[Reader-list] Art of the Future

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Thanks Monica for posting Nancy Adajania's text on Art for the Future and the 
Future of Art. 

As a response I am sending in my text which was published on the same website 
 - www.anthology-of-art.net - 

The ANTHOLOGY OF ART.NET project is an ongoing online collection of artwork 
and writing on the future of art ,edited by Jochen Gerz and published by the 
Braunschweig School of Art 

The text is in the form of an answer to the following question, which was 
asked of all the people who were asked to contribute texts to the website 
________________________________________________________________
Q : What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a future art? 

A : I see making or doing art as an argument between desire and reality. This 
presupposes that I take seriously the reality of my desires. Desire is 
predicated on the future. One desires something "to happen", one desires "to 
become" someone, one desires "to have or hold on to"  something, "to be"  
somewhere, or"to do" something. The "to happen" , "to become", "to have or 
hold on to", "to be" , and  "to do" parts of this sentence means that the 
thing  or situation desired is always just beyond the reach of the present 
moment.

Art, which we might call the process by which desire, and its corollary, 
imagination encounter the real, is at present held hostage to a framework of 
institutional practices , canons and histories. These serve primarily to 
separate art, or the domain of the aesthetic from the ethical, from the 
everyday, from the domain of dealing with the day to day fact of making 
meaning in difficult times. The future of art will depend on how far those 
who work with art are prepared to  go in terms of restoring to art its 
function of being that which involves a desire "to do' something with life, 
and the world. 

The ransom (which might free art)  involves a transaction by which we give up 
the indices of our attachments to the sensible, rational ways of dealing with 
an insane world  that we inhabit at present, for the sake of the slim chances 
of the transformation of the terms of everyday life in the future. 

To my mind, this is a wager worth taking up for consideration, and any person 
who makes art, or lives with art, or has visions, epileptic fits, nightmares 
and hangovers about art has to place bets, cut deals and count their chances 
along these lines. To do this is to say "...yes, in a world where terror is 
the breath of the real, I will imagine that it is still possible to 
participate in the creation or transmission of objects and situations of 
relentless and unforgiving beauty, by the clarity or confusion with which 
they change the way I look at life, that by their very force, will bring to 
bear another reality upon the world". 

This is the reason for art to be what it can be, and this reason comes to us 
from the territories of imagined futures. Which, if not better, are desired 
as being markedly different from the world of the present.

Art can speak to us and state that the 'here and now' of this world (war, 
terror, lies, money, power) can be something other than what it is. That when 
our circumstances are  imprisoned by the reason for things to continue to be 
what they are, for the future to be "more" of the present, it becomes all the 
more necessary to claim for ourselves another future, in and through art. Art 
can then be the restlessness of the desire for the future to be 'present' in 
the present. It is the insertion, of the desired future into the present, of 
locating an empty space and filling that with meaning. Even by absence, art 
invokes the necessary reality of utopia. 

It is as if the spray paint of potential experience, were to mark the walls 
of the city of the present, enabling life to teach passers by, the citizens 
of the present, the grammar and the lexicon of a new language  for talking 
about the everyday-ness of the future. 

It is to say - "here, take your passport, your newspaper, your identity card, 
your work permit, your electoral register, your health record, your social 
security number, your x ray, your bank statement, your doctors prescription, 
your inheritance, your insurance, your wage bill, your shopping list, your 
debt, your balance sheet, your inventory, your fear, your anxiety, your 
boredom, your humiliation - and see what happens if you were to wet them, 
make them into paste and fashion a papier mache object out of them, like you 
did once with waste paper in primary school. Recall, for once the joy of 
watching certainties being mashed into pulp. Watch how the glistening 
laminate of the passport cover can run and melt when torched, see the figures 
in the bank statement and the wage bill dance, watch the decimals explode, 
witness fear dissolving..."

To make art for the future is to add substance to this speculation. To enact 
it, to perform it, as one would a rite, is to change reality by making 
another reality occur. To be witness to that art  is to listen to whispers 
from the future, to decode signed and unsigned messages. These messages can 
be laments, prophecies, or calls for celebration, or puzzles and enigmas, but 
they will all ask us to turn away from the present moment on to some unmapped 
and immediate tomorrow, which is not merely an "accumulation of todays". 

All revolutionaries must learn to be artists, even if all artists need not be 
revolutionaries.

What kind of artists can prepare us for the future. Artist who are willing to 
hold in abeyance the barriers between a work and world, who can say "there is 
no boundary behind which my work needs to be, of authorship, or patronage, or 
curatorial frames within which it needs to be protected in order to survive" 
Artists who are willing to be generous with themselves and be demanding of 
life - artists who will give away their work, share their work, collaborate 
and quarrel with others in the making of work and who will freely take from 
life and from culture whatever is up for grabs. Artists who are not bothered 
by either the pressure to be original or by the need to belong, artists whose 
daily lives may be works in progress, and who can create ways of being and 
working with others that are pleasurable and provocative. Artists for whom 
there is no need to fetishize style, or manner, or technologies, or 
practices, even while they evolve styles, take on manners, push the borders 
of technologies and transform practices. Artists who, even if they sell in 
the marketplace, know that the market only measures the vanity of the buyer, 
not the worth of the artwork. 

Such people, whether or not they are recognised as artists, or choose to call 
themselves as such, may choose to be nameless, may be  comfortable in 
ensembles and coalitions,  might perform different identities for different 
purposes, and find themselves more often  in a fairground, on the street, in 
a picket line,or on web site than they might be in a gallery, a museum or a 
studio. 

For me, the future of art, and the art of the future, hinges on the 
recognition of these realities, and on artists, on all those who work with 
art, choosing to create those ways in which they can work in the present that 
anticipate imagined futures. 

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, October 2001, New Delhi