Guest Author of December 2010

Terry Smith is acknowledged world wide as the leading authority in the theory of contemporary art. We therefore are honoured and grateful to have his consent to prepublish parts of the general introduction of his forthcoming book Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011). The text explains the contents and aims of the book. We have selected those parts, which break down the general phenomenon of contemporary global art into three “world currents,” which are distinguished from each other, and thus develop a novel analysis of the present situation in the art world. Thus, our text selection serves to awaken the curiosity of our website users to read the full arguments in the book coming out in 2011. The originality of the author’s approach, in emphasizing contemporaneity as the credo of a new faith, also emerges from his attention to what has occurred in late modern art since the 1950s. His career began in the context of the debate about Australia’s place in modernity in the 1960s. Making the Modern, the title of his Ph.D. thesis and subsequent book, indicates his point of departure for his present project, which could be called “Making Contemporaneity.”

Contemporary Art in Transition: From Late Modern Art to Now

At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, art seems markedly different from what it was during the modern era: it is now—above all, and before it is anything else—contemporary. What kind of change is this: illusory or actual, singular or multiple? Why did it happen? How deep does it go? Has it, yet, a history? This book offers answers to these questions by surveying the major changes in art since the 1980s. It will show that a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary was prefigured in some late modern art during the 1950s, that it took definitive shape in the 1980s, and that it continues to unfold through the present, thus shaping art’s imaginable futures. It will also show that, while much is shared between artists wherever they reside, these changes occurred in different and distinctive ways in each cultural region, and in each art-producing locality. By the mid-twentieth century, modern art had become singular, even conformist, in its artistic orientations, and had concentrated its disseminative infrastructure (markets, museums, interpreters, publicists) in the great cultural centers of Europe and the United States. Now, however, diversity marks every aspect of the production and distribution of art, from the limitless range of materials used by artists, through the broad scope, specificity, and unpredictability of the questions their art raises, to the fact that they are active all over the world and interested in rapidly circulating their art everywhere else, across the planet and into cyberspace. Contemporary art is—perhaps for the first time in history—truly an art of the world. It comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole. This is the definition of diversity: it is the key characteristic of contemporary art, as it is of contemporary life, in the world today.

These are broad claims, about large aspirations. Let us approach them through some commonsense responses to a plain question: what is “contemporary” about art today? A natural answer would be: its qualities of freshness, recentness, uniqueness, and surprise. At the same time, however, we accept that not all art being made today is contemporary: we can see that older, sometimes ancient, traditions continue to be revised––ink painting in China, for example—as deliberate responses to the present, just as many artists everywhere remain committed to exploring the more subtle nuances of the once shockingly new styles of the twentieth-century Modernist avant-gardes. We expect contemporary art to be—in technique, subject matter, meaning, or affect—noticeably different from any of the images that come to our minds when we think of the art on display in the “permanent” galleries of the museums that we might know, including that in the rooms devoted to “Modern Art,” usually defined as the art of the modern era, a period stretching from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s. While we tend to see this period, and this art, as part of our history, we are attracted or repelled in a different way by the surprise of the open-ended potential, the clamorous buzz, of the art coming into being all around us now. It is contemporary with us in the most obvious sense, a vital part of our immediate experience of the present.

As we become more acquainted with the art coming into being around us, we might begin to feel that art can speak to us, in some special, direct way, about our own experience of living in the present time, of belonging to it, of being contemporary. Our reaction may be implicit: simply a sense that we are all—viewers, artworks, artists—coping, however individually, with the same set of circumstances. When a work of art provokes this feeling explicitly, however, it suggests that it is of our times in some special way, that it is immediately and convincingly recognizable as expressing the times in ways likely to be definitive. Such feelings of something significant being shared (of belonging to our times) can be vivid, even—perhaps especially—in cases where we recognize that the work we are looking at has been made by someone with a different perspective on the world today: he or she may be from another country or culture, of a different gender or sexuality, or from an older or younger generation. Nevertheless, a sense of coexistence, or contemporaneousness, is present: we are all in these times together, however differently. We are, in a word, contemporaries.

Contemporary art is no longer one kind of art, nor does it have a limited set of shared qualities somewhat distinct from those of the art of past periods in the history of art yet fundamentally continuous with them. It does not presume inevitable historical development; it has no expectation that present confusion will eventually cohere into a style representative of this historical moment. Contemporary art is multiple, internally differentiating, category-shifting, shape-changing, unpredictable (that is, diverse)—like contemporaneity itself¹.

In their book The Myth of Continents, human geographers Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen point out: “Clearly, the world regional system has some serious flaws. In most presentations, it is contaminated by the myth of the nation-state and by geographical determinism. Similarly, although less Eurocentric than the standard continental scheme, it still bears the traces of its origin within a self-centered European geographical tradition. More fundamentally, a world regional framework continues to grossly flatten out the complexities of global geography. No less than the continental scheme, it implies that the map of the world is readily divisible into a small number of fundamentally comparable units.”² They believe, nevertheless, that if one pays attention to historical processes rather than imagined civilizational traits, to assemblages of ideas, practices, and social institutions (that is, cultures) while acknowledging but not privileging political dominance and subordination, and to the interaction between peoples in each region as much as their internal relationships, a useful picture of regionality in the world can be drawn. A similar approach is adopted by the cartographic section of the United Nations in its conceptualization of the world’s regions³.

In my book, I propose that contemporary art may best be understood by thinking of it as evolving within three closely related yet distinctive currents. The first prevails in the great metropolitan centers of modernity in Europe and the United States (as well as in societies and subcultures closely related to them) and is a continuation of styles in the history of art, particularly Modernist ones. The second has arisen from movements toward political and economic independence that occurred in former colonies and on the edges of Europe, and is thus shaped above all by clashing ideologies and experiences. The result is that artists prioritize both local and global issues as the urgent content of their work. Meanwhile, artists working within the third current explore concerns that they feel personally yet share with others, particularly of their generation, throughout the world. Taken together, I suggest, these currents constitute the contemporary art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Contemporary Art (styles/practices).

A cluster of closely associated trends are contemporary in the sense that they are the most evidently up-to-date. As they evolved since the 1980s, two tendencies have emerged that enable us to be more precise about the ways artists have revised key elements of Modernism: I call them Remodernism and Retro-Sensationalism. In the work of certain artists and architects they combine to become a kind of Spectacle Art and Architecture, an aesthetic of globalizing capital at its highpoint at the turn of the millennium. These tendencies will be discussed and defined in detail in Chapter 2. It will be shown that they are, in fact, art movements—that is, changes in the history of art and architecture akin to those that have become familiar since Realism, Impressionism, and the succeeding avant-gardes. They are the main elements of what might amount to an art-historical period style, one that may become known by its current brand name: “Contemporary Art.”

The Postcolonial Turn (ideologies/issues).

The second current is too diverse, uneven, contradictory, and oppositional to amount to an art movement in any of the usual senses. While this current is international in its circulation, it originates in each of the many countries that have, since the mid-twentieth century, achieved (or are still struggling to achieve) degrees of independence from long periods of colonial rule by one or more of the European powers, and from the economic and cultural influence of the United States—a process known as decolonization, the after-effects of which are known as postcolonialism⁴. Art emergent from these circumstances is, therefore, diverse to a degree unprecedented in the modern history of European art, and, because of its origins on the borders of and outside Europe, different in kind. Yet it also finds a strong resonance in the outlook of artists working in the centers of geopolitical power who are critical of their own governments’ exercise of that power—they, too, are an important factor within this current. Overall, this is a content-driven art, aware of the influence of ideologies, and concerned above all with issues of nationality, identity, and rights. All of these are conceived as being in volatile states of transition, and requiring translation in order to be negotiated. From within these struggles, artists, like many others, are increasingly seeking modes of cosmopolitan connection and cooperation.

The Arts of Contemporaneity (concerns/strategies).

The third current is even more diverse internally and even more global, more particular yet more connected, than both of its predecessors. Many emerging artists sense that Modernism—no matter how often and subtly it is Remodernized—is past its use-by date. They regard “Postmodern” as an outmoded term, a temporary placeholder that is no longer adequate to describe conditions that, they believe, have changed fundamentally. Their youth means that they have inherited the successes and shortcomings of the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s—from anti-colonialism to feminism—and now seek to relate these lessons to the even greater challenges of living in the conditions of contemporaneity. Emergent artists are focused on questions arising from this challenge: questions as to the shapes of time, place, media, and mood in the world today.

These three currents are manifestations in the visual arts of the great changes in the distribution of political, economic, and cultural power that have occurred throughout the world since the mid-twentieth century.

Globalization.

The first current defined above flows strongest through the art centers of cities such as London, New York, and Paris: for centuries, they have been the engine rooms of modern art. These great modernizing cities were capitals of what became known, during the Cold War period, as the First World. Geopolitics was dominated by competition between free market-oriented, representative democracies led by the United States and Western Europe, and the centralized regimes led by the Communist governments of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Republic of China—the latter known as the Second World. Each of these groupings sought strategic influence throughout the rest of the world, built up huge, threatening arsenals of nuclear weapons, raced to dominate space exploration, and worked to attract the allegiance of intellectuals (including artists) to their belief systems or ideologies. The First World reached perhaps its most developed form during the 1980s, when artists working within the Remodernizing and Sensationalist current realized their definitive works.

With the collapse of the Communist governments in Europe in the years around 1990, free-market capitalism gained untrammeled access not only to new sources of material and labor throughout the world, but also to new markets. American models of conspicuous consumption of goods and services were widely emulated. New technologies promoted the growth of networks of economic, political, and cultural power that reach everywhere in the world today. These processes are known as globalization⁵. Remodernist and Sensationalist artists have absorbed these energies into their art such that it now flourishes on a spectacular scale.

Transnational Turnings.

In the years after World War II and since, it became increasingly apparent that the nation states that had come to define the modern geopolitical order were undergoing changes of radical kinds, both internally and in the nature of their relationships with others. The term “transnational” has come to mean more than the interactions—legal, political, sporting, or linguistic—between nations for which the term “international” better serves. It means something more than the management or delivery of services in more than one country, typically by a “multinational” corporation, or a multinational task force in the case of a military or a peacekeeping intervention. These usages tend to preserve the sense of nation states as relatively stable geopolitical, social, and cultural entities, which enter into relationships with their similarly structured partners. In the context of this book, by contrast, the word “transnational” is used to highlight the widespread sense that decolonizing forces, clashing with those of globalization, have obliged the modern nation state to understand itself as undergoing massive transformation, internally and in its external relationships. Some states, especially those formed by colonizers who set borders to divide existing tribal groups or ethnic concentrations, strain to remain within the nation-state framework, becoming what is known as “failed states.” Provisionality can become evident in a nation’s relationships to others, especially those with the power to invade it or regulate it in a less direct way. Transnationality is evident in the increasing role of what are called “nonstate actors,” that is, international cooperative and quasi-regulatory organizations (for example, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund), transnational nongovernmental organizations (for example, Médecins San Frontiers [Doctors Without Borders], Oxfam, and Amnesty International), or terrorist organizations (of which Al-Qaeda is the best known). Such accelerating complexity means that each nation in the world is experiencing acute questioning of its sense of identity relative to others, and severe disruption to its internal, community-defining processes. Individual citizens, entire social formations, and international organizations have come to realize that we are all living in a condition of permanent transition, and moving toward uncertain, unpredictable futures. The sense that all societies, whatever the impediments, were moving toward a better, more comfortable and equitable future has, sadly, been lost. Our highly differentiated, multidirectional, and, at times, seemingly incommensurable contemporaneity within this shared uncertainty is what makes us no longer modern.

We can see these changes at work in the shift from modern to contemporary art—indeed, they are prominent among its underlying, driving forces. After the Russian Revolution, but especially post-1940, Soviet-style Socialist Realism was imposed throughout the Second World as the official aesthetic. Enforced by the state, it occupied a position of cultural prominence equivalent to that of institutionalized, popular “Modern Art” in the First World. During the 1970s and 1980s, as centralized control began to loosen, many artists adopted Western styles of painterly abstraction as a mode of unofficial or nonconformist practice. Others revived the innovations of early twentieth-century avant-garde artists from their region. Still others began to experiment with art “actions” that paralleled the happenings, environments, and Performance Art of the West. These contributed notably to the collapse of the Soviet system. After 1990, artists from Eastern and Central Europe and in China interacted with art being made both elsewhere in their region and in the West, quickly developing distinctive kinds of contemporary art.

Many nonaligned countries in Asia, Oceania, Africa, the Caribbean, and South America were understood during the Cold War period as belonging to the Third World. Each of these regions had been subject to more than a century of colonization or at least semi-colonial dependence, but achieved independence from their European overlords at points throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Long-standing visual cultures such as those of Japan and China had undergone varying degrees of modernization during those times, yet developed artworld support systems (museums, schools, markets, collectors, interpreters) were rare, except in countries dominated by immigrants, such as Brazil and Argentina, and in settler colonies, the outposts of empire, such as South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Independence brought a widespread desire for national culture, including art, that would draw on local traditions but stand alongside modern art elsewhere, not least in the West. Some artists adopted a more confrontational approach to Western art, reflecting tensions in relationships between parts of the world that continue to be felt today.

“Fourth World” was the term applied to the cultures of peoples from Third World countries that had immigrated to the West for political, economic, or other reasons. They created culturally specific diasporas, and specific kinds of exilic art. At the same time, indigenous peoples throughout the world pursued traditional cultural forms while under duress of many kinds. For all of these peoples, diasporic and indigenous, art became an important means to perpetuate traditions and to register ethnic identity within the larger social formation. Some of this art took explicitly, and often surprisingly, contemporary form.

Transnational visual cultures show us what the world is like in all of its neocolonialist variety, manifesting the conflicted diversity of contemporary life. More productively than any other communicative medium, these arts and their institutional forms (for example, the ubiquitous art biennales held around the world, the plethora of websites) are reshaping our capacity to grasp the larger forces at work in the world today. Imagining the local within larger world-pictures is their main interest, their unique strength, and the basis of their likely persistence.

Contemporaneity.

The era of the European and North American colonizers seems to be entering its final days, yet their influence persists, and is taking new forms. While some believe that the United States stands alone as the world’s “last remaining superpower,” as the only “hyperpower,” others point to its failures in national and international policy during the years since 2001 as evidence that no nation retains the kind or extent of geopolitical influence once wielded by the advanced countries of the modern period. The economic rise of China and India is acknowledged, but it remains to be seen whether their efforts at global influence will be of the same kind.

In the twenty-first century, nation states no longer align themselves according to the four-tier system of First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds. Multinational corporations based in the EuroAmerican centers no longer control the world’s economy, just significant parts of it. New global corporations are located in South, East, and North Asia. Manufacturing, distribution, and services are themselves dispersed around the globe, and linked to delivery points by new technologies and old-fashioned labor. Some would argue that, with globalization, capitalism has achieved its pure form. Certainly, the living standard of millions has been lifted, but only at enormous cost to social cohesion, peaceful cohabitation, and natural resources. Some national and local governments, as well as many international agencies, seek to regulate this flow and assuage its worst side effects—so far without conspicuous success. The institutions that drove modernity seem, to date, incapable of dealing with the most important unexpected outcome of their efforts: the massive disruptions to natural ecosystems that now seem to threaten the survival of the Earth itself. Awareness of this possibility has increased consciousness of our inescapably shared, mutually dependent existence on this fragile planet.

The most recent generation of contemporary artists has inherited this daunting complexity. Their responses have been cautious, devoted to displaying concrete aspects of this complexity to those who would see it, and to helping to reshape the human capacity to make worlds on small, local scales. For all its modesty, and pragmatism, theirs is a hope-filled enterprise. Their efforts allow us to hope that contemporary art is becoming—perhaps for the first time in history—truly an art of the world. Certainly, as I will show, it comes from the whole world, and it tries to imagine the world as a whole.

Notes

¹ For further discussion of the concepts “contemporary” and “contemporaneity,” see my “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” in Terry Smith, Nancy Condee, and Okwui Enwezor, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity and Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–19. For an earlier version of the ideas advanced in this book, see my What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

² Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 186. Note especially their diagram on page 187, A Heuristic World Regionalization Scheme, which I have followed, with modifications.

³ See http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/english/htmain.htm. Click on “Select a region or country” under “Maps.”

⁴ A useful introduction, classic texts, and more recent contributions may be found in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Oxford: Routledge, 2004, 2nd ed.)

⁵ The best introduction to this concept remains Robert Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992).