3. Contemporary Art
Why do I select a phenomenon that is still not a serious concern for the majority of art museums today? And how does current contemporary art differ from contemporary art twenty years ago? We have witnessed a lot of redefinitions of art production in the last five decades. There was the great rebellion in the 1960s, which some understand as the rise of a second modernity. Classical exhibition art, staged in the “white cube,”(5) was devalued, and performance became one of the art world’s major activities in the art world. In a next step, we saw the introduction of new media such as video installation and so on. But such turns usually happened in the Western art world while now newcomers from the former “third world” are taking the lead in the course of events. At least, nothing of similar importance in terms of its impact on the market is present in the West. Take only the Chinese invasion and its hot acclamation by Western collectors.
In order to analyze the significance of this phenomenon, let me device a map of ideas and terms to which it relates in often contradictory ways. There is the ambivalent history of modernism, which nowadays meets with resistance or open opposition. Artists, more often than not, struggle to retrieve the hegemonic claims of this Western heritage, the latter being an unwelcome burden for latecomers who cannot situate themselves anywhere in the history of modernism. Some seek an exit from this heritage or search for alternative genealogies that offer possible definitions. Modernism often functioned as a barrier protecting Western art from contamination by ethnic or popular art, and it marginalized local production as unprofessional. In response, non-Western art sometimes acted with an antithesis to the claim of universalism that was inherent in modernism.
Modernism, as an idea, claimed to be of universal authority and thereby, in fact, exerted colonial power. Modernist art is best described as avant-garde art reflecting the idea of linear progress, conquest, and novelty, thus testifying against its own culture as a dead and unwelcome past. Avant-garde, which as we should note was originally a military term, made it possible to measure progress and innovation within the art context. Therefore, art history became necessary, which, in turn, needed art museums to display art history’s materials and results.(6) The method and the institution emerged simultaneously and were both modern in origin and intention. It is therefore not possible to simply transfer them to other cultures without a loss of meaning. Art history and ethnology were like two sides of the same coin. They covered a neatly divided world as defined by Hegel’s “Pale of History,” which meant that history existed only in the West.(7) Seen in this light, non-Western museums appeared to be inadequate copies of their Western models.
Let me now introduce contemporary art, a term that still causes a lot of confusion as it is traditionally identified with the most recent production of modern art, at least in the West where this chronological or avant-garde distinction resisted even postmodern notions and remained valid until quite recently. Yet beyond the West, contemporary art has a very different meaning that is slowly also seeping into the Western art scene. There, it is hailed as a liberation from modernism’s heritage and is identified with local art currents of recent origin. In such terms, it offers revolt against both art history, with its Western-based meaning, and against ethnic traditions, which seem like prisons for local culture in a global world. There are reasons behind this double resistance that deserve our attention.
On the one hand, there was no art history in most parts of the world; therefore, it could not be appropriated like a ready-made. On the other hand, ethnic arts and crafts, as the favorite child of colonial teachers and collectors, no longer continue as a living tradition even if they survive as a commodity for global tourism. “The death of authentic primitive art,” to quote the title of a book by Shelly Errington, opens a space that contemporary art invades with its double character: as post-historical, with respect to the West, and post-ethnic, with respect to its own environments.(8) I do not say that this is a description of what is, but a description how artists nowadays feel. It seems that the history of art, for Western artists, has been felt as a similar burden as what ethnic tradition, for non-Western artists has meant. I also do not say that history only exists in the West and tradition only in other parts of the worlds. But the two labels have played a considerable role in building up a specific consciousness. In both respects, a new situation has arrived. It therefore makes sense that contemporary art, in many cases, is understood as synonymous with global art. Globalism, in fact, is almost an antithesis to universalism because it decentralizes a unified and uni-directional world view and allows for “multiple modernities,” to quote the theme of a Daedalus issue dedicated to the topic in 2000. This also means that in the arts, the notion “modern” becomes a historical definition and accordingly loses the authority of a universal model. It might even appear as a past that is linked to the West, like other cultures view their own local pasts.
We have now reached a stage in our analysis where the concepts of modern (or modernism), contemporary, and global become relevant for museums, especially newly founded ones in non-Western parts of the world that have to represent such issues both by their collection and for a local audience. They are in a different situation than art fairs such as biennials, which are organized by individual curators, address individual collectors, and underlie the laws of the market, and are ephemeral events that can contradict any preceding exhibition without having to explain the change in direction. Museums, on the contrary, in principle, have to justify their collections and represent ideas that are broader than mere personal taste. Since they are official institutions, they are also subjected to public pressure, and must rely on support from funding authorities. They must therefore offer a program which, in this case, clarifies the constellation and local meaning of modern, contemporary, and global.
4. The modernist myth and the “MoMA”
When looking back at the history of modernism, we cannot overlook the powerful role that museums have played in its expansion. I therefore would like to interrupt my analysis of the global with a chronicle of events that provides evidence of the institution’s role in the history of modernism. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an obvious choice since it created the canon of modernist art some seventy years ago. It recently discovered its own past when it reopened its galleries in 2004. Modernism had meanwhile become a myth.(9) “The Modern,” as it is called in New York, “made us modern,” to quote a remark by Arthur C. Danto.(10) But we have to distinguish a prewar from a postwar modernism. The former was located in Europe, when making its appearance in an American museum. The latter came into being only in the U.S. It is only in postwar years that we can speak of “Western modernism” as a common space whose universalism, however, also served as a disguise for the new American hegemony. The MoMA was intended as both a universal and an American museum.(11)
When the MoMA re-opened its galleries in 2004, the double canon it had created surfaced in its main galleries. One floor was reserved for European modernism while the other floor, with few exceptions, presented American modernism. During the renovation period, a large part of the collection had been sent to Berlin where it became one of the greatest exhibition events ever to happen in Germany. This visit only confirmed the myth of the museum and the sacralization of modernism as a classical canon. In New York, the museum succumbed to the temptation to perform the history of the house and display its myth. The officials were well aware that they did, in a way, musealize their museum. They therefore announced a conference with the telling title “When was Modern Art? A contemporary question.” I was invited to this conference whose rhetoric somehow disagreed with the reality of the house’s new program. Contemporary art had always played a critical role in the acquisition politics of the house yet quite soon the gap emerging between modern and contemporary could no longer be closed.
I will now follow another line in my chronicle that allows us to remain in the same institution. It was in 1955, at the high tide of modernism, that Edward Steichen “created” a “photographic exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art,” as the title says. It was The Family of Man, which would then travel around the globe.(12) For the first time, “the art of photography,” to quote from the editorial, became the subject of a museum exhibition and, as such, invaded the modernist realms of painting and sculpture. The exhibition also broke with another rule by accepting amateur photographers alongside professionals. The aim was to offer a global view of what Steichen called “the essential oneness of mankind.” Indeed, this show represented all cultures and all kinds of people but, seen in retrospect, it proves that at the time the camera was still mostly in Western hands. A Western gaze remained dominant in documenting the world. And the pseudo-innocent idealism was so obvious even in the pictures from America that Robert Frank, in the same year, attacked the project with his campaign of dirty images of The Americans, whose publication was originally forbidden in the U.S.(13)
Today, photography is a common feature of museum collections. But since the late 1960s, video has entered the art scene and as a time-based medium has challenged the museum’s profile much more than photography. Low-cost video equipment had meanwhile become affordable for personal use. Its global distribution was also fostered by its relatively brief history in Western art, which made it attractive as a medium without the burden of art history. The editorial in Video Art, the renowned anthology edited by Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot in 1976, insists on video’s ability to recover images that had long been banned from art production.(14) Such video images featuring either the living artists or their local environments seemed to open a global world with a full gamut of very different visual cultures as compared to a uniform technology. A year after the publication of the anthology, the Centre Pompidou opened: a new type of museum that also reserved space for “new media,” offering a desperately awaited new dimension to late modern art. But it was not until 1997 that the ZKM in Karlsruhe made video and related media a prominent feature in a museum collection. In the present context, it is obvious how much the evolution of global art has profited from video and new technologies that are global by nature and do not depend on the genealogy of Western art history.
