Smith - Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity

Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity
Terry Smith
A park in Istanbul during the autumn months of 2001: out from the
manicured grass protrudes the corner section of a new, white-walled build-
ing. Or is it sinking (fig. 1)? High modernist styling like that can only mean
one thing: art gallery. But for what kind of art, and why is it here? Walk
around it and the words Temporary Art appear above the blocked, nearly
inaccessible door. Of course: a gallery or museum of contemporary art. Yet
its duck-rabbit directionality is a puzzle. Are we meant to construe it as the
victim of some unfelt earthquake, historical tragedy, or human neglect? Or
perhaps is it emerging from underground, an architectural chrysalis taking,
triumphantly, its rightful shape?
The answer is left deliberately ambiguous. The creators of this piece of
public art, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, made it for the Seventh
Istanbul Biennale; the park is a part of the exhibition grounds. So it is, first
of all, what the words on it lightheartedly say it is: a temporary work of art.
In other projects by these artists, architectural forms and functions are al-
tered in subtle and amusing ways. In one case, they installed a diving board
so that it pointed out the window of an upper story in a modernist high
rise. For a work entitled SPECTACULAR 2003 the Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf
underwent the transformation of having its entire collection dismantled,
packed into trucks that were driven once around the building, then rein-
stalled exactly as before. In the same year Elmgreen and Dragset installed a
white truck with a caravan as if it had shot through from the other side of
the planet and erupted, jackknifed, at the main crossing of the Galleria,
I wish to thank W. J. T. Mitchell, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee for their acute comments
and Miguel Rojas for assistance with the illustrations.
Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006)

䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3204-0011$10.00. All rights reserved.
681
682 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity
f i g u r e 1. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Powerless Structures—Traces of a Never

Existing History, Figure 222. Mixed media, 2001 (at Istanbul Biennale). Courtesy Galleri Nicolai
Wallner, Copenhagen.
Milan, entitling this work Short Cut. In Istanbul, however, the artists of-
fered an instalment from their Powerless Structures series; the subsiding/
projecting museum is subtitled Traces of a Never Existing History, Figure
222, as if it were an illustration from a future archaeology of the present.
The artists are wittily proposing that contemporary art is concerned with
posing questions, usually about itself, perhaps without much hope of effect,
and destined to end in ambiguity. Contemporary art might, somehow, be
losing touch with time. Yet this work, like many of their others, is potent:
smartly styled, conceptually compact, formally pointed, easy to get, hard
to forget. Such a contradiction between surety of form and uncertainty
as to content is a hallmark of art in the first decade of the twenty-
Te r r y S m i t h is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History

and Theory in the Henry Clay Frick Department of the History of Art and
Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently at work on The
Architecture of Aftermath, What Is Contemporary Art? and, with Nancy Condee
and Okwui Enwezor, Antinomies of Art and Culture.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 683
first century. It prompts the question, Just what is so contemporary about
this kind of apparent contradiction, and why does it pervade art these days?
What Is Contemporary Art Now?

For more than two decades no one has articulated a successful gener-
alization about contemporary art. First there have been fears of essential-
ism, followed by the sheer relief of having shaken off exclusivist theories,
imposed historicisms, and grand narratives, and then, recently, delight in
the simple-seeming pleasures of an open field. More prosaically, the answer
has seemed obvious to the point of banality. Look around you. Contem-
porary art is most—why not all?—of the art that is being made now. It
cannot be subject to generalization and has overwhelmed art history; it is
simply, totally contemporaneous. But this pluralist happymix is illusory.
The question of contemporary art has, in fact, been insistently answered
more narrowly by the acts of artists and the organizations that sustain
them—so much so that these responses are, by now, deeply embedded in
both. (Buried in each other, according to Elmgreen and Dragset.) The re-
sponses do not have singular shape; rather, they embody tendencies towards
both closure and openness. Most accounts highlight the currency of one or
another aspect of current practice: new media, digital imagery, immersive
cinema, national identifications, new internationalism, disidentification,
neomodernism, relational aesthetics, postproduction art, remix cultures.
The list keeps extending. Apologists stress the pivotal connectedness of their
favored approach to at least one significant aspect of contemporary expe-
rience, but usually deny any claims to universality, sighing with relief that
the bad old days of exclusionary dominance are over.1
Nevertheless, it seems to me that, in visual art discourse, two big answers
have come to figure forth amidst the multitude of smaller ones. This is es-
pecially evident in the major world art distribution centers. From broader
world perspectives, however, their prominence is misleading and, perhaps,
self-defeating. The multitudes may be on the cusp of having their day.
Ambitious, big-picture interpretations aim—as they always have—to be
acute descriptions of how particular (artistic) practices relate to general (so-
1. The subtlest presentation of this “de-definitional” perspective during its brief reign was Vad
är samtida konst? / What Is Contemporary Art? ed. Peter Edström, Helene Mohlin, and Anna
Palmqvist (Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden, 3 June–30 July 1989). In a series of publications beginning
in 1984, Arthur Danto sought to define contemporary, as distinct from modern, art as a
posthistorical pluralism, most concisely in the introduction to his After the End of Art:
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, N.J., 1997). The present essay develops from
my What Is Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity, and Art to Come
(Woolloomooloo, N.S.W., 2001) and “What Is Contemporary Art? Contemporaneity and Art to
Come,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 71, nos. 1–2 (2002): 3–15.
cial) conditions. I present them, mostly, in my own terms, for this is a po-
lemic as much as it is a description. I will offer characterizations of two great
forces, in all of their mismatched contention. I will then show them to be
polarities of a dichotomous exchange, the central regions of which are oc-
cupied by a mainstream that is, paradoxically, dispersive: the spilling di-
versity of contemporary practice.
Contemporary as the New Modern

Richard Serra was a leading proponent of informal art, capturing, in
pieces as various as videos showing his hand clutching at falling lead and
his Verb List (1967–68), its commitment to artwork as a demonstration of
active process rather than the realization or termination of a preconception.
He soon developed a powerful strategy for building this kind of dynamism
into works that seem, at first, as reductive and self-contained as most min-
imal sculpture but that draw the spectator into a much more engaged re-
lationship. This energy flows from their size, their evident weight, from the
eccentricity of their angles and the precariousness of their positioning—all
qualities that are exact in relation to each observer’s mobile eyes and body.
Unlike the virtual spatialities of abstract sculpture in the constructivist
mode, but like happenings and environments, Serra’s sculptures require
one to walk close to, around, or through them, in quite specific ways. Huge
sheets of unfinished Cor-Ten steel are stacked up as the only support of each
other, in busy public spaces such as the town center of Bochum, Germany
(Terminal [1977]), or at Broadgate, outside the entrance to the London Stock
Exchange (Fulcrum [1986–87]). Tilted Arc, a 120-foot-long partial cylinder
of raw Cor-Ten steel, over two inches thick and twelve feet high, installed
in the Federal Plaza, New York, in 1981, provoked a controversy fierce
enough to lead to its removal.2
More than any other artist’s work, and not least in its shift back through
art historical time, Serra’s has come to represent what late modern sculpture
means within the frameworks of official contemporary art. At the Guggen-
heim Museum, Bilbao, Frank Gehry shaped the famous “fish” gallery
around Serra’s Snake. When, in 2003, dia:Beacon opened in a converted
factory on the Hudson River, New York, the railroad shed and loading dock
were filled by Serra’s three gigantic Torqued Ellipses and the single steel slab
constituting his Torqued Spiral (fig. 2). In their clarity of form as read by
2. See Richard Serra Sculpture, ed. Rosalind E. Krauss (exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 27 Feb.–13 May 1986); Richard Serra, ed. Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000); and Richard Serra Sculpture 1985–1998, ed. Russell Ferguson, Anthony
McCall, and Clara Weyergraf-Serra (exhibition catalog, Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, 20
Sept. 1998–3 Jan. 1999).
the moving body, and in their muscular dialogue with their surroundings,
these works have a command of space that is exceptional in its resolute
clarity. In such a context, however, older conceptions of museum display—
art’s history, schools, and movements—are banished in the wow! of the aes-
thetic encounter in its distilled form. In elevating this instantaneity towards
awestruck transcendence, the Dia:Beacon displays shift the trenchant spa-
tiality of minimalism at its best towards a peculiarly late modern version of
pure contemporaneousness. In the words of Dia founder Heiner Friedrich:
“Art has no history—there is only a continuous present. . . . The non-stop
presence of art! Velázquez, Goya, Manet are all in one line, which extends
to Matisse and Warhol. If art is alive, it is always new.”3
f i g u r e 2. Richard Serra, Double-Torqued Ellipse. Cor-Ten steel, 1997. Dia Art

Foundation. 2000. Installation view at Dia:Beacon, Hudson River, New York.
3. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “The Mission: How the Dia Art Foundation Survived Feuds,
Legal Crises, and Its Own Ambitions,” The New Yorker, 19 May 2003, p. 46. An earlier, yet
quintessentially modernist, version of this kind of aesthetic valuing may be found in the
“instantaneousness” that Michael Fried, in his famous 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” saw as
definitive of a convinced response to modernist art and counterposed to the “theatricality” of
minimalism’s address to the spectator (Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art and Objecthood:
Essays and Reviews [Chicago, 1998], p. 167).
During the 2003 exhibit of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle at the Gug-
genheim Museum, New York, the famous rotunda spiralled up and away
from sight, into a chaste light, whiter than usual. A corporate logo hovered
above the skylight; the lozenge shape seemed familiar, but what was that
brand? Cobalt blue swam up from beneath one’s feet. Pink patches, bright
banners and competing noises composed a swirling panorama. From every
side and above, particularly on the giant, five-screen Jumbotron, video
monitors flashed out images of fantastical yet clearly fashionable characters
involved in high-speed action or ritually sedate posing. Punk rock exploded
through attenuated sounds, crescendos surged out of ambient Muzak. It
was, at once, an extraordinary work of art, an art theme park, and a daring
mix of far-out art, music video, cool design, and high-tech and crossover
fashion that for an entire generation is definitive of contemporary experi-
ence. The Cremaster cycle takes the form of five feature-length 35mm films
and a growing number of videos, drawings, collages, sculptures, and in-
stallations that relate directly to the films—a mobility of medium typical of
all forms of contemporary art. Typical, too, is the esoteric portentousness
of its central idea: the cremaster is the muscle that governs the chromosome
switch from female to male and then controls testicular contraction. Am-
biguous kernel, assured shell—again. Its $8 million production costs were,
for the time, exceptional.4
The films narrate an elaborate, self-enclosed allegory. Set in Bronco Sta-
dium, Boise, Idaho, the artist’s hometown, Cremaster 1 (1995) tracks a
troupe of dancers who take the shapes of still-androgynous gonads, sym-
bolizing pure potential. Cremaster 2 (1999), set in the Canadian Rockies and
Utah, connects three themes entailing movement backwards in time: the
movement of glaciers, the stories of murderer Garry Gilmore and of escap-
ologist Harry Houdini, and the lives of drone bees. Cremaster 3 (2002) con-
nects the construction of the Chrysler Building to that of Solomon’s Temple
and provides a setting for an escalating clash between Hiram Abiff, architect
of Solomon’s Temple and archetypal Master Builder in the Masonic Order
(played by Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney) (fig. 3).
Surmounting the five levels of initiation into the Masonic rites drives this
episode, as well as the interlude (subtitled The Order) in which Barney over-
comes complex obstacles at each level of the Guggenheim Museum’s ro-
tunda, themselves now symbolic of each of the films in the Cremaster cycle.
Set on the Isle of Man, Cremaster 4 (1994) stages a motorcycle race between
two teams travelling in opposite directions around the perimeter of the
4. See Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, ed. Nancy Spector (exhibition catalog, Museum
Ludwig, Cologne, 6 June–7 Sept. 2002).
f i g u r e 3. Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3, 2002. Production still from film,
showing Richard Serra as Grand Master. 䉷 2002 Matthew Barney.
Photograph: Chris Winget. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
roughly circular island, representing in turn the cremaster muscle ascended,
thus undifferentiated but tending to the feminine, and the muscle de-
scended, thus tending to differentiation and the masculine. The teams are,
however, symbolically tied to each other. Descension is finally attained in
Cremaster 5 (1997). Set at key sites in Budapest—the Lánchı́d (Chainlink)
Bridge, the Opera House, and the Gellért Thermal Baths—it performs, as
if in a dream, the longing, despair, and eventual death of the Queen of Chain
(played by Ursula Andress) and her Diva, Magician, and Giant (all played
by the artist).
Despite its complex structure and postmodern stylistics, this is a quest
narrative, a search for belonging through places that have their own im-
peratives amidst physical and social processes that are strangely subject to
incessant fusion and separation, isolation and metamorphosis. Although
more up-to-date and engaged with media culture, the work requires a re-
lationship to the spectator as direct as it is in Serra’s work. This—the Cre-
master cycle claims—is what it is to be in the era of cultural division and
genetic engineering. The same spirit of individual battling against unfath-
omable odds to surrender individuality and achieve community accep-
tance, the same insatiably active embrace of ultimate passivity, underlies the
success of novels and films such as Lord of the Rings and the vast member-
ship, worldwide, of cults, organized religions, and civic organizations. Like
them, this spirit makes the Cremaster cycle at once extraordinary and banal.
Works such as these provide the first powerful answer to the question of
the nature of art in these times: contemporary art, as a movement, has be-
come the new modern or, what amounts to the same thing, the old modern
in new clothes. In its most institutionalized forms—from the triumphalist
overreach of the Guggenheim Museum’s global franchising through the Old
Master elegance of the installations at Dia:Beacon to the confused gesturing
in the contemporary galleries when the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, reopened in 2004—it is the latest phase in the century-and-a-half-
long story of modern art in Europe and its cultural colonies, a continuation
of the modernist lineage, warily selected not least in an attempt to preserve
this cultural balance of power. Official contemporary art resonates with the
vivid confidence and the comforting occlusion that comes with it, taking
itself to be the high cultural style of its time. Think (as a beginning of a list
of the best of it) of not only the work by Serra and Barney but also of Jeff
Koons at fifty, the subadolescent consumerlands of Takashi Murakami and
Mariko Mori, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as distinct from Mad Max,
The Matrix Revolutions, Gerhard Richter’s paintings, Andreas Gursky’s
scale, Thomas Struth’s subjects and Thomas Demand’s style, Wang Quing-
song’s The Night Revels of Lao Li alongside his China Mansion, Damien
Hirst’s early work but not the Benneton-advertisement-style return to
painting in his 2005 exhibition The Elusive Truth! Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It
All! and so on, through all the major survey exhibitions and the latest sales
of contemporary art for record prices.5 Someone, soon, may baptize it “con-
temporism”—a contraction, perhaps, of contemporary modernism—or
“remodernism”—emphasizing its renovating, recursive character—to pre-
dictable scorn followed by eventual acceptance. In architecture, the parallel
impulse has recovered an old label: late modern.6 Better, perhaps, not to
name it: like all unspecifiable but deeply desired values, it is more powerful
when taken for granted.
Passages between Cultures

The main action of Shirin Neshat’s 2001 video Passage consists of a group
of white-shirted men carrying something, probably a body, across a north
African/Middle Eastern desert (fig. 4). Lacking symbols, hierarchy, and any
evident ritual, their purpose—however urgent and relentless it might seem
from the driving Philip Glass score that accompanies them—is as ambig-
uous as the state of the body they bear. The video constantly intercuts to a
group of women circled closely together, wailing loudly and beating at
something unseen on the stony ground between them. In the penultimate
scene, the men deliver their nearly invisible burden into the space cleared
by the women. Just at that moment, a fire breaks out and travels along a
triangular stone wall. The camera pans to a young girl who, it suddenly
seems, has been hiding there all along, a silent witness to something un-
fathomable. Equally, she may have been abruptly conjured into this role by
the process itself. This work is typical of the kind of contemporary art that
locates itself at the emotional core of a culture that seems to have nothing
that is contemporary about it, yet it persists. Indeed, in parts of the world,
it is ascendant. It is a culture that draws a worldly feminist artist (whose
work tracks the inner worlds of exile, including the trenchant power of ste-
reotypes) to its implacable differencing between men and women as an ex-
perience of trauma. In contrast to Barney’s baroque allegories, irony is
irrelevant. Anachronism is relevant, but it is questioned. The very idea that
one kind of culture, the modernizing ones, gets to decide that another is
anachronistic is questioned (not least in Neshat’s activation of the aesthetics
of Iranian film). Before 9/11, in a number of powerful works—Turbulent
5. On this topic, see my “Primacy, Convergence, Currency: Marketing Contemporary Art in

the Conditions of Contemporaneity” (parts 1 and 2), Art Papers 29 (May–June 2005): 22–27 and
(July–Aug. 2005): 22–27.
6. For a discussion of contemporary architecture parallel to that offered in this article see my
The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago, 2006).
f i g u r e 4. Shirin Neshat, Passage. Production still from video. 䉷 Shirin Neshat 2001.
Photograph: Larry Barns. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
(1998), Fervor (2000), and Rapture and Possessed (both 2001)—Neshat

showed that feudal structures not only persist in the cultures of the Middle
East and northern Africa but also are present at the roots of all of our re-
lationships. The last scene of Passage implies that death exists beyond gender
division, as does the recurrence of life, however marked both may be by
trauma. This is to show us something that is, at once, both incomprehen-
sibly strange yet hauntingly familiar, without pretending (in however subtle
or deferred ways) to possess the tools to resolve this tension in favor of one
or another category of redemption. Art growing out of the complexities of
contemporaneity cannot offer easy outs.7
Neshat came to prominence as a visual poet of the inscriptions of power,
tradition, and institutionalized religion on the bodies of women in patri-
archal cultures, notably in her photograph series The Women of Allah (1993–
97). Iranian performance artist Ghazel approaches the same subjects, but
from within a very different aesthetic. In her set of three videos, Me in 2000,
2001, 2002 (fig. 5), she parodies both Islamic dress codes and the typical
tropes of conceptual art by performing a number of nominated actions
7. See Shirin Neshat, ed. Lisa Corrin (exhibition catalog, Serpentine Gallery, London, and Wein
Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2000), and Shirin Neshat, ed. Giorgio Verzotti (exhibition catalog, Charta and
Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte, Milan, 30 Jan.–5 May 2002). The complexities of Neshat’s
situatedness are explored by Wendy Meryem K. Shaw, “Ambiguity and Audience in the Films of
Shirin Neshat,” Third Text, no. 57 (Winter 2001–2): 43–52.
based on commonsense sentiments while dressed in her burka. In Everyone
Dreams of Staying Young and Fresh, for example, she wraps her already fully
clad body in food-preserving foil. This rather desperate hilarity stands in
marked contrast to the portentous character of Neshat’s most recent epics,
such as Tooba (2002) and Women without Men (2004).
The contradictions in play here achieve explicitly public political dimen-
sions in the work of many artists. In Ayanah Moor’s 2004 wall installation,
Never.Ignorant.Gettin’ Goals.Accomplished., the words of the title—an ex-
hortation much used in encouragement manuals, including those aimed at
African Americans, seeking to promote “the New Negro”—are juxtaposed
with a mural-sized image taken from a magazine color photograph of Con-
doleezza Rice being kissed by President George W. Bush during the pre-
sentation of her as secretary of state (fig. 6). Seen one way, the words and
the image are in exact complementarity, flush with the self-evident reali-
zation of equal opportunity. This looks like what the televisual opportunity
was intended to be: a resplendent advertisement for the American Dream.
When, however, we read the words as marching on the image, and link left
to right the first letters of each word, the opposite meaning erupts. Estab-
lishment opportunism kicks us in the stomach and claws its way back in.
The moral vacuity at the heart of the current administration stands naked,
smirking and squirming, in the light. The illusion of simple equality is oblit-
erated, irretrievably, by laying bare its circumstantial cost.
Moor has recently taken an oath to reject further offers to show her work
in exhibitions that are framed in terms of black American identity,including
those devoted to interrogating its conditions and questioning its limits. This
puts the entire trajectory of her work to date at risk. This depth of impa-
f i g u r e 5. Ghazel, Me in 2003. Video still, installation at Havana Biennale, 2003. Photograph:

Miguel Rojas-Sotelo.
f i g u r e 6. Ayanah Moor, Never.Ignorant.Gettin’ Goals.Accomplished. Installation, 2004.

Courtesy of the artist.
tience with categorization is becoming more common and signals a shift

beyond the framework in which Neshat, for example, continues to work.
These comparisons bring us through and up to the current edges of the
second wide-scale answer of what constitutes truly contemporary art: that
which emerges from within the conditions of contemporaneity, including
the remnants of the cultures of modernity and postmodernity, but which
projects itself through and around these, as an art of that which actually is
in the world, of what it is to be in the world, and of that which is to come.
Its impulses are specific yet worldly, even multitudinous, inclusive yet op-
positional and anti-institutional, concrete but also various, mobile, and
open-ended. In 2002, after two decades in which it propelled the Biennale
circuit, this kind of art swarmed the precincts of contemporary art, un-
mistakably and irretrievably, via the platforms of Documenta 11. For the first
time in a major international survey exhibition, art from second, third, and
fourth worlds, and that concerned with traffic between these and the first
world, took up most of the spaces and set the agenda. (One major recog-
nition was that dividing the world into these worlds had been a ruinous
enterprise and was failing.) Confused curatorial retreat and a fierce rear-
guard action—fought in the name of the rights of the spectator—has halted
this advance, but for who knows how long?
Curators Stage the Debate

The debate over Documenta 11 brought to the surface certain value an-
tipathies that have been looming since around 1980 and have been at the
baseline of artworld discourse for at least half a decade. Sometimes, when
the grinding between them gets too hard, they appear in raw terms. Thus
Kurt Varnedoe wrote, in 2000, locating the historical significance of
MoMA’s collections of recent art as manifest in a series of millennial ex-
hibitions prior to the museum’s closure for renovation:
There is an argument to be made that the revolutions that originally
produced modern art, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, have not been concluded or superseded—and thus that contempo-
rary art today can be understood as the ongoing extension and revision
of those founding innovations and debates. The collection of The Mu-
seum of Modern Art is, in a very real sense, that argument. Contempo-
rary art is collected and presented at this Museum as part of modern
art—as belonging within, responding to, and expanding upon the
framework of initiatives and challenges established by the earlier history
of progressive art since the dawn of the twentieth century.8
Compare this conception of what was most at stake in millennial art ex-
hibitions to that of another curator, Okwui Enwezor, introducing the plat-
forms that constituted Documenta 11, of which he was artistic director. After
a series of discussions, held in different cities throughout 2001, and covering
such topics as “Democracy Unrealized” (Vienna and Berlin), “Experiments
with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconcili-
ation” (New Delhi), “Creolité and Creolization” (St. Lucia), and “Under
Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos” (La-
gos), the exhibition opened in Kassel, Germany, in 2002.
The collected result in the form of a series of volumes and exhibitions is
placed at the dialectical intersection of contemporary art and culture. Such
an intersection equally marks the limits out of which the postcolonial, post–
cold war, postideological, transnational, deterritorialized, diasporic, global
8. Kirk Varnedoe, “Introduction,” in Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA since 1980, ed.
Varnedoe, Paola Antonelli, and Joshua Siegel (exhibition catalog, MoMA, New York, 28 Sept.
2000–30 Jan. 2001), p. 12. For a critique of MoMA’s millennial exhibitions, particularly
Modernstarts: People. Places. Things., see Franco Moretti, “MoMA2000: The Capitulation,” New
Left Review 4, 2d ser. (July–Aug. 2000): 98–102.
world has been written. This dialectical enterprise attempts to establish
imaginative and concrete links within the various projects of modernity.
Their impact, as well as their material and symbolic ordering, is woven
through procedures of translation, interpretation, subversion, hybridiza-
tion, creolization, displacement, and reassemblage. What emerges in this
transformation in different parts of the world produces a critical ordering
of intellectual and artistic networks of the globalizing world. The exhibition
as a diagnostic toolbox actively seeks to stage the relationships, conjunc-
tions, and disjunctions between different realities: between artists, institu-
tions, disciplines, genres, generations, processes, forms, media, activities. In
short, between identity and subjectification. Linking together the first four
platforms, the Kassel exhibition counterposed the supposed purity and au-
tonomy of the art object against a rethinking of modernity based on ideas
of transculturality and extraterritoriality. Thus, the exhibition project of the
fifth platform was less a receptacle of commodity objects than a container
for a plurality of voices, a material reflection on a series of disparate and
interconnected actions and processes.9
Seeking a middle path between these two contending forces—one a tir-
ing juggernaut, the other a swarming of attack vehicles—has become com-
mon. A recent Hamburger Kunstverein exhibition, Formalismus, was
conceived, in the words of Berlin critic Diedrich Diederichsen, as “a reex-
amination of the basic ideas of modernism in light of the very contemporary
cognizance that every detail of presentation and production is already con-
taminated by specific histories.”10 Translating this into art discursive polem-
ics, this amounts to a rereading of residual modernist formalism through
the repeating, remixing lens of relational aesthetics, in the not-so-secret
hope of surprising with an object-focussed art more integral, more powerful
than both popular, everyday-life recycling practices and “a world choked
with referentiality.”11
Grounding one set of values, these days, usually means doing so in re-
lation to other sets. Diederichsen understands the relationship between
what I have described as the two big answers this way:
9. See Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11—Platform 5: Exhibition (exhibition
catalog, Kassel, 8 June–15 Sept. 2002), p. 55. The exhibition has attracted much partisan comment,
pro and con. More useful are questions such as those raised by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie,
“Ordering the Universe: Documenta 11 and the Apotheosis of the Occidental Gaze,” Art Journal 64
(Spring 2005): 80–89.
10. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Formalismus,” Artforum 29 (Mar. 2005): 231.
11. Ibid. He alludes to Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza
Woods, and Mathieu Copeland (1998; Dijon, 2002) and Post-Production (New York, 2002), both
discussed in Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004):
51–79.
Theoretical ambitions notwithstanding, the exhibition offered a sophis-
ticated overview of art today. The work provided an alternative to cer-
tain regressive and particularistic tendencies: on the one hand, the
return to the normality of painting and spectacular images in keeping
with the logic of the art market; on the other, the recourse to an art that
is satisfied with constructing global networks of semi-politicized crea-
tive subcultures.12
From where he stands, both of the big answers are reductive options, and
each is as empty as the other. To him, the only way forward is between them,
via “dialectical synthesis.” His approach is certainly synthetic, but it is di-
alectical only in the simplest, static sense. A more complex sense of dialec-
tical fury was a key to Enwezor’s conception of Documenta 11. For me, the
“dialectic” is between three terms (only two of which I have set out so far)
that are tied to each other, uncomfortably but of necessity, as contraries that
are only partially synthesizable, that are highly generative but only as sup-
plements of their mismatching—that are, in a word, antinomies.
Problems and a Proposal

A further step needs to be taken. While the two big picture approaches
have an undeniably powerful currency and are accurate accounts as far as
they go, neither of them fully addresses the changes in actual artistic prac-
tices that have, for arguably three decades now, marked out more and more
artistic production as distinctively contemporary—as opposed to that
which continues to be made in modernist, or even postmodern, modes. The
“contemporary art” juggernaut operates primarily in terms of frame-
works—managerial, curatorial, corporate, historical, commercial, educa-
tional—imposed by art institutions, themselves a key part of a now
pervasive, beguilingly distractive but at bottom hollow cultural industry.
The guerrilla swarming of the others is marked by acknowledgment of the
psychic, social, cultural, and political settings in which art is made, of the
demands that these conditions make upon practice, and the extent to which
they provide the content of much contemporary art and establish its cir-
cuitry of communication. (It will be obvious already that the second in-
corporates the first; I separate them here to highlight an important tension
within contemporary art, one to which I shall keep returning.) A third, and
better, answer would be one in which the smaller-scale strategies listed in
my opening paragraph, along with many others, are understood not as mere
artworld stylistics but as symptoms of a limited number of powerful, shared
tendencies that are themselves the outcome, not of a persistent modernist
12. Diederichsen, “Formalismus,” p. 231.
formalism, but of the great changes of the 1960s and 1970s, the paradigm
shifters internal to art itself, and those of a world reshaped by rapid decol-
onization and incipient globalization. This is the domain across which
something strange, almost impossible, occurs, and has been occurring for
decades. We might call it dialectical supplementarity or, better, antinomic
exchange. It is just this quality, let me suggest, that infuses truly contem-
porary art and is the key to its contemporaneity.
Before exploring this idea in any depth, some conceptual issues need to
be cleared, some obvious objections met. On the face of it, calling the art
of our day contemporary tells us nothing other than the banal fact that it
is being made now. It is something that could have been said at any time,
and, in the past at least, the contemporaneous qualities of an artwork—
however initially attractive—were usually the least interesting things about
it. To periodize the ephemeral as contemporary art might be to repeat the
mistake made when the same was done with modern art, only more so,
because the word contemporary—in its ordinary usages—is even less res-
onant than the word modern. Contemporary art seems a vacuous place-
holder, but for what? Is there something there that cannot name itself—or
not yet? Or is it simply a fancy name for the most refined of those objects
that serve spectacle society by inducing in their beholders the preferred state
of attenuated distraction? Similarly, it is fair to ask, What is contemporaneity
other than a pointer (empty as a signifier, overfull as a signified) to whatever
it is that is occurring in all of the world right now? How could such a term
match, let alone supplant, modernity and postmodernity as a descriptor of
the state of things?
In logic, these objections fail because they could, themselves, be made at
any time. They are posed, however, in more pragmatic realms: studios, desk-
tops, galleries, marketplaces. The interesting question is whether or not
there is something distinctive about the present conjunction of forces in
such realms that attracts this kind of paradox. Donald Kuspit, for one, senses
that there is. In a recent article on “The Contemporary and the Historical”
he unleashes most of the standard objections against efforts to see structure
in the present chaos, yet acknowledges that something has changed:
There has always been more contemporary than historical art—or, to
put it more broadly, there has always been more contemporaneity than
historicity—but this fact only became emphatically explicit in moder-
nity.
Art history’s attempt to control contemporaneity—and with that
the temporal flow of art events—by stripping certain art events of their
idiosyncracy and incidentalness in the name of some absolute system of
value, was overwhelmed by the abundance of contemporary art evi-
dence that proposed alternative and often radically contrary ideas of
value.13
He does not specify precisely when this change occurred, but his
examples all have it being introduced in the 1960s, when “the turbulent
pluralism of modern art . . . increased exponentially in the postmodern
situation” (“CH”). He takes this to be the naturally, or at least historically,
evolved state of contemporary art production, and so he attacks artists, crit-
ics, curators, and historians who would try to second-guess art history by
preferring “the happy few or One and Only truly and absolutely significant
artist” (“CH”). The responsible role for criticism in this context is, he be-
lieves, to keep advancing a “pluralism of critical interpretations” of current,
recent, and past art in order to “keep it in contemporary play.” For Kuspit,
“the power of the contemporary comes from the insecurity of being ephem-
eral,” so that nominating particular artworks, or works by select artists, as
today’s art for the future is to reduce them to “sterile homogeneity”—to
kill off precisely that power to persist and to attract future critical interest
(“CH”). In the current context, which he sees quite accurately as domi-
nated, on the one hand, by a Malthusian overproduction of artists and, on
the other, by the exclusivist superficiality of extraordinary auction prices
and media-sensationalist celebrity, any form of interpretive generalization
will be self-defeating at best, at worst complicit. When this is put alongside
the incommensurate particularity and radical incompleteness that is nat-
ural to the contemporary, the only option for criticism is, he believes, the
making of “an interpretive case for a particular art’s interestingness by
tracking its environmental development in the context of the observer-
interpreter’s phenomenological articulation of his or her complex experi-
ence of it” (“CH”). Criticism, then, not history. Or history as accreted
criticism.
Kuspit is right about the dangers of generalization in a situation where
the shots are being called by inimical institutional, media, and market
forces. But singularizing particularity, however shrouded in objections to
the larger forces, is no solution. An engaged, implicated relativism is more
difficult, but more responsible. Here is my proposal. I believe that the ques-
tion, What is contemporary art now? requires a response consisting neither
of discerning a middle path between two of the big answers sketched above
nor of setting them into either/or confrontation. Rather, it involves taking
the three answers together as each containing differing kinds, and degrees,
13. Donald Kuspit, “The Contemporary and the Historical,” Artnet, 13 Apr. 2005, www.artnet.
com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit4-14-05.asp; hereafter abbreviated “CH.” These views are
given fuller treatment in Kuspit, The End of Art (New York, 2004).
of present-making power. We should treat them as antinomies—that is, as
statements about reality that, when linked, are contradictions incapable of
mutual resolution without the obliteration of all but one, yet each of which
remains true in itself.14 We should recognize the energy of their profound
contention. Every situation that is truly contemporary is an outcome of the
friction between them. Working within but also against this general condi-
tion, art supplies provisional syntheses, provides pauses in the overall rush
into the unsynthesizable, showing its flows as if in section or as glimpses fro-
zen into objects intended for passersby, modelling the minutiae of the world’s
processes as supplements deposited in their wake. These are the kinds of
time that art is taking these days, this is how it uncovers images, these are
the ways in which it arrives at made things, and why it sets up settings.15
Dislocation and Situatedness

When I think of artists whose work has, over the past few years, tapped
closest into the demands of contemporaneity, I recognize that all of them
are committed to an art that turns on long-term, exemplary projects that
discern the antinomies of the world as it is, that display the workings of
globality and locality, and that imagine ways of living ethically within
them: Turkey Tolson Tjuppurrula’s painted meditations on peace, Rover
Thomas’s ancient dreaming in the present, Emily Kngwarreye’s withheld
exposures of her earthworlds, Gordon Bennett’s black/white Australian
history paintings, the revelatory hoardings of Georges Adéagbo, Hans
Haacke’s persistent criticality, the war architecture of Lebbeus Woods,
14. I thank Okwui Enwezor for reminding me of this relation; it was crucial to the
conceptualization of the symposium Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and
Culture after the Twentieth Century, jointly convened by us with Nancy Condee and held at the
University of Pittsburgh, 4–6 November 2004, in which many of the issues raised in this essay were
canvassed. See Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity and Contemporaneity, ed.
Smith, Nancy Condee, and Enwezor (Durham, N.C., forthcoming).
15. As I write these lines, my mind’s eye passes across the street and through the rooms of the
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, where the fifty-fourth Carnegie International was shown,
November 2004 to March 2005. A number of works in that show display an urge to engage with
contemporaneity in the ways I have just sketched. These include Kutlug Ataman’s Kuba (2004),
Paul Chan’s Happiness (Finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles
Fourier (2000–2003), Maurizio Cattelan’s Now (2004), Francis Alÿs’s The Prophet (a series begun
1992), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Reading Inaow for Female Corpse (2001), Fernando Bryce’s
Revolución (2004), a number of recent paintings by Neo Rausch, Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine II
(2002), Julie Mehretu’s Untitled (Stadia) (2004), Isa Genzhken’s Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death
(2003), Rachael Harrison’s Untitled (Perth Amboy) (2001), and Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s film,
Driftwood (1999). Carnegie International curator Laura Hoptman opted for art that, she felt, dealt
with “the Ultimates. . . . fundamentally human questions: the nature of life and death, the
existence of God, the anatomy of belief ” (Laura Hoptman, “The Essential Thirty-eight,” The Fifty-
fourth Carnegie International, ed. Hoptman [exhibition catalog, Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh, 9 Oct. 2004–20 Mar. 2005], pp. 17, 35).
Doris Salcedo’s registrations of enforced disappearance, Richard Pettibon,
Tania Bruguera, and Jorge Macchi on the vicissitudes of public speech, Allan
Sekula’s tracking of global maritime flows, Mark Lombardi’s delicate dia-
grams of the criminality of international economies, Zoe Leonard’s records
of economic place making, Fiona Hall’s meditations on cultural currency,
Wenda Gu’s united nations project, Thomas Hirschhorn’s antimonuments,
William Kentridge tapping his country’s racial unconscious, Chantal Ack-
erman charting border crossings, the arch commentary of the Atlas Group,
the communal cultural work of groups such as Huit Fachette and Woch-
enkausur, Felix Gonzales-Torres’s reflections on personal loss, Cindy Sher-
man, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Ilona Németh, and Marlene Dumas
figuring the misshaping of women by societies, Isaac Julien the circuitry of
desire, and Mary Kelly the traumas of motherhood, Jean-Pierre Bruyere’s
photographic and iCinema allegories of the lifeworlds of young children in
the cities of the Congo, the masquerades of Tracey Moffatt and Ayanah
Moor aimed at subverting the racial identity categories imposed on them—
these are just some examples of significant art being made all over the world.
Accusations of sensationalism, esoteric irrelevance, and bad faith do not
apply. It is an impressive body of work, and it’s growing.
Nor would I wish to divide current practitioners into two camps, baldly
opposed. While the contemporary artists listed earlier remain framed by
the ruins of the modernist project, their work gains much of its subliminal
power from an engagement, however filtered, with the demands of contem-
poraneity. Similarly, those artists just listed cannot avoid these same mod-
ernist ruins; the difference is that they treat them as echoes, as hollow
resonances, and get on with their search for an aesthetics and ethics that
might be viable in the aftermath. There are, as well, many other artists who
operate between these tendencies, not to resolve them, but to extend their
premises outward: the plethora of artist’s museums, not least the Museum
of Jurassic Technology, in Los Angeles, Rachael Whiteread’s cast voids, Rich-
ard Wilson’s various installations of 20/50, Bill Viola’s efforts to reinspire
spirituality, Ilya Kabakov’s ideological memory capsules, the resonant
photo tableaux of Tracey Moffatt, Jeff Wall, and Bill Henson, the inventive
recycling of Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon among many others, Ed-
uardo Kac and Patricia Piccinini’s startling evocations of cloning, Rirkrit
Tiravanija’s open invitations, the coy meditations on everyday life of Rivane
Neuenschwander, the sharp parodies of the international art system by An-
drea Fraser, Tanja Ostojic, and Martı́n Shastre, the chameleon public sphere
politics of the Yes Men and increasing numbers of collectives, such as Bijari,
contra filé, and La Baulera.
Slight gestures, feral strategies, mild subversions, small steps. To which
purposes and in the names of which values? These questions can still be
posed and be answered (although an extended consideration must be de-
ferred). In brief, it seems to me that at least four themes course through the
heterogeneity that is natural to contemporaneity. All of the artists men-
tioned, and the thousands more of whom they are representatives, focus
their wide-ranging concerns on questions of time, place, mediation, and
mood. They make visible our sense that these fundamental, familiar con-
stituents of being are becoming, each day, steadily more strange. Nowadays,
the list looks more like: (alter)temporality, (dis)location, transformativity
within the hyperreal, and the altercation of affect/effectivity. Within this
contemporaneity, they seek sustainable modes of survival, cooperation,and
growth.
The Thickening of the Present

In the ancient world, around the shores of the Mediterranean, the word
modern (modernus) distinguished a mood, or mode, of fullness emergent
in the otherwise ordinary passing of time and within the predictable un-
folding of fashion (hodiernus, “of today”).16 This sense that the present
could be pregnant with something special about itself—manifest as a quality
later called nowness—persisted until late medieval times, when contrast
with what was seen to be the past, and then several past periods, became
central to the meaning of modern. An early formulation was that of St.
Augustine: “There are three times: a present of things past, a present of
things present; and a present of future things.”17
In the expanded modern world, however, modern became the core of a
set of terms that narrated the two-centuries-long formation of modernity
in terms of novelty, pastness, and futurism, not least those of its definitive
artistic currents, modern art and modernism, modern movement archi-
tecture and modern or contemporary design. Despite the vibrancy of these
tendencies, the “modern” aged, as its time went on, until it became, in a
paradox tolerated by most, historical. Indeed, it became the name of its own
period, one that would, it was presumed, become increasingly modern,
without end. Recently, however, in most ordinary usage—in English and in
16. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Modernity and Literary Tradition,” trans. Christian Thorne,
Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005): 329–64.
17. Augustine places this sense of time, that of the “human soul,” against God’s eternal time,
and goes on to note that “these three do somehow exist in the mind, for otherwise I do not see
them: there is present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things
future, expectation” (Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Hal M. Helms [Orleans,
Mass., 1986], p. 246). I am indebted to Wolf Schäfer, “Global History and the Present Time,” in
Wiring Prometheus: Globalization, History, and Technology, ed. Peter Lyth and Helmut Trischler
(Aarhus, Denmark, 2004), p. 103, for this reminder.
some but not all other European languages—it has surrendered currency
to the term contemporary and its cognates. St. Augustine’s accumulation of
presents has returned, uncannily, to currency.
For most of the twentieth century, and especially in the 1920s and the
1960s, when modernist attitudes prevailed, the word contemporary served,
in art discourse as elsewhere, mainly as a default for modern. Boris Groys
points out the main reason:
Modern art is (or, rather, was) directed towards the future. Being mod-
ern means to live in a project, to practice a work in progress. Because
of this permanent movement towards the future modern art tends
to overlook, to forget the present, to reduce it to a permanently self-
effacing moment of transition from past to future.18
Nevertheless, a number of the most engaged contemporary artists are re-
defining what it means to live in a project and doing so in terms that ac-
knowledge the power of the present. This shift has been occurring since the
decline of modernism in the 1980s and has appeared in institutional nam-
ing—of galleries, museums, auction house departments, academic courses,
and textbook titles—which, however, tend to use contemporary as a soft
signifier of current plurality.
This change echoes a larger one. Modernity has not, for decades, been
able to maintain its division of the world into those who live in modern
times and those who, while physically present, were regarded as noncon-
temporaneous beings. In arguing that the global spread of information and
the instantaneousness of its communication now means that the “socio-
temporal world order is changing in favor of contemporaneity for all,” Wolf
Schäfer cites a passage from Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s 1961 novel Ambiguous
Adventure, an exchange between the father of a young Senegalese revolu-
tionary and a French teacher:
We have not had the same past, you and ourselves, but we shall have,
strictly, the same future. The era of separate destinies has run its course.
In that sense, the end of the world has indeed come for every one of us,
because no one can any longer live by the simple carrying out of what
he himself is.19
Increased opportunity of access has not, of course, meant equality of out-
come—on the contrary—nor has it meant (contrary to early fears about
18. Boris Groys, “Topology of Contemporary Art,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture.
19. Quoted in Schäfer, “Global History and the Present Time,” p. 120.
globalization) homogeneity of choices. During the period of modernity’s
dominance, the downside of what used to be called cultural imperialism
was a kind of ethnic cleansing carried out by the displacement of unmodern
peoples into past, slower, or frozen time. In a mediascape characterized by
such contrary forces as instant communication of key decisions by political
leaders and the capacity to demonstrate against them within the same news
cycle, the power to force everyone forward in broadly the same direction
has been lost. In many parts of the world, consciousness is concerned with
taking many steps, fast, not from the old to the new but vice versa. Multiple
temporalities are the rule these days, and their conceptions of historical
development move in multifarious directions. Against this broad tide, fun-
damentalisms move in just one direction, implacably. In these conflicted
circumstances, any appellation that ties a current world description entirely
to modernity, in however conditional a manner, and however decked out
with a modified version of postmodernity, will miss as much of the main
point as do the fundamentalisms.
Are we at a threshold of large-scale meaning change, yet again? If so, it
is one that has built its gateway around us through indirection and as an
outcome of quite other great changes: the reduction of modernity to “the
only remaining superpower,” the evaporation of postmodernism as a one-
generation wonder, and the isolation of postmodernity as a fate of the West
(or, at least, of many parts and elements of it), but not the world. Nor does
postmodernity explain enough of what is happening in what remains of the
West as the world migrates to it, everyone changing as they come and go.
In these circumstances, it might be time to grasp a more supple set of ways
of being in time now and to shift to another set of terms. There is such a
set, lying close by.
Regarding Contemporaneity
The word contemporary has always meant more than just the plain and
passing present. Its etymology, we can now see, is as rich as that of modern.
The term contemporary calibrates a number of distinct but related ways of
being in or with time, even of being in and out of time at the same time.
Indeed, for a while, during the seventeenth century in England, it seemed
that cotemporary might overtake it to express this strange currency. The cur-
rent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary gives four major meanings.
They are all relational, turning on prepositions, on being placed to, from,
at, or during time. There is the strong sense of “belonging to the same time,
age, or period,” the coincidental “having existed or lived from the same date,
equal in age, coeval,” and the adventitious “occurring at the same moment
of time, or during the same period; occupying the same definite period,
contemporaneous, simultaneous.” In each of these meanings there is a dis-
tinctive sense of presentness, of being in the present, of beings who are (that
are) present to each other, and to the time they happen to be in. Of course,
these kinds of relationships have occurred at all times in the historical past,
do so now, and will do so in the future. The second and third meanings
make this clear, whereas the first points to the phenomenon of two or more
people, events, ideas, or things “belonging” to the same historical time. Yet,
even here, while the connectedness is stronger, while the phenomena may
have some sense of being joined by their contemporaneousness, they may
equally well do so, as it were, separately, standing alongside yet apart from
each other, existing in simple simultaneity. They may also subsist in a com-
plex awareness that, given human difference, their contemporaries may not
stand in relation to time as they do. Finally, given the diversity of present
experiences of temporality, they may feel themselves as standing, in im-
portant senses, at once within and against the times.
It is the OED’s fourth definition of contemporary that brings persons,
things, ideas, and time together under a one-directional banner: “Modern;
of or characteristic of the present period; especially up-to-date, ultra-
modern; specifically designating art of a markedly avant-garde quality, or
furniture, building, decoration, etc. having modern characteristics.” In this
definition, the two words have finally exchanged their core meaning: the
contemporary has become the new modern. We are, following this logic,
out of the modern age, or era, and in that of the contemporary.
To leap to such a conclusion would be to miss an essential quality of
contemporaneousness: its immediacy, its presentness, its instantaneity, its
prioritizing of the moment over the time, the instant over the epoch, of
direct experience of multiplicitous complexity over the singular simplicity
of distanced reflection. It is the pregnant present of the original meaning
of modern, but without its subsequent contract with the future. If we were
to generalize this quality (of course, against its grain) as a key to world pic-
turing, we would see its constituent features manifest there to the virtual
exclusion of other explanations. We would see, then, that contemporaneity
consists precisely in the constant experience of radical disjunctures of percep-
tion, mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual
coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of vari-
ous cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight
the fast-growing inequalities within and between them. This certainly looks
like the world as it is now. No longer does it feel like “our time” because
“our” cannot stretch to encompass its contrariness. Nor, indeed, is it “a
time” because if the modern were inclined above all to define itself as a
period, and sort the past into periods, in contemporaneity periodization is
impossible.20 This suggests that the only potentially permanent thing about
this state of affairs is that its impermanence may last forever. The present
may become “eternal,” not in a state of wrought transfiguration, as Baude-
laire had hoped, but as a kind of incessant incipience, of the kind theorized
by Jacques Derrida as l’avenir, as perpetual advent, that which is, while im-
possible to foresee or predict, to come.21
“Multeity,” “altertemporality,” and inequity are not only the most strik-
ing features on any short list of the qualities of contemporaneity; they are
at its volatile core. Unlike Baudelaire’s famous markers of modernité, they
are not the symptoms of a deeper stability or an entry point to its achieve-
ment.22 In the aftermath of modernity and the passing of the postmodern,
they may be all that there is. This is why there is no longer any overarching
explanatory totality that accurately accumulates and convincingly accounts
for these proliferating differences. The particular, it seems, is now general
and, perhaps, forever shall be.
Following my reservation about Kuspit’s conclusion, this is not a rec-
ommendation for stand-alone, singularizing particularism; rather, it is an
appeal for radical particularism to work with and against radical general-
ization, to treat all the elements in the mix as antinomies. Global historians
continue to do us great service by tracking the trajectories of large forces
that unfold through lengthy durations. These include the social and eco-
logical elements—localized, metropolitan, and cosmopolitan—of the
successively expanding “human web” described, for example, by the
McNeills.23 Yet it is equally important to weave into these accounts recog-
nition of the less visible workings of what de Landa names “matter-
energy.”24 Yet a paradoxical outcome of recent long-term historical
explanations is their unusual degree of uncertainty with regard to the im-
20. This responds to one of the dilemmas posed by Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: An
Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London, 2002).
21. A key concept in Derrida’s later work, the most relevant texts here being Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, 1994) and the interview following 9/11, “Autoimmunity: Real and
Symbolic Suicides,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Philosophy in a Time of
Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago,
2003).
22. Baudelaire’s famous formulation—“La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le
contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (“By modernity I
mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and
the immutable”)—appears in Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1864), “The
Painter of Modern Life” and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964), p. 12.
23. See J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (New York, 2003), esp. the
introduction and chap. 8.
24. Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York, 2000), p. 21; see also
pp. 227–74.
mediate future. While belief in the persistence through the present of on-
going formations is widespread, the forms in which that might occur seem
less predictable. Obsession with the past and concern about the complex-
ities of the present have tended to thicken our awareness of it at the expense
of expectations about the future. Social geographers such as Jared Diamond
alert us to the prospect that societies based on guns, germs, and steel are on
the verge of immanent collapse if they continue to maintain present modes
of thought and organization.25 As Schäfer (rather blandly) puts it, “coming
to terms with the complexity of the present time, which results from the
massive parallelism of cultural contemporaneities, is obviously one of the
great challenges.”26
New World Disarray

In public discourse, “master narratives” persist and continue to promise
everything from continuing modernizing progress—freedom and democ-
racy are the watchwords of U.S. expansion into the Middle East—to the
return of spiritual leaders under the banner, for example, of jihad. Certainly
the commanding, beguiling power of these simplifications buildsfollowings
in larger and larger numbers. But their partiality inevitably means that they
do so in ways that divide each bloc of believers more and more from the
others, with the net effect that they not only cast out “unbelievers” but un-
dermine their own future triumph. In the hearts of their spiritual leaders,
there is a dawning sense that world domination by any one set of views is
impossible in human affairs, that not even their fundamentalism is appli-
cable to all humankind, that the others will, mostly, remain Other. This
sense underlies, and deeply threatens, the homogenizing thrusts of certain
kinds of economic globalization, obliging it to adapt to local circumstances.
It also renders provisional, and often gestural, the appeals to universal rights
that have been for decades an available language for negotiation between
competing interests. New forms of translation need to be found for chan-
nelling the world’s friction.
Differences that are as profound as these do not lie side by side, peace-
fully, nor do they sit up separately in some static array awaiting our in-
spection. They are actively implicated in each other, all over the place, all
the time, just as every one of us lives in them, always. Their interaction is a
major work of the world, of the world on us and us on the world. We are,
all of us, thoroughly embedded inside these processes. Too many of them
are violently bent on the erasure of the other. Some, however, seek recon-
25. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 2003)
and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005).
26. Schäfer, “Global History and the Present Time,” p. 110.
ciliation within a framework of respect for difference. The Australian Con-
temporary Aboriginal Art movement, for example, is significantly driven
by this impulse.27 All of these elements were present in events such as the
9/11 attacks on various U.S. “icons of military and economic power”—an
incomplete event with continuing effects in all spheres of life.28 While the
language of universals remains current, it always arises in concrete partic-
ulars and increasingly in the form of frictional encounters.29
Other recent events indicate profound realignments of modernity’s great
formations, as well as the emergence of what may be new ones. Among
these: 9/11 as an attack within an ideological war, as a fissuring of the icon-
omy, and as an occasion to reimpose social constraints within ostensible
democracies; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the uncertain prospect of a
U.S. emperium; the question of European polity, internally and externally;
the implosive fallout of the second world and the reemergence of author-
itarianism within it; in the ex-Soviet peripheries, the suddenness of unReal
states and of the apparent extension of Europe; continuing conflicts in the
Middle East, Central Europe, Africa, and the Pacific; the revival of leftist
governments in South America; the deadly inadequacy of tribalism versus
modernization as models for decolonization; the crisis of post–World War
II international institutions as political and economic mediators (UN, IMF,
World Bank); the accelerating concentration of wealth in a few countries
and within those countries its concentration in the few; ecological time
bombs everywhere and the looming threat of societal collapse; the ubiquity
and diversification of specular culture; the concentration and narrowing of
media versus the spread of the internet; contradictions within and between
regulated and coercive economies and deregulated and criminal ones; the
coexistence of multiple economies and cultures within singular state for-
mations (most prominently, now, China); the proliferation of protest
movements and alternative networks; and the distinctively different models
of appropriate artistic practice, foregrounded in major survey exhibitions,
such as Documenta 11 of 2002 and the fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003, and
in the subsequent disarray among curators and critics. Classic conceptions
of modernity and modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism—to say
nothing of the implied bonds between social formation and artistic practice
carried by these terms—cannot be stretched and patched to carry this de-
gree of spinout. And the discursive division of world art into official brands
27. I argue this in “Aboriginality and Postmodernity: Parallel Lives,” the concluding chapter of
Smith, Transformations in Australian Art, 2 vols. (Sydney, 2002), 2:144–67.
28. Osama bin Laden, interview with Hamid Mir, The Observer, 11 Nov. 2001, p. 3.
29. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton,
N.J., 2005).
issued from the power centers and the struggling multiplicity emergent
from everywhere else cannot do so either. The rich complexities of contem-
poraneity have set the world’s agenda since the end of the cold war, creating
a nearly universal condition of permanent-seeming aftermath—Ground
Zero everywhere. Yet sprinkled amidst the recursion to past and fantastical
styles of security we have seen, in the artworks highlighted here, more and
more insights into adaptable modes of active resistance and hopeful per-
sistence.
Just over thirty years ago I described the international art system as still
centered, however precariously and debilitatingly, on the New York art-
world.30 It is inspiring, now, to be able to see that this system, however much
it strives to concentrate its power, has been transformed by a larger network
of widely dispersed and variously connected sources of creative coping. A
less salutary, and even more challenging, aspect of contemporaneity is the
world (dis)order in which this productivity subsists.
30. See Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum 13 (Sept. 1974): 54–59.

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Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity

Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006)

f i g u r e 1. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Powerless Structures—Traces of a Never

Te r r y S m i t h is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History

What Is Contemporary Art Now?

Contemporary as the New Modern

f i g u r e 2. Richard Serra, Double-Torqued Ellipse. Cor-Ten steel, 1997. Dia Art

Passages between Cultures

5. On this topic, see my “Primacy, Convergence, Currency: Marketing Contemporary Art in

(1998), Fervor (2000), and Rapture and Possessed (both 2001)—Neshat

f i g u r e 5. Ghazel, Me in 2003. Video still, installation at Havana Biennale, 2003. Photograph:

f i g u r e 6. Ayanah Moor, Never.Ignorant.Gettin’ Goals.Accomplished. Installation, 2004.

tience with categorization is becoming more common and signals a shift

Curators Stage the Debate

Problems and a Proposal

Dislocation and Situatedness

The Thickening of the Present

New World Disarray

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