contemporary art world has experienced not just a multiplication of centers, but a deep constitutional adjustment regarding the nature of borders, travel, and the global economy. The increased number of biennials and triennials spread across the globe—something virtually unheard of before 1989, with the exception of stalwarts like São Paulo and Venice—made artists “peripatetic travelers” who created site-specific installations in response to the phenomena of globalization. Oft criticized for engendering a touristic, entertainment-oriented experience, these shows likewise gave rise to a kind of participatory art, taking advantage of the absence of traditional institutional structures for new, contingent presentational styles.
Such differences in exhibition practice notwithstanding, it may seem contentious to link aesthetic change to the geopolitical shifts of 1989—an argument that applies to other momentous dates, such as 1945 and 1968, which routinely arrange the writing of art history, the teaching of its classes, as well as the chronological installations of museum collections. To be sure, the events of 1989 and the years surrounding it were prepared for by longer-term cultural, economic, and political histories, the implications of which are decisive for the comprehension of the recent past. But much art produced in the last twenty years arises, on the one hand, from artists who have grown up, been educated, and work in a context removed or critically distant from normative, Western art historical and social historical concerns. On the other hand, for those who have been educated in the Western/North Atlantic tradition—an obviously diverse body of individuals—many have at best an ambivalent relationship to the history of Western art and see themselves participating in an integrated international art system.
Despite these many transformations, the problems of power, distribution networks, conflicting senses of history, and the various contingencies surrounding both ideas of subjectivity and political agency remind us of how fraught this moment of art production and reception really is. When taken together, these complex conditions have gradually serrated the art made after 1989 from the art preceding it. Related to this, the authors assembled in these pages are, by and large, members of generations formed by the events of 1989, rather than the Vietnam War. (This latter fact has the advantage of setting aside the animating tensions between social art history and formalism that have driven much of “high” art critical writing since the 1970s, while making apparent the ways in which both approaches have been retooled, whether by means of new philosophical reference points or emergent aspects of practice.)
But to reiterate: There are numerous connections—many of which go back decades, if not longer—that caution against taking a stance of historical exceptionalism. Nevertheless the social and political alterations of the last twenty or so years have impacted how artists and commentators look at both their practice and the world, often regarding art as a source of critique as well as a tool for comprehending contemporary life under coeval conditions of holistically integrated cultures and temporalities. It is here that Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present begins and leaves us, in medias res, which does not obviate the gesture toward understanding but renders it urgent.
The ubiquity and variance of contemporary art since 1989 challenges art historians, curators, and critics attempting to account for works of art created and circulated in a truly, if imperfectly, global context. At the root of this problem is how to order thematically art defined by a multiplicity of contents—art that is far from determined or accommodating to extant, particularly Western, critical categories. Indeed, the openness of post-1989 art abets both its possibility and potential vacuity, and in response, we have grouped the essays into fluid rubrics that range from theoretically oriented problems to medium-based investigations: The Contemporary and Globalization; Art After Modernism and Postmodernism; Formalism; Medium Specificity; Art and Technology; Biennials; Participation; Activism; Agency; The Rise of Fundamentalism; Judgment; Markets; Art Schools; and Scholarship.
Each section is prefaced by a brief editorial statement, which introduces the material in broad strokes. We have included three essays per section to highlight the respective range of standpoints, and while the approaches and writing techniques vary from the straightforwardly scholarly to the self-consciously casual, each text is relatively brief in length. The essays are meant for a wide audience—as befits the topic at hand. Their concision provides a forum for deft, polemical interventions. We have made the editorial decision to avoid the imposition of a house style in order to show how the essays reflect recent developments in the contemporary art world and current methodological approaches to its interpretation, whether through a case study, survey-of-literature, journalistic brief, or experimental script.
The essays also manifest critical pedagogical concerns: Authors implicitly or otherwise evaluate the distinction between primary and secondary material; balance social, historical, material, theoretical, and aesthetic issues; and come to terms with the distinctions between contemporary art history and criticism. While Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present originated in the academy—one of the main impetuses for this book arose from our experiences in the classroom—it is, most importantly, also intended for artists, curators, critics, and anyone interested in a strongly argued, sustained, and disputatious inquiry into the structures and belief systems of the international contemporary art world.