I waited and waited for the big art revolution to happen at the end of the 20th century, just as it had exploded in France at the close of the 19th century with Paul Cézanne’s Post-Impressionism and, soon after the turn, with Pablo Picasso’s Cubism and Marcel Duchamp’s proto-Conceptualism, all of which emerged within a couple of decades of one another. The notion of a fin de siècle is supposed to embody an intense period of cultural regeneration and vibrancy – think of Gustav Klimt in Vienna, Oscar Wilde in London and of similar figures in Berlin, Budapest and New York. Any such literary, artistic, philosophical and aesthetic upheaval typically follows years of relative stagnation, cynicism and pessimism in those fields.
So the year 1999 came and went, or as Prince sang, “2000 zero zero party over, oops! Out of time!” And yet the stagnation, cynicism and pessimism remained. In fact, the millennium was eerily quiet.
There was no new movement in art, no literary heroes and no genre-defying albums on the horizon, just a giant dome in the Docklands and a not-so New Labour government. There was no Tiananmen Square, no Vietnam, seemingly nothing to protest, nothing to write home about and nothing to shape the next century.
All we were preoccupied with was whether the Millennium Bug would catastrophically reset all of our computer’s date and time settings. The decade would become known as “the noughties”, for goodness’ sake: that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of an intellectual atmosphere conducive to serious thought or societal advancement.
Digital
And yet, it was the impact of the digital age (despite the initial shrug of the Millennium Bug) that would come to define that early era of the 21st century. Art was not immune from this epochal shift and while you might not associate the early burst of internet art with any real revolution – given that the original so-called “net.art” phenomenon had arguably ended in 2000, when it was included in the Whitney Biennial and so effectively institutionalised and somehow neutered – the seeds of that movement would nevertheless grow swiftly and begin to colonise the wider art world.
The signs were subtle at first. A Brooklyn-based hacker and musician named Cory Arcangel decided to split open and amend an old Nintendo cartridge, and reduce the classic platform game Super Mario Bros. to nothing but a serene projection in which only a few lonely pixelated white clouds wandered across an 8-bit, blue sky (for a work entitled Super Mario Clouds, 2002). He then “modded” other arcade machines so that Tetris moved at treacle speeds, and that the computer-controlled player of sports games could never score a slam-dunk or register a strike at ten-pin bowling. It wasn’t that the games themselves would crash (as it was in the good old days with first-generation consoles) so much as Arcangel had managed to embed that feeling of existential disappointment, with technology and with life, into the very lines of code themselves.
If Arcangel’s retrofitted geekery seeks out the poignant or amusing nature of our new virtual world (also celebrated in his show titles Pro Tools, Power Points and in his profligate use of the Comic Sans font), then the work of another American artist, Wade Guyton, similarly elevated the glitches and mundanities of desktop publishing, ink-jet printing and lo-fi scanning to the heady realms of high art. In the same year as Arcangel’s clouds, Guyton started using an Epson and Microsoft Word to populate his “drawings” and “paintings” with crosses, scrunch marks and jagged bleeds, caused by apparent tray misfeeds and paper jams. Ironically, his computer-printed canvases became highly sought-after commodities themselves, echoing the hollowness of an art market fuelled by newness and nowness. Guyton, hiding behind his typefaces and his OS (the title of his major New York museum show and short for Operating System), has managed to drag abstract art, kicking and screaming, into the digital age.
Whilst we are on the subject of kicking and screaming, no one has captured the post-millennial multimedia malaise quite like a third young American, Ryan Trecartin, whose butt-clenchingly shrill film installations are amped-up portrayals of our Facebook and screen-addicted selves, although perhaps no more revolutionary in their format than the videos of Paul McCarthy were for the pre-DVD generation. Indeed, the idea that all these digitally savvy young artists suddenly changed our landscape in the decade since 2000 is a fallacy, not least because all of them learnt from their predecessors, or as in the case of Christian Marclay – now famed for his 24-hour film cut-and-paste collage The Clock (2010), but whose audiovisual sampling began in the late 70s – many of them are still around and still producing influential work.
In another instance, the Italian duo of Eva and Franco Mattes, also known as 0100101110101101.ORG., joined a long list of net.art collectives and practitioners, including jodi.org, Etoy and RTMark, but have continued their careers into this century, reflecting the increasing paucity of reality or humanity in our virtual environments. Eva and Franco Mattes have mined the impersonal and imperfect nature of online openness by staging a fake suicide on the speed-meeting site Chat Roulette (in their disturbing video, No Fun, 2010) and by attempting to strike up conversations or arrange ceasefires in a virtual shoot ’em-up realm (Freedom, 2010). Such contrary behaviours were almost always met with derision or disbelief in the online world, as if the real world users responsible were hiding any traces of humanity behind the safety and anonymity of their avatars.
Physical
Of course, the idea that art would follow too quickly or too closely the increasingly downloadable and online nature of music and film seems absurd now, especially given the ongoing strength of the art market and the unabated rise in a super-wealthy international collector class, hungry for investment-worthy works to decorate their homes. And while the scale, and worth, of the art object keeps enlarging exponentially and has done since many of the pre-millennial monuments went up (by Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra and others) there is another kind of large-scale art that is similarly immersive and site-specific, but not always spectacular, shiny or necessarily of plaza-filling size, neither is it highly commercial or covetable.
We could call this kind of art physical, experiential or environmental. It’s often immersive, interactive or all-encompassing, as well. Two great British exponents of this newly sensory type of art include Mike Nelson and Karla Black, both of whom use humble or everyday materials to create otherworldly installations. Nelson’s labyrinthine constructions bring about disorientation and displacement in viewers, his alien surroundings and false walls convincingly concealed and built within a gallery or museum interior. Over the last decade he has variously transported us to a terrorist’s cell, a sinister darkroom, an abandoned mini-cab office and a Turkish factory floor. Black, on the other hand, installs drifts of cosmetics, plastics and soils that assault our noses as much as our eyes or bodily boundaries, creating nearly not-there ripostes to macho minimalism and sculptural maximalism.
Political
Rewind back to 2000. There we were, waiting for technology to fail; waiting for something big to happen and then, on 11 September 2001, something did. The World Trade Center collapsed and it changed everything. Suddenly there was nowhere to hide. The War on Terror ensued, a war on Iraq followed, as did a division between East and West, between ideologies, religions, morals and between past and future. One of the few artists to try and make sense of this warmongering madness is the Israeli-born, Berlin-based American Omer Fast, whose 2008 film, Take a Deep Breath, presents us with an alarming scene in a shop after a suicide bomb attack, based on a real event in Jerusalem.
A man, we later discover as the terrorist, lies in the throes of death with various limbs blown off, being attended to by a paramedic. Without warning, the camera pans back to show off-screen arguments about the lead’s lack of acting prowess, who is then duly replaced, but not before the LAPD show up demanding to see the director’s permits to shoot in Los Angeles, among other farcical goings-on.
In his deconstructions of how fictional, filmic worlds are created, Fast has also spliced his own voice into copies of The Terminator (for his piece T3-AEON, 2000) as well as dramatised various interviews with soldiers recently returned from service in Iraq (for The Casting, 2007) or Polish extras from Schindler’s List, (for Spielberg’s List, 2005). Although at times verging on the zeal of a conspiracy theorist, Fast nevertheless successfully reveals the extents to which our preferred news sources or Hollywood accounts of war are manipulated and staged. He does what all good artists should do, and that is to open our eyes a littler wider.
I suppose we also had to wait a long time for anyone really revolutionary, politically active and counter-cultural to emerge from our era of relative shelter and safety, but that figure eventually emerged in the art world as an outspoken Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, whose father Ai Qing was also a dissident poet who spent a total of 26 years either in jail or exile. Ai Weiwei’s 81-day detention by the Chinese authorities in 2011, without any sign of imminent release, was met with worldwide scorn and only added to his previous tales of beatings, buggings and censoring by the secret police as further proof of the once beloved Communist Party’s increasingly heavy-handed and out-of-touch tactics. In addition to his decision to stand up and be counted, Ai Weiwei has produced some notable bodies of politically astute work, including ruminations on his time under house arrest (for S.A.C.R.E.D, 2013) and on the scandals of shoddy building work after the notorious Sichuan earthquakes of 2008 (in works such as Straight, 2008-12).
Spiritual
And yet what passes for radicalism in the 21st century is often merely a re-run or a retreading of footsteps already well trammelled. In the last few years we’ve had numerous attempts to coin a new movement in art, all of which seem to riff on the ructions of a century before – so we’ve had: Meta modern, Altermodern, Off-Modern, Post-postmodern, Post-studio, Newbrow and The New Aesthetic (none of which have held). Indeed, there is no 2013 equivalent of Duchamp’s decision of a hundred years previous to install some upturned plumbing, to place a bicycle wheel on a stool or arrange any number of domestic objects in the consecrated spaces of an art gallery. Our holiest of holies nowadays is the shopping mall, the cinema, the mega museum. The closest we get to spiritual uplift is in communion with our credit cards or via the completion of a computer game. With this in mind, the brilliantly glamorous glass vitrines and faux-shop front windows of Josephine Meckseper foreground the facile nature of consumerism and capitalism, while the tender Manga-infused portraits and arcade machines of David Blandy reveals how thin the line is between reality and an online identity crisis. While much art has gotten too big, too expensive and too full of itself, what won’t stop is art’s ability to reinvent itself like the society it mirrors. And so the wheel turns.
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