Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity

Terry Smith

A park in Istanbul during the autumn months of 2001: out from the manicured grass protrudes the corner section of a new, white-walled building. Or is it sinking (fig. 1)? High modernist styling like that can only mean one thing: art gallery. But for what kind of art, and why is it here? Walk around it and the words Temporary Art appear above the blocked, nearly inaccessible door. Of course: a gallery or museum of contemporary art. Yet its duck-rabbit directionality is a puzzle. Are we meant to construe it as the victim of some unfelt earthquake, historical tragedy, or human neglect? Or perhaps is it emerging from underground, an architectural chrysalis taking, triumphantly, its rightful shape? The answer is left deliberately ambiguous. The creators of this piece of public art, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, made it for the Seventh Istanbul Biennale; the park is a part of the exhibition grounds. So it is, first of all, what the words on it lightheartedly say it is: a temporary work of art. In other projects by these artists, architectural forms and functions are altered in subtle and amusing ways. In one case, they installed a diving board so that it pointed out the window of an upper story in a modernist high rise. For a work entitled SPECTACULAR 2003 the Kunst Palast in Du ¨ sseldorf underwent the transformation of having its entire collection dismantled, packed into trucks that were driven once around the building, then reinstalled exactly as before. In the same year Elmgreen and Dragset installed a white truck with a caravan as if it had shot through from the other side of the planet and erupted, jackknifed, at the main crossing of the Galleria,
I wish to thank W. J. T. Mitchell, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee for their acute comments and Miguel Rojas for assistance with the illustrations.
Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006) ᭧ 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3204-0011$10.00. All rights reserved.

681

682

Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity

f i g u r e 1. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Powerless Structures—Traces of a Never Existing History, Figure 222. Mixed media, 2001 (at Istanbul Biennale). Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen.

Milan, entitling this work Short Cut. In Istanbul, however, the artists offered an instalment from their Powerless Structures series; the subsiding/ projecting museum is subtitled Traces of a Never Existing History, Figure 222, as if it were an illustration from a future archaeology of the present. The artists are wittily proposing that contemporary art is concerned with posing questions, usually about itself, perhaps without much hope of effect, and destined to end in ambiguity. Contemporary art might, somehow, be losing touch with time. Yet this work, like many of their others, is potent: smartly styled, conceptually compact, formally pointed, easy to get, hard to forget. Such a contradiction between surety of form and uncertainty as to content is a hallmark of art in the first decade of the twentyTe r r y S m i t h is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Henry Clay Frick Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently at work on The Architecture of Aftermath, What Is Contemporary Art? and, with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Antinomies of Art and Culture.

it is simply. 1997). relational aesthetics. sighing with relief that the bad old days of exclusionary dominance are over.. the answer has seemed obvious to the point of banality. In a series of publications beginning in 1984. national identifications. self-defeating. digital imagery. N. Sweden. 3 June–30 July 1989).W. and grand narratives. 1–2 (2002): 3–15. in fact. they embody tendencies towards both closure and openness. The question of contemporary art has. But this pluralist happymix is illusory. . The present essay develops from my What Is Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art. art as a posthistorical pluralism. Look around you. Malmo ¨ . 2001) and “What Is Contemporary Art? Contemporaneity and Art to Come. their prominence is misleading and. From broader world perspectives.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 683 first century. totally contemporaneous. Just what is so contemporary about this kind of apparent contradiction. and Anna Palmqvist (Rooseum. It cannot be subject to generalization and has overwhelmed art history. Arthur Danto sought to define contemporary. and then. been insistently answered more narrowly by the acts of artists and the organizations that sustain them—so much so that these responses are. Contemporary art is most—why not all?—of the art that is being made now. perhaps.J. postproduction art. delight in the simple-seeming pleasures of an open field. The multitudes may be on the cusp of having their day. followed by the sheer relief of having shaken off exclusivist theories. but usually deny any claims to universality. two big answers have come to figure forth amidst the multitude of smaller ones. new internationalism. Contemporaneity. according to Elmgreen and Dragset. This is especially evident in the major world art distribution centers. The subtlest presentation of this “de-definitional” perspective during its brief reign was Vad a ¨ r samtida konst? / What Is Contemporary Art? ed. in visual art discourse. and why does it pervade art these days? What Is Contemporary Art Now? For more than two decades no one has articulated a successful generalization about contemporary art. as distinct from modern.S. imposed historicisms. rather. and Art to Come (Woolloomooloo. by now. recently. remix cultures. however. Peter Edstro ¨ m. Apologists stress the pivotal connectedness of their favored approach to at least one significant aspect of contemporary experience.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 71. More prosaically. Ambitious. neomodernism. most concisely in the introduction to his After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton. deeply embedded in both. N. The list keeps extending.) The responses do not have singular shape. It prompts the question. First there have been fears of essentialism. (Buried in each other.1 Nevertheless. disidentification. big-picture interpretations aim—as they always have—to be acute descriptions of how particular (artistic) practices relate to general (so1. it seems to me that. Helene Mohlin.. nos. immersive cinema. Most accounts highlight the currency of one or another aspect of current practice: new media.

and not least in its shift back through art historical time. Richard Serra. in quite specific ways. in 2003.684 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity cial) conditions. Bilbao. ed. Serra’s sculptures require one to walk close to. Anthony McCall. At the Guggenheim Museum. He soon developed a powerful strategy for building this kind of dynamism into works that seem. Mass. in my own terms. ed. ed. as reductive and self-contained as most minimal sculpture but that draw the spectator into a much more engaged relationship. dia:Beacon opened in a converted factory on the Hudson River. from the eccentricity of their angles and the precariousness of their positioning—all qualities that are exact in relation to each observer’s mobile eyes and body. Contemporary as the New Modern Richard Serra was a leading proponent of informal art.. or at Broadgate. a 120-foot-long partial cylinder of raw Cor-Ten steel. New York. County Museum of Art. When. New York. its commitment to artwork as a demonstration of active process rather than the realization or termination of a preconception. I will offer characterizations of two great forces. 1998–3 Jan. This energy flows from their size. In their clarity of form as read by 2. at first. in 1981.2 More than any other artist’s work. See Richard Serra Sculpture. around. Russell Ferguson. Unlike the virtual spatialities of abstract sculpture in the constructivist mode. I will then show them to be polarities of a dichotomous exchange. 2). installed in the Federal Plaza. the railroad shed and loading dock were filled by Serra’s three gigantic Torqued Ellipses and the single steel slab constituting his Torqued Spiral (fig. outside the entrance to the London Stock Exchange (Fulcrum [1986–87]). in pieces as various as videos showing his hand clutching at falling lead and his Verb List (1967–68). Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes (Cambridge. dispersive: the spilling diversity of contemporary practice. 27 Feb. Frank Gehry shaped the famous “fish” gallery around Serra’s Snake. Serra’s has come to represent what late modern sculpture means within the frameworks of official contemporary art. Rosalind E. their evident weight. mostly. in all of their mismatched contention. 20 Sept. paradoxically. . and Clara Weyergraf-Serra (exhibition catalog. capturing. but like happenings and environments. New York. Germany (Terminal [1977]). Krauss (exhibition catalog. for this is a polemic as much as it is a description. Los Angeles. over two inches thick and twelve feet high. Museum of Modern Art. provoked a controversy fierce enough to lead to its removal. the central regions of which are occupied by a mainstream that is. or through them. and Richard Serra Sculpture 1985–1998. 1999). 2000).–13 May 1986). Tilted Arc. I present them. in busy public spaces such as the town center of Bochum. Huge sheets of unfinished Cor-Ten steel are stacked up as the only support of each other.

The non-stop presence of art! Vela ´ zquez. In the words of Dia founder Heiner Friedrich: “Art has no history—there is only a continuous present. Cor-Ten steel. Legal Crises. p. 19 May 2003. Double-Torqued Ellipse. which extends to Matisse and Warhol. these works have a command of space that is exceptional in its resolute clarity. version of this kind of aesthetic valuing may be found in the “instantaneousness” that Michael Fried. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins. and in their muscular dialogue with their surroundings. p. Goya.” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews [Chicago. . “Art and Objecthood. and movements—are banished in the wow! of the aesthetic encounter in its distilled form.” saw as definitive of a convinced response to modernist art and counterposed to the “theatricality” of minimalism’s address to the spectator (Michael Fried. New York. 2000. . Installation view at Dia:Beacon. 1998]. Manet are all in one line. 3. 46. and Its Own Ambitions. An earlier. schools. In such a context. older conceptions of museum display— art’s history. Hudson River. .”3 f i g u r e 2. 167). yet quintessentially modernist. 1997. In elevating this instantaneity towards awestruck transcendence.” The New Yorker. however. “The Mission: How the Dia Art Foundation Survived Feuds. it is always new.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 685 the moving body. Richard Serra. If art is alive. in his famous 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood. the Dia:Beacon displays shift the trenchant spatiality of minimalism at its best towards a peculiarly late modern version of pure contemporaneousness. Dia Art Foundation. .

assured shell—again. 6 June–7 Sept. architect of Solomon’s Temple and archetypal Master Builder in the Masonic Order (played by Serra). for the time. sculptures. collages. Its $8 million production costs were. the stories of murderer Garry Gilmore and of escapologist Harry Houdini. It was. cool design. as well as the interlude (subtitled The Order) in which Barney overcomes complex obstacles at each level of the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda. Museum Ludwig. video monitors flashed out images of fantastical yet clearly fashionable characters involved in high-speed action or ritually sedate posing. particularly on the giant. set in the Canadian Rockies and Utah. Cremaster 2 (1999). Cremaster 1 (1995) tracks a troupe of dancers who take the shapes of still-androgynous gonads. too. five-screen Jumbotron.686 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity During the 2003 exhibit of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle at the Guggenheim Museum. symbolizing pure potential. Punk rock exploded through attenuated sounds. Ambiguous kernel. connects three themes entailing movement backwards in time: the movement of glaciers. bright banners and competing noises composed a swirling panorama. . Typical. A corporate logo hovered above the skylight. themselves now symbolic of each of the films in the Cremaster cycle. 2002). music video. New York. Boise. an extraordinary work of art. The Cremaster cycle takes the form of five feature-length 35mm films and a growing number of videos. is the esoteric portentousness of its central idea: the cremaster is the muscle that governs the chromosome switch from female to male and then controls testicular contraction. From every side and above. 3). Idaho. into a chaste light. Pink patches. Cremaster 4 (1994) stages a motorcycle race between two teams travelling in opposite directions around the perimeter of the 4. self-enclosed allegory. and a daring mix of far-out art. Set on the Isle of Man. and the lives of drone bees. and installations that relate directly to the films—a mobility of medium typical of all forms of contemporary art. crescendos surged out of ambient Muzak. and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney) (fig. Surmounting the five levels of initiation into the Masonic rites drives this episode. the famous rotunda spiralled up and away from sight. the artist’s hometown. See Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. and high-tech and crossover fashion that for an entire generation is definitive of contemporary experience. Cremaster 3 (2002) connects the construction of the Chrysler Building to that of Solomon’s Temple and provides a setting for an escalating clash between Hiram Abiff. but what was that brand? Cobalt blue swam up from beneath one’s feet. whiter than usual. exceptional. ed. the lozenge shape seemed familiar. Nancy Spector (exhibition catalog. an art theme park. at once. Cologne. drawings. Set in Bronco Stadium.4 The films narrate an elaborate.

Photograph: Chris Winget. Production still from film. 2002. New York. Cremaster 3. ᭧ 2002 Matthew Barney. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Matthew Barney. . showing Richard Serra as Grand Master.f i g u r e 3.

Thomas Struth’s subjects and Thomas Demand’s style. however. has become the new modern or. despair. Wang Quingsong’s The Night Revels of Lao Li alongside his China Mansion. worldwide. what amounts to the same thing. Set at key sites in Budapest—the La ´ nchı ´d (Chainlink) Bridge. the subadolescent consumerlands of Takashi Murakami and Mariko Mori. In its most institutionalized forms—from the triumphalist overreach of the Guggenheim Museum’s global franchising through the Old Master elegance of the installations at Dia:Beacon to the confused gesturing in the contemporary galleries when the Museum of Modern Art. Magician. taking itself to be the high cultural style of its time. of cults. The teams are. this spirit makes the Cremaster cycle at once extraordinary and banal. and civic organizations. organized religions. as if in a dream. reopened in 2004—it is the latest phase in the century-and-a-halflong story of modern art in Europe and its cultural colonies. the work requires a relationship to the spectator as direct as it is in Serra’s work. Official contemporary art resonates with the vivid confidence and the comforting occlusion that comes with it. the Opera House. symbolically tied to each other. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as distinct from Mad Max. Although more up-to-date and engaged with media culture. Works such as these provide the first powerful answer to the question of the nature of art in these times: contemporary art. This—the Cremaster cycle claims—is what it is to be in the era of cultural division and genetic engineering. representing in turn the cremaster muscle ascended. Like them. New York. Think (as a beginning of a list of the best of it) of not only the work by Serra and Barney but also of Jeff Koons at fifty. Andreas Gursky’s scale.688 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity roughly circular island. this is a quest narrative. Despite its complex structure and postmodern stylistics. Gerhard Richter’s paintings. and the Gelle ´ rt Thermal Baths—it performs. thus undifferentiated but tending to the feminine. the old modern in new clothes. Damien . The same spirit of individual battling against unfathomable odds to surrender individuality and achieve community acceptance. and Giant (all played by the artist). warily selected not least in an attempt to preserve this cultural balance of power. and eventual death of the Queen of Chain (played by Ursula Andress) and her Diva. isolation and metamorphosis. the same insatiably active embrace of ultimate passivity. underlies the success of novels and films such as Lord of the Rings and the vast membership. Descension is finally attained in Cremaster 5 (1997). and the muscle descended. the longing. a continuation of the modernist lineage. thus tending to differentiation and the masculine. as a movement. a search for belonging through places that have their own imperatives amidst physical and social processes that are strangely subject to incessant fusion and separation. The Matrix Revolutions.

2006). On this topic. the men deliver their nearly invisible burden into the space cleared by the women. their purpose—however urgent and relentless it might seem from the driving Philip Glass score that accompanies them—is as ambiguous as the state of the body they bear. In contrast to Barney’s baroque allegories. recursive character—to predictable scorn followed by eventual acceptance. The camera pans to a young girl who. not to name it: like all unspecifiable but deeply desired values. it is ascendant. soon. through all the major survey exhibitions and the latest sales of contemporary art for record prices. see my “Primacy. It is a culture that draws a worldly feminist artist (whose work tracks the inner worlds of exile. in parts of the world. 4). In architecture. perhaps. a silent witness to something unfathomable. Lacking symbols. she may have been abruptly conjured into this role by the process itself. 2005): 22–27. has been hiding there all along. Just at that moment. Indeed. irony is irrelevant. probably a body. including the trenchant power of stereotypes) to its implacable differencing between men and women as an experience of trauma. . across a north African/Middle Eastern desert (fig. Currency: Marketing Contemporary Art in the Conditions of Contemporaneity” (parts 1 and 2). Anachronism is relevant.6 Better. gets to decide that another is anachronistic is questioned (not least in Neshat’s activation of the aesthetics of Iranian film). perhaps. a fire breaks out and travels along a triangular stone wall. the parallel impulse has recovered an old label: late modern. 6.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 689 Hirst’s early work but not the Benneton-advertisement-style return to painting in his 2005 exhibition The Elusive Truth! Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All! and so on. the modernizing ones. Passages between Cultures The main action of Shirin Neshat’s 2001 video Passage consists of a group of white-shirted men carrying something. The video constantly intercuts to a group of women circled closely together. hierarchy. For a discussion of contemporary architecture parallel to that offered in this article see my The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago. but it is questioned. and any evident ritual. in a number of powerful works—Turbulent 5. of contemporary modernism—or “remodernism”—emphasizing its renovating. yet it persists. Art Papers 29 (May–June 2005): 22–27 and (July–Aug. In the penultimate scene. may baptize it “contemporism”—a contraction. Equally. This work is typical of the kind of contemporary art that locates itself at the emotional core of a culture that seems to have nothing that is contemporary about it. Convergence. it suddenly seems. The very idea that one kind of culture.5 Someone. wailing loudly and beating at something unseen on the stony ground between them. it is more powerful when taken for granted. Before 9/11.

Art growing out of the complexities of contemporaneity cannot offer easy outs. Milan. This is to show us something that is. In her set of three videos. The last scene of Passage implies that death exists beyond gender division. ed. 2002 (fig.” Third Text. Shirin Neshat. The complexities of Neshat’s situatedness are explored by Wendy Meryem K. but from within a very different aesthetic. 5). 57 (Winter 2001–2): 43–52. without pretending (in however subtle or deferred ways) to possess the tools to resolve this tension in favor of one or another category of redemption. Me in 2000.690 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity f i g u r e 4. Vienna. Serpentine Gallery. New York. Fervor (2000). however marked both may be by trauma. London. and Shirin Neshat. both incomprehensibly strange yet hauntingly familiar. Photograph: Larry Barns. and Wein Kunsthalle. ᭧ Shirin Neshat 2001. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Iranian performance artist Ghazel approaches the same subjects. Production still from video.7 Neshat came to prominence as a visual poet of the inscriptions of power. Giorgio Verzotti (exhibition catalog. as does the recurrence of life. Charta and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte. at once. no. she parodies both Islamic dress codes and the typical tropes of conceptual art by performing a number of nominated actions 7. notably in her photograph series The Women of Allah (1993– 97).–5 May 2002). “Ambiguity and Audience in the Films of Shirin Neshat. . Lisa Corrin (exhibition catalog. tradition. and Rapture and Possessed (both 2001)—Neshat showed that feudal structures not only persist in the cultures of the Middle East and northern Africa but also are present at the roots of all of our relationships. 2001. ed. See Shirin Neshat. 2000). (1998). and institutionalized religion on the bodies of women in patriarchal cultures. Passage. 30 Jan. Shaw.

the words of the title—an exhortation much used in encouragement manuals. Video still. seeking to promote “the New Negro”—are juxtaposed with a mural-sized image taken from a magazine color photograph of Condoleezza Rice being kissed by President George W. Never. This looks like what the televisual opportunity was intended to be: a resplendent advertisement for the American Dream. The illusion of simple equality is obliterated. we read the words as marching on the image. The moral vacuity at the heart of the current administration stands naked. the words and the image are in exact complementarity. she wraps her already fully clad body in food-preserving foil. such as Tooba (2002) and Women without Men (2004). Photograph: Miguel Rojas-Sotelo. installation at Havana Biennale.including those devoted to interrogating its conditions and questioning its limits. In Ayanah Moor’s 2004 wall installation. Seen one way. This depth of impa- f i g u r e 5. Me in 2003. Moor has recently taken an oath to reject further offers to show her work in exhibitions that are framed in terms of black American identity. the opposite meaning erupts. including those aimed at African Americans. smirking and squirming. 2003.Accomplished. for example. This puts the entire trajectory of her work to date at risk. irretrievably. In Everyone Dreams of Staying Young and Fresh.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 691 based on commonsense sentiments while dressed in her burka. This rather desperate hilarity stands in marked contrast to the portentous character of Neshat’s most recent epics. Establishment opportunism kicks us in the stomach and claws its way back in. and link left to right the first letters of each word.Gettin’ Goals. by laying bare its circumstantial cost.. in the light. flush with the self-evident realization of equal opportunity. The contradictions in play here achieve explicitly public political dimensions in the work of many artists. When. 6). Ghazel.Ignorant. however. . Bush during the presentation of her as secretary of state (fig.

and fourth worlds. tience with categorization is becoming more common and signals a shift beyond the framework in which Neshat. even multitudinous. including the remnants of the cultures of modernity and postmodernity. concrete but also various. mobile. These comparisons bring us through and up to the current edges of the second wide-scale answer of what constitutes truly contemporary art: that which emerges from within the conditions of contemporaneity. In 2002. for example. Never. and open-ended. Courtesy of the artist. after two decades in which it propelled the Biennale circuit. took up most of the spaces and set the agenda. as an art of that which actually is in the world. of what it is to be in the world. Its impulses are specific yet worldly. this kind of art swarmed the precincts of contemporary art. inclusive yet oppositional and anti-institutional. and that concerned with traffic between these and the first world. Ayanah Moor. Installation. 2004. (One major recog- . For the first time in a major international survey exhibition. third.Accomplished. but which projects itself through and around these. art from second.Gettin’ Goals.692 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity f i g u r e 6. unmistakably and irretrievably. continues to work.Ignorant. via the platforms of Documenta 11. and of that which is to come.

Sometimes. 28 Sept. “MoMA2000: The Capitulation. Varnedoe. and “Under Siege: Four African Cities. held in different cities throughout 2001. “Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation” (New Delhi). particularly Modernstarts: People. Lagos” (Lagos).. “Introduction. Johannesburg. Thus Kurt Varnedoe wrote. and expanding upon the framework of initiatives and challenges established by the earlier history of progressive art since the dawn of the twentieth century. Okwui Enwezor. “Creolite ´ and Creolization” (St.) Confused curatorial retreat and a fierce rearguard action—fought in the name of the rights of the spectator—has halted this advance. locating the historical significance of MoMA’s collections of recent art as manifest in a series of millennial exhibitions prior to the museum’s closure for renovation: There is an argument to be made that the revolutions that originally produced modern art. The collected result in the form of a series of volumes and exhibitions is placed at the dialectical intersection of contemporary art and culture. 2d ser. in a very real sense.” New Left Review 4. 12. have not been concluded or superseded—and thus that contemporary art today can be understood as the ongoing extension and revision of those founding innovations and debates. Contemporary art is collected and presented at this Museum as part of modern art—as belonging within. New York. postideological. Kirk Varnedoe. when the grinding between them gets too hard. responding to. 2000–30 Jan. post– cold war. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After a series of discussions. The collection of The Museum of Modern Art is. and covering such topics as “Democracy Unrealized” (Vienna and Berlin). (July–Aug. in 2002. For a critique of MoMA’s millennial exhibitions. they appear in raw terms. Germany. Kinshasa. 2001).” in Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA since 1980. Lucia). MoMA. and Joshua Siegel (exhibition catalog. diasporic. the exhibition opened in Kassel. p.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 693 nition was that dividing the world into these worlds had been a ruinous enterprise and was failing. Such an intersection equally marks the limits out of which the postcolonial. Things. see Franco Moretti. introducing the platforms that constituted Documenta 11. Paola Antonelli. that argument. transnational. of which he was artistic director. in 2000.8 Compare this conception of what was most at stake in millennial art exhibitions to that of another curator. Places. global 8. 2000): 98–102. deterritorialized. Freetown. ed. . but for who knows how long? Curators Stage the Debate The debate over Documenta 11 brought to the surface certain value antipathies that have been looming since around 1980 and have been at the baseline of artworld discourse for at least half a decade.

“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” Artforum 29 (Mar.” October. The exhibition has attracted much partisan comment. This dialectical enterprise attempts to establish imaginative and concrete links within the various projects of modernity. Dijon. usually means doing so in relation to other sets. Diederichsen understands the relationship between what I have described as the two big answers this way: 9. In short. Kassel. both discussed in Claire Bishop. 11. these days. the exhibition project of the fifth platform was less a receptacle of commodity objects than a container for a plurality of voices. in the not-so-secret hope of surprising with an object-focussed art more integral. and reassemblage. “The Black Box. Linking together the first four platforms. Ibid. is woven through procedures of translation. everyday-life recycling practices and “a world choked with referentiality. Simon Pleasance. activities. genres. More useful are questions such as those raised by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie. “Ordering the Universe: Documenta 11 and the Apotheosis of the Occidental Gaze. media. What emerges in this transformation in different parts of the world produces a critical ordering of intellectual and artistic networks of the globalizing world. this amounts to a rereading of residual modernist formalism through the repeating. trans.”10 Translating this into art discursive polemics. 55. as well as their material and symbolic ordering.9 Seeking a middle path between these two contending forces—one a tiring juggernaut. 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. no. He alludes to Nicolas Bourriaud. forms. Thus. was conceived. 2002) and Post-Production (New York.”11 Grounding one set of values. and disjunctions between different realities: between artists. displacement. Relational Aesthetics. The exhibition as a diagnostic toolbox actively seeks to stage the relationships. pro and con. See Okwui Enwezor. 2005): 231. subversion. . between identity and subjectification. disciplines. 2002).” in Documenta 11—Platform 5: Exhibition (exhibition catalog. hybridization. interpretation. more powerful than both popular. a material reflection on a series of disparate and interconnected actions and processes. creolization. Diedrich Diederichsen. p. and Mathieu Copeland (1998. Fronza Woods. the Kassel exhibition counterposed the supposed purity and autonomy of the art object against a rethinking of modernity based on ideas of transculturality and extraterritoriality. 10.” Art Journal 64 (Spring 2005): 80–89. generations. conjunctions. processes. the other a swarming of attack vehicles—has become common. Their impact. 8 June–15 Sept. remixing lens of relational aesthetics. institutions. “Formalismus. 2002).694 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity world has been written. in the words of Berlin critic Diedrich Diederichsen. A recent Hamburger Kunstverein exhibition. Formalismus. as “a reexamination of the basic ideas of modernism in light of the very contemporary cognizance that every detail of presentation and production is already contaminated by specific histories.

via “dialectical synthesis. corporate. the return to the normality of painting and spectacular images in keeping with the logic of the art market. To him. the only way forward is between them.” p. but it is dialectical only in the simplest.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 695 Theoretical ambitions notwithstanding.” His approach is certainly synthetic. For me. of the demands that these conditions make upon practice. themselves a key part of a now pervasive. . in a word. both of the big answers are reductive options. for arguably three decades now. or even postmodern. The “contemporary art” juggernaut operates primarily in terms of frameworks—managerial. While the two big picture approaches have an undeniably powerful currency and are accurate accounts as far as they go. that are highly generative but only as supplements of their mismatching—that are. the “dialectic” is between three terms (only two of which I have set out so far) that are tied to each other. on the other. and each is as empty as the other. and political settings in which art is made. curatorial. not of a persistent modernist 12. answer would be one in which the smaller-scale strategies listed in my opening paragraph. static sense. marked out more and more artistic production as distinctively contemporary—as opposed to that which continues to be made in modernist. neither of them fully addresses the changes in actual artistic practices that have. as contraries that are only partially synthesizable. uncomfortably but of necessity. commercial.) A third. shared tendencies that are themselves the outcome. The work provided an alternative to certain regressive and particularistic tendencies: on the one hand. social. the exhibition offered a sophisticated overview of art today. and better. The guerrilla swarming of the others is marked by acknowledgment of the psychic. historical. A more complex sense of dialectical fury was a key to Enwezor’s conception of Documenta 11. “Formalismus. and the extent to which they provide the content of much contemporary art and establish its circuitry of communication.12 From where he stands. I separate them here to highlight an important tension within contemporary art. modes. educational—imposed by art institutions. cultural. Problems and a Proposal A further step needs to be taken. (It will be obvious already that the second incorporates the first. 231. antinomies. Diederichsen. are understood not as mere artworld stylistics but as symptoms of a limited number of powerful. the recourse to an art that is satisfied with constructing global networks of semi-politicized creative subcultures. beguilingly distractive but at bottom hollow cultural industry. along with many others. one to which I shall keep returning.

in the past at least. In a recent article on “The Contemporary and the Historical” he unleashes most of the standard objections against efforts to see structure in the present chaos. themselves. and has been occurring for decades. because the word contemporary—in its ordinary usages—is even less resonant than the word modern. for one. some obvious objections met. to put it more broadly. It is just this quality. it is fair to ask. in more pragmatic realms: studios. galleries. almost impossible. let me suggest. calling the art of our day contemporary tells us nothing other than the banal fact that it is being made now. marketplaces. senses that there is. modernity and postmodernity as a descriptor of the state of things? In logic. overfull as a signified) to whatever it is that is occurring in all of the world right now? How could such a term match. and those of a world reshaped by rapid decolonization and incipient globalization. the contemporaneous qualities of an artwork— however initially attractive—were usually the least interesting things about it. but of the great changes of the 1960s and 1970s. some conceptual issues need to be cleared. however.696 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity formalism. antinomic exchange. What is contemporaneity other than a pointer (empty as a signifier. Donald Kuspit. these objections fail because they could. To periodize the ephemeral as contemporary art might be to repeat the mistake made when the same was done with modern art. the paradigm shifters internal to art itself. and. only more so. that infuses truly contemporary art and is the key to its contemporaneity. was overwhelmed by the abundance of contemporary art evi- . Art history’s attempt to control contemporaneity—and with that the temporal flow of art events—by stripping certain art events of their idiosyncracy and incidentalness in the name of some absolute system of value. better. Contemporary art seems a vacuous placeholder. Before exploring this idea in any depth. We might call it dialectical supplementarity or. let alone supplant. yet acknowledges that something has changed: There has always been more contemporary than historical art—or. This is the domain across which something strange. but for what? Is there something there that cannot name itself—or not yet? Or is it simply a fancy name for the most refined of those objects that serve spectacle society by inducing in their beholders the preferred state of attenuated distraction? Similarly. It is something that could have been said at any time. The interesting question is whether or not there is something distinctive about the present conjunction of forces in such realms that attracts this kind of paradox. occurs. there has always been more contemporaneity than historicity—but this fact only became emphatically explicit in modernity. They are posed. On the face of it. be made at any time. desktops.

media. the only option for criticism is. Criticism. Donald Kuspit. but his examples all have it being introduced in the 1960s. Kuspit is right about the dangers of generalization in a situation where the shots are being called by inimical institutional. on the other. it involves taking the three answers together as each containing differing kinds. He takes this to be the naturally. 13 Apr. . What is contemporary art now? requires a response consisting neither of discerning a middle path between two of the big answers sketched above nor of setting them into either/or confrontation. at worst complicit. not history. on the one hand. however shrouded in objections to the larger forces. The End of Art (New York. or at least historically. to keep advancing a “pluralism of critical interpretations” of current. 2004). www. and market forces. The responsible role for criticism in this context is. . evolved state of contemporary art production. Rather. hereafter abbreviated “CH. any form of interpretive generalization will be self-defeating at best. In the current context. 13. Or history as accreted criticism.” For Kuspit. he believes.artnet. as today’s art for the future is to reduce them to “sterile homogeneity”—to kill off precisely that power to persist and to attract future critical interest (“CH”). is no solution. then. “The Contemporary and the Historical. “the power of the contemporary comes from the insecurity of being ephemeral.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 697 dence that proposed alternative and often radically contrary ideas of value. he believes. or works by select artists. by a Malthusian overproduction of artists and. by the exclusivist superficiality of extraordinary auction prices and media-sensationalist celebrity. when “the turbulent pluralism of modern art . curators. and historians who would try to second-guess art history by preferring “the happy few or One and Only truly and absolutely significant artist” (“CH”). 2005. . Here is my proposal. which he sees quite accurately as dominated. critics. implicated relativism is more difficult.” Artnet. com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit4-14-05. increased exponentially in the postmodern situation” (“CH”).” These views are given fuller treatment in Kuspit. But singularizing particularity. and so he attacks artists. and past art in order to “keep it in contemporary play.13 He does not specify precisely when this change occurred. When this is put alongside the incommensurate particularity and radical incompleteness that is natural to the contemporary. and degrees.” so that nominating particular artworks. but more responsible.asp. An engaged. recent. the making of “an interpretive case for a particular art’s interestingness by tracking its environmental development in the context of the observerinterpreter’s phenomenological articulation of his or her complex experience of it” (“CH”). I believe that the question.

Julie Mehretu’s Untitled (Stadia) (2004). modelling the minutiae of the world’s processes as supplements deposited in their wake. Rover Thomas’s ancient dreaming in the present. it was crucial to the conceptualization of the symposium Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and Culture after the Twentieth Century. exemplary projects that discern the antinomies of the world as it is. Francis Aly ¨ s’s The Prophet (a series begun 1992). Fernando Bryce’s Revolucio ´ n (2004).C. 15. forthcoming).000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier (2000–2003). my mind’s eye passes across the street and through the rooms of the Carnegie Museum of Art. that display the workings of globality and locality. . As I write these lines.. . and Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s film. Emily Kngwarreye’s withheld exposures of her earthworlds. See Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Reading Inaow for Female Corpse (2001). Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine II (2002). Carnegie International curator Laura Hoptman opted for art that. Carnegie Museum of Art.14 We should recognize the energy of their profound contention. Postmodernity and Contemporaneity. over the past few years. 35). pp. she felt. as statements about reality that. These are the kinds of time that art is taking these days. Paul Chan’s Happiness (Finally) after 35. this is how it uncovers images. where the fifty-fourth Carnegie International was shown. art supplies provisional syntheses. We should treat them as antinomies—that is. “The Essential Thirty-eight. dealt with “the Ultimates. these are the ways in which it arrives at made things. 4–6 November 2004. I thank Okwui Enwezor for reminding me of this relation. the anatomy of belief ” (Laura Hoptman.698 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity of present-making power. fundamentally human questions: the nature of life and death. Gordon Bennett’s black/white Australian history paintings. Nancy Condee. 2005]. the war architecture of Lebbeus Woods. N. Maurizio Cattelan’s Now (2004). the existence of God. Who Kills Death (2003). Isa Genzhken’s Empire/Vampire. in which many of the issues raised in this essay were canvassed. and Enwezor (Durham. Driftwood (1999). Every situation that is truly contemporary is an outcome of the friction between them. provides pauses in the overall rush into the unsynthesizable.” The Fiftyfourth Carnegie International. are contradictions incapable of mutual resolution without the obliteration of all but one. Pittsburgh. I recognize that all of them are committed to an art that turns on long-term. showing its flows as if in section or as glimpses frozen into objects intended for passersby. November 2004 to March 2005. Pittsburgh. and why it sets up settings. the revelatory hoardings of Georges Ade ´ agbo. when linked. ed. . 17. Working within but also against this general condition. Rachael Harrison’s Untitled (Perth Amboy) (2001). jointly convened by us with Nancy Condee and held at the University of Pittsburgh.15 Dislocation and Situatedness When I think of artists whose work has. Smith. yet each of which remains true in itself. tapped closest into the demands of contemporaneity. 14. Hoptman [exhibition catalog. A number of works in that show display an urge to engage with contemporaneity in the ways I have just sketched. These include Kutlug Ataman’s Kuba (2004). ed. 9 Oct. and that imagine ways of living ethically within them: Turkey Tolson Tjuppurrula’s painted meditations on peace. 2004–20 Mar. Hans Haacke’s persistent criticality. a number of recent paintings by Neo Rausch. .

Cindy Sherman. such as Bijari. Fiona Hall’s meditations on cultural currency. baldly opposed. and Martı ´n Shastre. Felix Gonzales-Torres’s reflections on personal loss. the resonant photo tableaux of Tracey Moffatt. Similarly. many other artists who operate between these tendencies. feral strategies. Slight gestures. and get on with their search for an aesthetics and ethics that might be viable in the aftermath. To which . and Mary Kelly the traumas of motherhood. and Marlene Dumas figuring the misshaping of women by societies. not to resolve them. however filtered. the arch commentary of the Atlas Group. Ilya Kabakov’s ideological memory capsules. Accusations of sensationalism. with the demands of contemporaneity. as well. the inventive recycling of Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon among many others.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 699 Doris Salcedo’s registrations of enforced disappearance. Chantal Ackerman charting border crossings. Zoe Leonard’s records of economic place making. It is an impressive body of work. Jean-Pierre Bruyere’s photographic and iCinema allegories of the lifeworlds of young children in the cities of the Congo. as hollow resonances. not least the Museum of Jurassic Technology. but to extend their premises outward: the plethora of artist’s museums. the masquerades of Tracey Moffatt and Ayanah Moor aimed at subverting the racial identity categories imposed on them— these are just some examples of significant art being made all over the world. and La Baulera. Tania Bruguera. the communal cultural work of groups such as Huit Fachette and Wochenkausur. the coy meditations on everyday life of Rivane Neuenschwander. the chameleon public sphere politics of the Yes Men and increasing numbers of collectives. in Los Angeles. the sharp parodies of the international art system by Andrea Fraser. There are. mild subversions. Richard Pettibon. Thomas Hirschhorn’s antimonuments. Bill Viola’s efforts to reinspire spirituality. contra file ´. and Jorge Macchi on the vicissitudes of public speech. small steps. While the contemporary artists listed earlier remain framed by the ruins of the modernist project. Shirin Neshat. Allan Sekula’s tracking of global maritime flows. William Kentridge tapping his country’s racial unconscious. Mark Lombardi’s delicate diagrams of the criminality of international economies. Eduardo Kac and Patricia Piccinini’s startling evocations of cloning. and bad faith do not apply. Tanja Ostojic. Wenda Gu’s united nations project. Nor would I wish to divide current practitioners into two camps. Mona Hatoum. Jeff Wall. esoteric irrelevance. their work gains much of its subliminal power from an engagement. and Bill Henson. the difference is that they treat them as echoes. and it’s growing. Isaac Julien the circuitry of desire. Richard Wilson’s various installations of 20/50. Rachael Whiteread’s cast voids. those artists just listed cannot avoid these same modernist ruins. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s open invitations. Ilona Ne ´ meth.

Helms [Orleans. without end. and mood.” in Wiring Prometheus: Globalization. it was presumed. In brief. History. 246). Augustine.700 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity purposes and in the names of which values? These questions can still be posed and be answered (although an extended consideration must be deferred). however. ed. (dis)location. p. familiar constituents of being are becoming. modern art and modernism. See Hans Robert Jauss.” trans. memory. the word modern (modernus) distinguished a mood. or mode. Nowadays. present of things future. Hal M. The Confessions of St. in a paradox tolerated by most. they seek sustainable modes of survival. and goes on to note that “these three do somehow exist in the mind. Indeed. as its time went on. Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005): 329–64. and the altercation of affect/effectivity. pastness. All of the artists mentioned. each day. modern became the core of a set of terms that narrated the two-centuries-long formation of modernity in terms of novelty. it seems to me that at least four themes course through the heterogeneity that is natural to contemporaneity. focus their wide-ranging concerns on questions of time.16 This sense that the present could be pregnant with something special about itself—manifest as a quality later called nowness—persisted until late medieval times. for otherwise I do not see them: there is present of things past. in most ordinary usage—in English and in 16. Augustine: “There are three times: a present of things past. Within this contemporaneity. trans. Peter Lyth and Helmut Trischler (Aarhus. “Modernity and Literary Tradition. Christian Thorne.”17 In the expanded modern world. and then several past periods.. the “modern” aged. 103. sight. . when contrast with what was seen to be the past. of fullness emergent in the otherwise ordinary passing of time and within the predictable unfolding of fashion (hodiernus. 1986]. and futurism. and a present of future things. An early formulation was that of St. one that would. Augustine places this sense of time. until it became. transformativity within the hyperreal. modern movement architecture and modern or contemporary design. not least those of its definitive artistic currents. around the shores of the Mediterranean.” against God’s eternal time. for this reminder. it became the name of its own period. became central to the meaning of modern. Recently. The Thickening of the Present In the ancient world. however. Mass. 17. a present of things present. “of today”). expectation” (Augustine. place. Denmark.and growth. present of things present. 2004). steadily more strange. mediation. Despite the vibrancy of these tendencies. p. “Global History and the Present Time. I am indebted to Wolf Scha ¨ fer. become increasingly modern. and the thousands more of whom they are representatives. the list looks more like: (alter)temporality. historical. They make visible our sense that these fundamental. cooperation. and Technology. that of the “human soul.

The era of separate destinies has run its course. 19. rather. strictly. Modernity has not. and textbook titles—which. of course. This change echoes a larger one. in art discourse as elsewhere. 120. In arguing that the global spread of information and the instantaneousness of its communication now means that the “sociotemporal world order is changing in favor of contemporaneity for all. to forget the present. mainly as a default for modern. but we shall have. to reduce it to a permanently selfeffacing moment of transition from past to future. the word contemporary served. tend to use contemporary as a soft signifier of current plurality. because no one can any longer live by the simple carrying out of what he himself is. Because of this permanent movement towards the future modern art tends to overlook. for decades.” Wolf Scha ¨fer cites a passage from Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s 1961 novel Ambiguous Adventure. to currency.19 Increased opportunity of access has not.18 Nevertheless. . Boris Groys. St. an exchange between the father of a young Senegalese revolutionary and a French teacher: We have not had the same past. while physically present. was) directed towards the future. Boris Groys points out the main reason: Modern art is (or. you and ourselves. the end of the world has indeed come for every one of us. This shift has been occurring since the decline of modernism in the 1980s and has appeared in institutional naming—of galleries. For most of the twentieth century. to practice a work in progress. Augustine’s accumulation of presents has returned. In that sense. Being modern means to live in a project. been able to maintain its division of the world into those who live in modern times and those who. “Global History and the Present Time. a number of the most engaged contemporary artists are redefining what it means to live in a project and doing so in terms that acknowledge the power of the present. auction house departments. the same future. were regarded as noncontemporaneous beings. academic courses. however. uncannily. and especially in the 1920s and the 1960s. “Topology of Contemporary Art. Quoted in Scha ¨ fer. when modernist attitudes prevailed.” in Antinomies of Art and Culture.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 701 some but not all other European languages—it has surrendered currency to the term contemporary and its cognates.” p. meant equality of outcome—on the contrary—nor has it meant (contrary to early fears about 18. museums.

consciousness is concerned with taking many steps.702 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity globalization) homogeneity of choices. The current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary gives four major meanings. coeval. fast. not from the old to the new but vice versa. lying close by. even of being in and out of time at the same time. the power to force everyone forward in broadly the same direction has been lost. and the isolation of postmodernity as a fate of the West (or. or during time. or period. from. They are all relational. it seemed that cotemporary might overtake it to express this strange currency. or during the same period. Are we at a threshold of large-scale meaning change. it is one that has built its gateway around us through indirection and as an outcome of quite other great changes: the reduction of modernity to “the only remaining superpower. Indeed.” the evaporation of postmodernism as a onegeneration wonder. it might be time to grasp a more supple set of ways of being in time now and to shift to another set of terms. In many parts of the world. on being placed to. There is the strong sense of “belonging to the same time. is as rich as that of modern. everyone changing as they come and go.” the coincidental “having existed or lived from the same date. during the seventeenth century in England. and however decked out with a modified version of postmodernity. Its etymology. turning on prepositions. any appellation that ties a current world description entirely to modernity. equal in age.” and the adventitious “occurring at the same moment of time. age. for a while. Regarding Contemporaneity The word contemporary has always meant more than just the plain and passing present. slower. fundamentalisms move in just one direction. Against this broad tide. at least. or frozen time. In a mediascape characterized by such contrary forces as instant communication of key decisions by political leaders and the capacity to demonstrate against them within the same news cycle. During the period of modernity’s dominance. In these conflicted circumstances. Nor does postmodernity explain enough of what is happening in what remains of the West as the world migrates to it. There is such a set. we can now see. of many parts and elements of it). will miss as much of the main point as do the fundamentalisms. occupying the same definite period. In these circumstances. at. . yet again? If so. The term contemporary calibrates a number of distinct but related ways of being in or with time. but not the world. Multiple temporalities are the rule these days. the downside of what used to be called cultural imperialism was a kind of ethnic cleansing carried out by the displacement of unmodern peoples into past. and their conceptions of historical development move in multifarious directions. in however conditional a manner. implacably.

the two words have finally exchanged their core meaning: the contemporary has become the new modern. It is the OED’s fourth definition of contemporary that brings persons. mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world. in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities. etc. The second and third meanings make this clear. of or characteristic of the present period. specifically designating art of a markedly avant-garde quality. given the diversity of present experiences of temporality. the instant over the epoch. building. They may also subsist in a complex awareness that. and to the time they happen to be in. decoration. of direct experience of multiplicitous complexity over the singular simplicity of distanced reflection.” In each of these meanings there is a distinctive sense of presentness. and will do so in the future. No longer does it feel like “our time” because “our” cannot stretch to encompass its contrariness. as it were. in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities. and time together under a one-directional banner: “Modern. its presentness. things. given human difference. indeed. their contemporaries may not stand in relation to time as they do. they may equally well do so. all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between them. is it “a time” because if the modern were inclined above all to define itself as a period. or furniture. If we were to generalize this quality (of course. existing in simple simultaneity. at once within and against the times. Yet. whereas the first points to the phenomenon of two or more people. but without its subsequent contract with the future. events. its instantaneity. Nor. simultaneous. while the phenomena may have some sense of being joined by their contemporaneousness. then. This certainly looks like the world as it is now. its prioritizing of the moment over the time. Of course. and sort the past into periods. in contemporaneity periodization is . and in that of the contemporary. of being in the present. even here. they may feel themselves as standing. having modern characteristics. following this logic. or things “belonging” to the same historical time. of beings who are (that are) present to each other. especially up-to-date. We would see. ultramodern. that contemporaneity consists precisely in the constant experience of radical disjunctures of perception.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 703 contemporaneous. Finally. To leap to such a conclusion would be to miss an essential quality of contemporaneousness: its immediacy. do so now. separately. while the connectedness is stronger. ideas. against its grain) as a key to world picturing. in important senses. we would see its constituent features manifest there to the virtual exclusion of other explanations. or era.” In this definition. It is the pregnant present of the original meaning of modern. these kinds of relationships have occurred at all times in the historical past. We are. out of the modern age. ideas. standing alongside yet apart from each other.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York. A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London. it seems. they may be all that there is. it is an appeal for radical particularism to work with and against radical generalization. 2003). the Work of Mourning and the New International. the contingent.23 Yet it is equally important to weave into these accounts recognition of the less visible workings of what de Landa names “matterenergy.22 In the aftermath of modernity and the passing of the postmodern. These include the social and ecological elements—localized. the introduction and chap. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. but as a kind of incessant incipience. 2003). R. while impossible to foresee or predict. they are not the symptoms of a deeper stability or an entry point to its achievement.704 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity impossible.” trans. Following my reservation about Kuspit’s conclusion. that which is. 227–74. perhaps. This is why there is no longer any overarching explanatory totality that accurately accumulates and convincingly accounts for these proliferating differences. 2000).” “altertemporality. 24. the fugitive. the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”)—appears in Charles Baudelaire. metropolitan. ed. c’est le transitoire. 21. p. see also pp. esp. for example. is now general and. “The Painter of Modern Life” (1864). Jonathan Mayne (London.”24 Yet a paradoxical outcome of recent long-term historical explanations is their unusual degree of uncertainty with regard to the im20. trans. 12. and cosmopolitan—of the successively expanding “human web” described. rather. le fugitif. as Baudelaire had hoped. 1964). Baudelaire’s famous formulation—“La modernite ´ .” and inequity are not only the most striking features on any short list of the qualities of contemporaneity. singularizing particularism. 21. This responds to one of the dilemmas posed by Fredric Jameson. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago. by the McNeills. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt. The particular. trans. A key concept in Derrida’s later work. “The Painter of Modern Life” and Other Essays. as perpetual advent. Unlike Baudelaire’s famous markers of modernite ´. 2002). le contingent. The present may become “eternal.21 “Multeity. 8. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. of the kind theorized by Jacques Derrida as l’avenir. in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju ¨ rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. 22. See J. they are at its volatile core. . The Human Web (New York. this is not a recommendation for stand-alone. p. to come. 23. the most relevant texts here being Jacques Derrida.20 This suggests that the only potentially permanent thing about this state of affairs is that its impermanence may last forever. McNeill and William H.” not in a state of wrought transfiguration. dont l’autre moitie ´ est l’e ´ ternel et l’immuable” (“By modernity I mean the ephemeral. la moitie ´ de l’art. to treat all the elements in the mix as antinomies. McNeill. Global historians continue to do us great service by tracking the trajectories of large forces that unfold through lengthy durations. forever shall be. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago. Manuel de Landa. 1994) and the interview following 9/11.

thoroughly embedded inside these processes. of jihad. peacefully. however. In the hearts of their spiritual leaders. nor do they sit up separately in some static array awaiting our inspection.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 705 mediate future. for example. all the time. Differences that are as profound as these do not lie side by side. They are actively implicated in each other. While belief in the persistence through the present of ongoing formations is widespread. seek recon25. Scha ¨fer. and often gestural. 110. We are. Some. that not even their fundamentalism is applicable to all humankind. mostly. Certainly the commanding. Obsession with the past and concern about the complexities of the present have tended to thicken our awareness of it at the expense of expectations about the future. obliging it to adapt to local circumstances. the forms in which that might occur seem less predictable. . See Jared Diamond. germs. 2005). which results from the massive parallelism of cultural contemporaneities. This sense underlies. “master narratives” persist and continue to promise everything from continuing modernizing progress—freedom and democracy are the watchwords of U. “coming of thought and organization.”26 New World Disarray In public discourse. expansion into the Middle East—to the return of spiritual leaders under the banner. New forms of translation need to be found for channelling the world’s friction. But their partiality inevitably means that they do so in ways that divide each bloc of believers more and more from the others. beguiling power of these simplifications buildsfollowings in larger and larger numbers. all of us. with the net effect that they not only cast out “unbelievers” but undermine their own future triumph. Their interaction is a major work of the world. “Global History and the Present Time. It also renders provisional.25 As Scha to terms with the complexity of the present time. remain Other. Too many of them are violently bent on the erasure of the other. is obviously one of the great challenges. Germs. always. that the others will. Guns. Social geographers such as Jared Diamond alert us to the prospect that societies based on guns. 26. of the world on us and us on the world. all over the place. the appeals to universal rights that have been for decades an available language for negotiation between competing interests. and steel are on the verge of immanent collapse if they continue to maintain present modes ¨fer (rather blandly) puts it. 2003) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York. the homogenizing thrusts of certain kinds of economic globalization. there is a dawning sense that world domination by any one set of views is impossible in human affairs. and deeply threatens.S. and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York.” p. just as every one of us lives in them.

J. “icons of military and economic power”—an incomplete event with continuing effects in all spheres of life. p. (Sydney. the suddenness of unReal states and of the apparent extension of Europe. the deadly inadequacy of tribalism versus modernization as models for decolonization. the accelerating concentration of wealth in a few countries and within those countries its concentration in the few. 3. Among these: 9/11 as an attack within an ideological war. 2001. now. the proliferation of protest movements and alternative networks.29 Other recent events indicate profound realignments of modernity’s great formations. . the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. and the Pacific. the uncertain prospect of a U.S. Central Europe. it always arises in concrete particulars and increasingly in the form of frictional encounters. postmodernity and postmodernism—to say nothing of the implied bonds between social formation and artistic practice carried by these terms—cannot be stretched and patched to carry this degree of spinout. interview with Hamid Mir. The Observer. The Australian Contemporary Aboriginal Art movement.. emperium. 11 Nov. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. in the ex-Soviet peripheries. such as Documenta 11 of 2002 and the fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003. as well as the emergence of what may be new ones. Classic conceptions of modernity and modernism. the question of European polity.S. N. World Bank). Osama bin Laden. 2005). as a fissuring of the iconomy.706 Terry Smith / Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity ciliation within a framework of respect for difference. and as an occasion to reimpose social constraints within ostensible democracies. 2002).” the concluding chapter of Smith. 2:144–67. Africa. and the distinctively different models of appropriate artistic practice. internally and externally. the ubiquity and diversification of specular culture. the implosive fallout of the second world and the reemergence of authoritarianism within it. the coexistence of multiple economies and cultures within singular state formations (most prominently. the revival of leftist governments in South America. the concentration and narrowing of media versus the spread of the internet. for example. 2 vols. And the discursive division of world art into official brands 27. foregrounded in major survey exhibitions. I argue this in “Aboriginality and Postmodernity: Parallel Lives. is significantly driven by this impulse. 29. and in the subsequent disarray among curators and critics. the crisis of post–World War II international institutions as political and economic mediators (UN.28 While the language of universals remains current. China). Transformations in Australian Art. 28. continuing conflicts in the Middle East. ecological time bombs everywhere and the looming threat of societal collapse. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton. IMF.27 All of these elements were present in events such as the 9/11 attacks on various U. contradictions within and between regulated and coercive economies and deregulated and criminal ones.

30 It is inspiring. “The Provincialism Problem.” Artforum 13 (Sept. in the artworks highlighted here. 1974): 54–59. See Smith.Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 707 issued from the power centers and the struggling multiplicity emergent from everywhere else cannot do so either. has been transformed by a larger network of widely dispersed and variously connected sources of creative coping. and even more challenging. more and more insights into adaptable modes of active resistance and hopeful persistence. to be able to see that this system. Just over thirty years ago I described the international art system as still centered. A less salutary. on the New York artworld. now. 30. aspect of contemporaneity is the world (dis)order in which this productivity subsists. however much it strives to concentrate its power. . The rich complexities of contemporaneity have set the world’s agenda since the end of the cold war. however precariously and debilitatingly. Yet sprinkled amidst the recursion to past and fantastical styles of security we have seen. creating a nearly universal condition of permanent-seeming aftermath—Ground Zero everywhere.