Rewind

Rewind! Has it ever occurred to you that most contemporary art galleries are asking us to rewind? “Look back”, they seem to say, “take a look at all the art that shook the world during the twentieth century! Look at its political agendas, its dense conceptualisation, its experimentalism, its radicalism, its craziness, and its out-of-this-worldliness! Can any of you struggling artists create anything better, potent, or more profound? We think not!”

Clean and perfectly formed contemporary art galleries of the world unite: theory rules OK. The concept of artist as genius creator is not just dead, but has been reincarnated and slaughtered again several times. Technology and the capitalist mode have replaced you artists! We don’t need you to paint pictures or take photos or make nice films, we have it all already – on YouTube, on Twitter, on Sky Arts - we’ve already got the cultural distractions we need thanks. Why do we need more new art? Our artistic fulfilment can surely be met in the countless retrospectives of all those Great Dead Guys: Warhol, Duchamp, Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Pollock, Beuys…

But for a moment, let us ‘rewind’ to Duchamp, to whom, granted, we do owe something. In 1957, he spoke of the artist as a medium. As a part of the sentence rather than the full-stop. He said that the meaning of a work of art would accrue in the course of its existence. This implies that an artwork is not determined by the initial creative gesture as much as in the realm of the spectator, and ultimately in the work’s historical reception. Surely the task of all these retrospectives at contemporary art museums is to help us look forward by looking back; to provoke new ways of perceiving political situations and temporality and so highlighting what’s going on in our own dreadful present? Obliquely it might be possible for us to study our own ‘realm’ by focussing on realms of the past.

Recently I went to the Reine Sophia Contemporary Art Gallery in Madrid. An intimidating sprawl of crisp white rooms awaited me. One temporary exhibition was entitled: ‘New Realisms: 1957 – 1962, Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle’. White cube after white cube pummelled me with information about the strategies of a group of artists, including Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Jean Tinguely and Duchamp himself. These guys were trying to figure out how art could possess a meaning in a world capable of constructing the atom bomb. How could we still claim to be creators when there is something so much bigger and more powerful than us that can at any moment obliterate our whole existence? The thought processes of these artists was obvious and necessary. But it left me thinking: what are we responding to now? The war in Afghanistan? Our obsession with reality TV and with the culture of celebrity? With climate change? With material goals? Corrupt politicians? Poverty? Why do I feel that every time I go to a show by young artists in London their messages are confused and spiralling into a cacophony of issues? Is this the fault of the spectator or of the artist? Has our desire to sell art overtaken our need for it to forge new ways of thinking?

Artists! I ask you:

What is our realm?

How can we enlarge upon it or re-engage its boundaries?

How do we wish the future to respond and ‘historicize’ our art?

Surely if our realm is too multi-faceted and confusing to fit the gallery space then let us remove our work from it rather than put up with the confusion. There is a grave danger in art only being encountered when inside a gallery. Let us challenge this vague normalisation of ‘Art’ that reigns supreme in these big white spaces where anything goes as long as it is on the inside. Let us rewind to Christo, who wrapped up his museum, or to Daniel Buren, who sealed it up, or to Robert Barry, who just put up a ‘Closed’ sign.

On another floor of the Reine Sophia I came across the work of a German artist who grew up in the GDR. Having never previously been exposed to American advertising, Hans-Peter Feldman set about collecting as many images of commodified goods as possible. These consist of anything from lips, to women’s legs, to lampshades. In the final room of his exhibition Feldman had collected and framed as many newspaper front pages of 9/11 as he could find. In a myriad of languages the viewer observes that commonplace image of the collective 21^st century psyche: the twin towers going up in smoke. The viewer of 2010 instinctively gets the impression that this is our realm. There was a silence in that room. Feldman’s work was both a tribute and a declamation of our most precious image distributor: the media. In the static presence of those front pages that said everything and nothing, that were content-less but also pregnant with meaning, I was forced to think about our realm.