by Jon Lackman | 17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster:
[M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in the academic world there are professorships and programs, and in the museum world departments and institutions, all devoted to the subject, and most tend to treat it as apart not only from prewar practice but from most postwar practice as well … Is this floating-free real or imagined? A merely local perception? A simple effect of the end-of-grand-narratives? If it is real, how can we specify some of its principal causes, that is, beyond general reference to ‘the market’ and ‘globalization’?
Julia Bryan-Wilson responded:
They have cut off the hot water in the building where I teach. The rumor is that we will soon lose our office phones, as the Women’s Studies department already has. In this underfunded public university [UC-Irvine] … I cannot help but think about the problem of ‘the contemporary’ in relation to the urgencies of the troubled future.
Other respondents: Grant Kester, James Elkins, Miwon Kwon, Joshua Shannon, Richard Meyer, Johanna Burton, Pamela M. Lee, Michelle Kuo, Mark Godfrey, Okwui Enwezor, Anton Vidokle, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Terry Smith, Alexander Alberro, Tim Griffin, Yates McKee, James Meyer, Vered Maimon, T.J. Demos, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Andrew Perchuk, Blake Stimson, Kelly Baum, Rachel Haidu, Juliane Rebentisch, Jaleh Mansoor, Siona Wilson, Judith Rodenbeck, Helen Molesworth, Suzanne Hudson, Isabelle Graw, Tom McDonough.
When “The” stands first, time to move on.