WHAT IS

CONTEMPORARY?
BY INGRID SCHAFFNER, CURATOR OF
THE 2018 CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL

28 CARNEGIE • SPRING 2016

 T his past November, I introduced myself
as the curator of the 57th Carnegie
International by asking “What is
Contemporary?” in a public lecture.
It’s a question I have been posing over
the past 10 years in the form of annual
talks, and one I will have yet to answer
as long as contemporary art continues to be a
vital way to experience the world today.
Just asking it prompts a gyroscopic
exploration of the urgent, subtle, frustrating,
revelatory, vast, and complex ways in which
artists lead the question through their work.
Responsive to the world today, contemporary
art is an ever-changing field. It is also ever-
expanding as reflected by the increasingly
global context of the International itself.
Once one of a relatively small number
of big shows to routinely survey the latest
developments in art from North America,
Western Europe, and Latin America, the
Carnegie International now takes place amidst
a proliferation of exhibitions happening
worldwide. From Dakar to Sharjah to
Mercosul to Beijing, the ambitions that
first prompted Pittsburgh to position itself
as a city of cultural aspirations are now shared
globally. The scope of the International has
also correspondingly grown, as artists work
and participate in a seemingly boundless
art world.
As I approached the question again,
this time as curator of the next Carnegie
International, I decided to narrow the scope
of the field to recent past Internationals. My
reasons were twofold. First, what better way
for the Carnegie International team—assisting
at every step are Allison Miller and Liz Park
—to learn about the history we are building
on? Preparing for this talk was an immersive
crash course in the works of art, big ideas,
catalogues, events, online life, and swag that
have made each exhibition distinctive. (If
you bought a set of the 2004 R. Crumb beer
glasses from the museum shop, we envy you!)
More significantly, this focus would begin to
transmit a vision of the Internationals not as
a series of one big show supplanting the next,
but as a cumulative and ongoing look at art
Installation view of in a field that always stands to be seen anew.
Allan McCollum’s 1991 Starting in 1995, I have seen every iteration
work, Lost Objects. of the International, and when I think ahead
to 2018, I like to imagine the invisible aggre-
gate of past and future installations that the
next International is contributing to. This
compilation of “What is Contemporary?”
helped me do just that.
I begin, as I always do, with a declaration
of terms. My manifesto. Contemporary art
is by definition not yet history. And therefore
has no established canons, clear-cut move-
ments, or linear chronologies. It is driven
by ideas and practices, not masters and
mistresses, or masterpieces, or for that matter
by mediums. Artists today can be painters and
sculptors, but more than likely they deploy
a wide range of mediums or no materials at
all—whatever is the best form for expressing
their particular concerns or ideas.
To structure this wide-ranging question,
I use 13 themes, which I have developed
to generally encompass current issues
and ideas. Ranging from TERRAIN to
TECHNOLOGY, these themes offer inter-
pretive inroads to the field of contemporary
art and are by no means definitive.
A work that falls under FLESH might as
easily be discussed in terms of TERRAIN.
For instance, when Allan McCollum blan-
keted the floor of the Hall of Sculpture
with dinosaur bones in 1991, he essentially
transformed the space into what looked like
a dig site. But instead of TERRAIN, I chose
FLESH to signal that which falls away and
leaves us all bare bones—the museum truly
as mausoleum. McCollum’s boneyard also
gave me a chance to learn about one of the
(continued)
CARNEGIE • SPRING 2016 29
 CONTEMPORARY ART IS dRIvEN bY IdEAS ANd PRACTICES, NOT MASTERS ANd
MISTRESSES, OR MASTERPIECES, OR fOR THAT MATTER bY MEdIuMS.
many unique collaborations that have taken
place over the years between Carnegie
Museums of Art and Natural History. The
artist worked closely with Mary Dawson,
curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology,
who selected these particular bones from the
museum’s renowned collection to cast by the
dozens for this massive installation.
“When is Contemporary?” can be
answered many ways. For this exploration,
I look at the past 30 years, or the span of a
generation of memory. Marked by the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the start of the American
culture wars, the uprising in Tiananmen
Square, among other social and political
events and upheavals worldwide, 1989
stands as a decisive year for contemporary
culture at large.
Since there was no International in
1989, a Carnegie-centric survey of “What is
Contemporary?”stakes its start to the 1988
exhibition and ends with the most recent
International held in 2013. Admittedly, I am
partial to the idea that America’s oldest global
survey has been contemporary from the start.
(The Venice Biennale is older by a year, but
Pittsburgh does famously have three more
bridges.) Since 1896, the Carnegie has been
showing and collecting the work of living
artists, originally with the hopes that some
would prove to be “the old masters of the
future.” Therein lies the rub: that 19th-cen-
tury rhetoric just doesn’t jibe with the idea of
the contemporary—as a field, an awareness,
a culture currently under construction.
“What is Contemporary?” is a capacious
format for exploring a question that I look
forward to returning to throughout the
process of organizing the 2018 International.
For the first Pittsburgh delivery, the museum’s
theater was happily packed with the
International’s frontline audience—the local
community. The talk moved quickly, as it
must, to synthesize each year’s reflections on
an unruly field. Afterward, snacks were served
in the lobby, where pierogies were piled high,
Arsenal cider flowed, and conversation roared.
I took this din to signal a good start to making
“What is Contemporary?” as alive a question
to those of you who come to see the 57th
International as it is to me.

A SNAPSHOT OF THE 13 THEMES AND SOME OF THE CORRESPONDING ARTWORKS THAT FRAME INGRID SCHAFFNER’S
EXPLORATION OF “WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY?” BASED ON PAST CARNEGIE INTERNATIONALS FROM 1988-2013.

TERRAIN: Visible only at night, Doug

Aitken’s cinematic projection on the
Forbes Avenue façade in 2008 (at right)
was a surreal western in which an
all-animal cast moved silently through
the hotels, motels, and airports that
have altered their native terrain.

SYSTEMS: Still on view overhead in the

Hall of Sculpture (far right) is Lothar
Baumgarten’s 1988 inscription of letters
for the Cherokee tongue that didn’t have
a written system of language until the
19th century.

REFERENCE: Sometimes it’s easy to

discern the references in Gerhard Richter’s
1988 paintings based on photographic
reproductions; other times, it’s the act of
mechanical reproduction itself that appears
referenced in abstractions that read like
layers and layers of mis-registered print.

Doug Aitken, Migration, 2008, 4-projection outdoor video installation; Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro Gallery,
London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

30 CARNEGIE • SPRING 2016

 PHOTO: RENEE ROSENSTEEL

HISTORY: In 1999, Kara Walker’s charming, Above is an installation view

of Zanele Muholi’s Faces
cinematic silhouettes unmasked race
and Phases series. At left is
relations in a revised history of the South. Lothar Baumgarten’s large
and permanent installation
IDENTITY: Visual activist Zanele Muholi, The Tongue of the Cherokee,
whose portraits were presented in 2013 located in the Hall of
Sculpture’s skylights.
(above), put an assured face on African
LGBT communities.

ALCHEMY: To fully experience the alchemy

of Ernesto Neto’s 1999 environmental
sculpture, you needed to enter the Nude
Plasmic, smell the lavender, and let your
awareness of the surroundings be trans-
formed by materials.

FLESH: A drain in the chest of a fragmented

torso could be peeked at through the bars
of a grate in the floor, where Robert Gober’s
1995 sculpture was installed to give a
contemporary view of the figure as flesh.

STORAGE: In 1991, Christian Boltanski

constructed an imaginary archive with an
empty storage box for every artist who
participated in a past International.
PHOTO: BRYAN CONLEY

(continued)

CARNEGIE • SPRING 2016 31

Clockwise:
Cao Fei's My Future is Not a Dream, a
production still from her 2006 video,
Whose Utopia. Photo courtesy of the artist
and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York
Lara Favaretto, Jestem, 2013, Courtesy of
the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin
Kathy Butterly, Bonnet, 2000, Collection of
Elizabeth Harvey Levine, New York
Joseph Yoakum, Mt. Raelene near town of
Perth Australia, Private collection
32 CARNEGIE • SPRING 2016
BUSINESS: Installed in 2008 in the
museum’s grand staircase—where John
Alexander White’s mural The Crowning of
Labor holds sway—Cao Fei’s video Whose
Utopia (above) imagined the interior lives
and dreams of young people at work
in the frenetic wake of business in
Communist China.
FORM: Particles of Lara Favaretto’s
confetti cubes are still turning up the
traces of her 2013 sculptures (top right),
which quickly went from being solid
forms to material dispersions.
EVOCATION: In the 1970s, when he was
in his 70s, the visionary artist Joseph
Yoakum started drawing an account of
his world travels as conjured from
memory as imaginative evocations of
place. Shown in 2013, Yoakum’s work
(right) proves an artist doesn’t need to
be living for their work to be alive to a
contemporary point of view.
ORNAMENT: The craft of Kathy Butterly’s
diminutive ceramic sculptures (below),
shown in 2004, is as disarming as it is
ornamental and decorative.

TECHNOLOGY: In 2004, Harun Farocki’s

Eye Machine evidenced 60 years of military
assaults and otherwise almost invisible
electronic surveillance and technology.

RESISTANCE: The artists collective

Transformazium took visitors to the 2013
International outside of the museum to the
township of Braddock, where they are still
energizing the community around art and
the generative potential of working in
resistance to mainstream approaches and
venues. [The public can still borrow artwork
from the Art Lending Collection at
Braddock Carnegie Library.] n

CARNEGIE • SPRING 2016 33