In this together: The aesthetics of inclusion
Romuald Hazoume | Benin b.1962 | Avion de Terre 2004 | Type C photograph, ed. 1/6 | 120 x 80cm | Purchased 2009 with funds from the Bequest of Grace Davies and Nell Davies through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Kathryn Weir is Curatorial Manager, International Art and Australian Cinémathèque at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Read this essay and more in the exhibition publication 21st Century: Art of the First Decade
In his recent essay ‘What is the contemporary?’, philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that contemporariness is ‘a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and also takes distance from it’.1 This includes a relationship with the past that perceives its signs in the present, and transforms the association between different times:
. . . the entryway into the present necessarily takes the form of an archaeology; one that does not, however, return to a historical past, but rather to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living.2
He compares this to looking at dark areas of the sky to see stars too far away for their light to reach us. The metaphor can throw into relief artists’ strategies for making visible lines of exclusion, and revealing possibilities that have been obscured, particularly those related to the changing contemporary experience of history, geography and ecology.
One of the defining characteristics of the art of the 21st century is its drive for absolute inclusiveness: the aesthetic equality of all media and all geographies. Rather than heralding ‘the end of art history’, this contemporary condition is generating much more complex formulations of history. In place of a unified history of modern and contemporary art defined in Europe and the United States, there is a widening awareness of the many historical and geographical frames of reference for contemporary art practice. The forms, concerns and strategies of art today not only refer to multiple modernisms, but also draw on very longstanding aesthetic heritages, and reflect on flows and borrowings between overlapping cultural histories. Some of the key ideas and approaches to emerge in the ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ exhibition and the essays in this volume include the rethinking of history in terms of a multitude of artistic genealogies; the changing experiences and constellations of geography at local, regional and global levels; and the highlighting by artists of interrelatedness and mutual responsibility with regard to social and ecological issues. Many of these concerns relate to how humans share the earth with each other and with other species, and understand their place in history and ecology. Notions of inclusion and exclusion are fundamental to these questions and to many current art strategies.
The attempt to see that which we are ‘incapable of living’, or the far-flung light in dark areas of the sky, resonates with what theorist Boris Groys considers definitive of art practice today. In his recent essays, compiled in the monograph Art Power (2008), Groys argues that contemporary art’s autonomy lies in its insistence on inclusion. Artists frequently point to what is excluded or unseen; Groys’ criterion for distinguishing ‘good art’ is the degree to which it mobilises strategies that work in favour of inclusion, and against the intrusion within the sphere of art of value judgment reflecting cultural, social, political and economic inequities: ‘art operates in the gap between the formal equality of all art forms and their factual inequality’.3 Contemporary art then assumes the absolute equality of all images, beyond any determination on the grounds of ‘taste’ or power, and actively works to underline what is excluded in different contexts. It does this by producing paradoxical works that embody contradictions and reveal the difficulty of perpetuating certain distinctions, whether these are of form or of strategy — for example, those between sculpture and the readymade, process and object, documentary and fiction, or individual creation and collaboration. Contradictions in the broader frame of art’s reception have also been explored in the art of recent years, notably in relation to ecological concerns and in terms of the phenomenological experience of art — including how art may transform the viewer’s sense of implication in the work.
| Contemporary art’s histories and geographies |
Endnotes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è il contemporaneo?, Nottetempo, Rome, 2008, p.9 (author’s translation); for published English translation, see ‘What is the contemporary?’ in Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 2009.
2 Agamben, p.22.
3 Boris Groys, Art Power, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008, p.16.
