Branislav Dimitrijević

Contemporary Art and the Not-Now

(Paper presented at the Festival of Critical Culture - KRIK, Skopje, 2016)

Art now has no object in view.

(Charles Harrison, 1970)

There is a sense in which the practitioners in the field of contemporary art may find
themselves stuck in the process of a perpetual reproduction of cultural routine, as an
overall yielding of art in the confines of cultural industries. It is a condition when an
achieved standardisation in the production and display of contemporary art (in the “Global
West”) narrows down any potential of art to partake in the processes of social becoming,
which was characteristic for the early phase of contemporary art, that arrived under the
term “New artistic practice” that was encompassing conceptual art, performance art, land
art and arte povera.1 If we propose a historical genealogy of contemporary art (as the term
used both in the capitalist West and the socialist East since the late forties) we might, in
the conventional art-historical method, recognise its early stage (from the mid 1960s to the
mid 1980s), its high stage (from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s), and, since then, its late
stage. In this late stage, we have already fortified a historical canon, a canon of
contemporary art as part of the overall canon of contemporaneity.2

“Contemporary art” increasingly seems to emerge as a historical category, a category

towards which we may already develop not only critical but also a historical distance. The
genealogy of contemporary art may be found in the direct continuity with the critical
tendencies of modernist art to overcome Art confronted by its professed “death” by
merging it with Life, yet by characteristically maintaining its ontological kernel: the very
indestructible event of art. As it has been noted in many accounts, Modernist art had two
main lines of its development. One was in the continuity with early modern aestheticism
and formalism (Baudelaire, Wild, Fry, Bell, Greenberg), that is a medium-specific
modernism. This line is centred upon the formal evaluation of an individual work in an
artistic medium that had been inherited from the previous historical paradigm: the classical
paradigm with its invention of the autonomy of painting and sculpture as the high-artistic

1 The term is proposed in the late 1960s, early 1970s, in the writings of art critics Germano Celant and
Catherine Millet, and, in the Yugoslav context emloyed as a term used by Ješa Denegri and other art critics
in the 1970s to describe the final phase of a continuity of the “Art of the Other Line” which established a
genealogy with its origin in the historical Avantgarde of the 1920s. See: Ješa Denegri, “Problemi umjetničke
prakse posljednjeg decenija”, u Nova umjetnička praksa 1966-1978, (ed. Marijan Susovski), Galerija
suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, 1978, pp. 5-13.
2 See: Jelena Vesić, “Canon of Contemporaneity”, Manifesta Journal, 11, 2011, pp. 41-43.
media. As opposed to this “aesthetic modernism” stands what Thierry de Duve calls
“generic modernism” based on the the notion of art as historical-ontological rather then art
as aesthetic. In generic art, instead of the media-specific critical judgment of the quality of
a painting or a sculpture, there is a critical judgment of the very recognition of art and of
the artistic. The question was no longer if this art was beautiful or good, but if this art was
art in the historical ontology of art. This line can be traced from Duchamp’s readymades
(and his separation of the previously near-synonymous categories of the artistic and the
aesthetic) throughout the various avantgarde and neo-avantgarde artistic propositions.3

Whereas the outcome of “aesthetic modernism” may be found in the expanding field of the
term Design, the outcome of “generic modernism” is realised in the “ontology” of
contemporary art. It was a development of the signification of art beyond its media-based
classification. In one of the crucial late modernist essays on art, Michael Fried’s “Art and
Objecthood” (1967), the minimal art (as arguably one of the first manifestations of the
transition from modernist to contemporary art) was criticised because of its “literality” and
“theatricality” that replaced the “presentness” of the modernist work of art.4 With the advent
of minimal art and other artistic forms since the late sixties (conceptual art, land art,
performance art, installation art, relationist art, etc) there was no longer any certainty that
the work of art is something situated here or there, in front of the beholder, something as a
whole, encompassing, identifiable and singular “work”. The “work” is no longer singularly
autonomous but its autonomy is motivated and interpreted by the heteronomy of
situations, the networks and webs of its articulation.

As one of the foundational statements for the new ontology of contemporary art here we
may take the notion of the “Non-Site” introduced by the American “land artist” Robert
Smithson. Non-Site is not just about the dynamics between the gallery space and the non-
gallery space, but it is about the very situatedness of art, about the being-there of art as
not specified by one scrupulous and genuine media. The relation between the Site and the
Non-Site is not linear or bi-polar relation, but the whole body of different elements:
intervention on the site, materiality of the elements of the site in the non-site, photographs,
videos, documents, written texts, maps, diagrams, etc. It is about a "logical picture" that
differs from a natural or realistic picture. As opposed to "expressive art" which “avoids the
problem of logic”, a logical intuition can develop an entirely "new sense of metaphor" free
of natural as well as expressive content.5 And it can only be understood in the condition of
the altered state of the beholder, something that Smithson describe in the text referring to
his early mirrored neon light object The Eliminator from 1964: “The viewer doesn't know
what he is looking at, because he has no surface space to fixate on; thus he becomes

3 See Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, The MIT Press, 1999.
4 See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, Artforum, Summer, 1967.
5Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites”, The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996.
aware of the emptiness of his own sight or sees through his sight”.6 In fact, Smithson’s
relation of the Non-Site to the Site is also a metaphoric wordplay referring to the dialectics
between the sight and the non-sight.

As opposed to the modernist-aesthetic concept of artistic autonomy (autonomy grounded

on the inherent aesthetic, i.e. retinal, qualities of a painting or a sculpture) this “other line”
of modernism understood artistic autonomy as an autonomy beyond the notion of the
autonomous character of any aesthetic object (its concrete uselessness) but as the
autonomy of name. Contemporary art seemed to begin with the outright critique of
modernist autonomy through an act of de-aestheticisation. However, in fact it demanded
even a higher degree of autonomy of autonomy of art that is rejecting to fulfil even the
disinterested aesthetic gaze. One of the foundational statements of contemporary art
might be a document issued by the sculptor Robert Morris in 1963, that was verified by the
public notary. This document stated that the artist withdrew all aesthetic qualities from his
construction entitled Litanies and that further on a said construction did not possess such
qualities. Following such a statement the very artistic practice that questioned the notion of
the artistic autonomy (in the aesthetic mode) in the 1960s and 1970s did in fact demand
an autonomy of “de-aestheticised” art, primarily the one breaking with the chains of
economic commodification governing the modernist media-specificity.

Already by the mid-1970s this demand for an even greater autonomy of “generic art”
reached its perverse ideological impediment with the inauguration of the political system
that we call neoliberal. In the following decades, and reaching its final phases now (after
the 2007/8 crisis), contemporary art became semi-integrated in the system of cultural
industries, mostly as a semi-disguised practice, surviving through nomadic participation
and tactics of evasion and parasitising. Finally these tactics could have been seen as
successful in the intensified institutionalisation of contemporary art in the Global West
since the early 1990s. After the experience of the crisis, this institutional proliferation has
become increasingly questioned for its “non-sustainability”. Along with the full growth of the
internet and the social networking, contemporary art entered its late phase, in which it
operates along with the two main forms of its socially imposed raison d’être, but with both
restricting its autonomous field. One is to be found in the internally structured strategy of
multiplication that repeats the gesture of the information flow, and the other is in the
external (social) demand for any form of applicability of the artistic gesture. We may say
that contemporary art is succumbing to two main forms of attack on artistic autonomy: by
the demand of information and by the demand of application.

When we talk about the demand of application, we are not only implying the market-
application of art, i.e commodification. We are also implying different forms of activist
application of artistic gesture for a progressive political objective, and finally different forms
of “affirmative art”, “util art”, and other neologisms demanding artistic gestures to be

6 Ibid.
situated within the discourse of socially practical services in a modest and non-aggressive
manner. In its late phase contemporary art is measured by its declaratively affirmative
intention, which is a response to cultural foundations’ policies that request some aim and
objective of an art project to be declared in advance, prior to its production. The curatorial
practice of recent years has declaratively departed from the discussion that lays in the
foundations of “generic art” - that boils down to the “is this art?” - and has embraced the
question “what can we do with art?”, “art” becoming a term that still keeps its ultimate
autonomy, the autonomy of the name. Although we do not any longer ask the question
what is art, we still cling to the traditional power of the notion. This instrumentalisation of
the name “art”, as an “autonomous name”, is the logic of the late phase of contemporary
art. However, this process also brings to a closure the political potential of contemporary
art. As the theorist Mika Hannula put it, there is a difference between politicking and
politicisation when we deal with contemporary art. Whereas politicking is characterised by
the decision what an art project stands for and what it supports before it acts, conversely,
“politicisation is what it is only when it opens up, starts questioning, and keeps that
process of opening up and asking the annoying questions going on and on”.7

In the current condition of art the forms of “information” have been replacing the forms of
art-thinking in the process leading to a particular form of hyper-knowledge. The obsession
with information is a pre-condition of the fetishisation of the nowness that is structuring the
canon of contemporary art. Through the constant flow of providing and sharing information
we have structured a very densely woven mask hiding our main inability, our main trigger
of frustration: the inability to know the totality of the present. Contemporary art is the mode
of exercising this inability, and, at its worst, it merely repeats the gesture of the information
flow. But, at its best, it practices this inability to know the present (to know our “thing”) by
opening the fractures in the present, so that our inability to know the present represents
the indicator of this very present, and could open the mode of thinking it. Contemporary art
is an agonistic quest for “an image at the now of recognisability”, to paraphrase Walter
Benjamin. Flow of information is an extension of the now, contemporary art is a vehicle of
that extension. In his “Storyteller”, Benjamin perceives the emergence of information and
the decline of narrative as “symptom of secular productive forces of history”. For Benjamin,
“the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at
that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any
time.”8

In one of the first acts of institutionalisation of contemporary art, the notion of information is
prominently taken as the title of the first exhibition of “new artistic practice” in the leading
museum of modern art, MOMA in New York. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue,
curator Kynaston McShine writes:

7Mika Hannula, Politics, Identity and Public Space – Critical reflections in and through the practices of
contemporary art, Expothesis, Utrecht, 2009. p. 14.
8 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, Illuminations, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1968, p. 90.
"With an artworld that knows more readily about current work, through reproductions and
the wide dissemination of information via periodicals, and that has been altered by
television, films and satellites, as well as the “jet,” it is now possible for artists to be truly
international; exchange with their peers is now comparatively simple. The art historian’s
problem of who did what first is almost getting to the point of having to date by the hour.
Increasingly artists use mail, telegrams, telex machines, etc., for transmission of works
themselves—photographs, films, documents—or of information about their activity. For
both artists and their public it is a stimulating and open situation, and certainly less
parochial than even five years ago.It is no longer imperative for an artist to be in Paris or
New York. Those far from the “art centers” contribute more easily, without the often artificial
protocol that at one time seemed essential for recognition.”9

The notion of information as hyper-spread by the communication media is perceived as

liberating and open, and particularly beneficial for those “far from the art centres”. This
inaugurated capacity to simultaneously recognise artistic practices in, say, Buenos Aires,
Belgrade and New York, and to share information of their existence, is one of the
foundational propositions of contemporary art as a form of “hyper-modernity” in which the
emancipatory gesture of modernism (its internationalism) is upgraded and accelerated.
This initial sense of continuity of modernity may be one of the reasons for the instant
institutional recognition of contemporary art, which as an art practice received its
immediate attention already in 1969 with the exhibitions “When Attitudes Become
Forms” (Kunsthalle, Bern and ICA, London), “Op losse schroeven” (Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam) and followed by “Information” in 1970. In the same time in the socialist
Yugoslavia, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade organised the exhibition “Examples
of Conceptual Art in Yugoslavia” (curated by Biljana Tomić and Ješa Denegri in 1971),
even before the opening of Students Cultural Centre where this type of practice emerged
in this city. The most prominent ideas of new artistic practice (dematerialisation of art, the
primacy of the idea over the product, melting of the boundary between art and life,
democratisation of artistic act, etc) were elaborated from within the very institutions of
modernism, and, in spite of expected conservative rejections, these institutions in the West
(particularly since the early 1990s) provided a certain sense of hegemony of
“contemporary art” as a generic term.

Today we know that many “revolutionary” propositions of “early contemporary art”, during
its “high” phase (the 1990s) came to be known as tuned to the development of neoliberal
culture. The notion of dematerialisation is part of the shift from industrial to post-industrial
economy, primacy of the idea over the product has become a pivotal notion for advertising
industry, melting of the boundary between art and life and democratisation of art have
become integral part of entertainment culture, with reality TV and the overall culturalisation
of everything. What has emerged as a critique of cultural industries and cultural

9 Kynaston McShine, "Introduction to Information", Information, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970.
commodification has become entangled with the altered modes of commodification and
fetishisation, something that already in 1972 Robert Smithson described as a “market-
place of ideas” that “removes ideas from any physical reality”. Already then, he saw
“conceptual art” as a demand for cheaper cultural products in the reduction of objects to
“ideas”. Instead of objects, dematerialised ideas respond more adequately to the demand
of the incessant flow of the present.

But what could then be a dialectical negation of this ideological process as manifested in
current art? The negation of modernism (of dominating discourse of aesthetic modernism)
was to be found in practicing non-art and anti-art. From Duchamp’s resolution to play
chess rather then to “make” art in the 1920s, to “International strike of artists” organised
(unsuccessfully) by Goran Đorđević in the late 1970s, there was a series of different
tactical withdrawals from art and different articulations of its negation. Contemporary art
inherited that position as well, and to be a non-artist is now also an artistic position in the
broad field of contemporary art. Therefore the negation of contemporary art could only be
a negation of its ontological condition, that is, of its being-within the spatio-temporal logic
of here and now. The dialectics between here and elsewhere has been one of the
foundational interests of the “other line” of contemporary art that we may recognise in
Smithson’s notion of a “Non-Site” - as a negation of modernist presentness.

In his analysis of “post-conceptualist” art, Peter Osborne, observing the “transcategorial

character” of works by Gordon Matta-Clark, introduces a following maxim: “To each work
its own spatiality - singular in its temporal instantiations and relations, but social and
conceptual in its elements and structures of relations”.10 Osborne sees this kind of art
space as akin to what Deleuze called “any-space-whatever” (un espace quelconque), as a
singular space but the one that has lost its homogeneity. Contemporary art, as Osborne
defines in the title of his book, is situated as anywhere or not at all.

But how then to understand the negation of now? How to look at art beyond the nowness
of contemporary art and not to resort to values that we were familiar with before the now
happens? The simple negation of the now may be found in different retro-forms, in the
perpetual emergencies of the past within the present, in the archival anxiety that has
become also an integral part of contemporary art. The other negation would be found in
the imagination of future, of living for the future, as is also a recognisable line in
contemporary art, and the one in the continuity with modernist obsessions about future.
This imagination of future is purely and simply dominated by imaginations of the coming
catastrophe. Osborne understands this relation of the past and the future in the canon of
contemporaneity as a mode in which “fragments of the past are structurally within
themselves as futural (as projective) qua fragments, as fragments of the future are
(projects)”: their futurity must be retrieved as “part of their afterlife”.11

10 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All - Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London, 2013, p. 149.
11 Ibid, p. 170.
But what if we instead of a tripartite structure past-now-future, imagine some binary
structure of now and its opposite? In our Christian tradition have inherited a “tripartite
nowness of the soul” from Saint Augustin and this nowness is articulated for him in the
tripartite structure of attention (present), remembrance (past) and expectation (future).
Needless to say, all three categories have undergone a serious crisis in our, so called,
(post-)ideological and (post-)historical condition. Whereas memory has been handed over
to technical apparatus, and attention gets conditioned by the same apparatus,
expectations are diminished by the inability of the apparatus to formulate social
imagination because it possess everything but the unconsciousness. This crisis of the
tripartite nowness of the soul calls for a re-articulation that is charged by the need to
negate the ritualised practices of contemporary art in its late phase. So, again, what if
instead of this tripartite structure we imagine some binary structure, a structure generating
a new mode of dialectical thinking?

Let us take as an example a display of paintings recently hung in the foyer of an amateur
theatre located on the periphery of New Belgrade12 . In such a “non-place”, above a lonely
sofa, one could have encountered paintings, that are the copies of the well-known
paintings by Mondrian, Picasso, Duchamp, Malevich, Arp and Picabia. They were
displayed together with some religious canvases of The Crucifixion, The Entombment, The
Immaculate Conception, Christ Carrying the Cross, Saint Michael, Saint Jerome in the
Wilderness… In the printed material accompanying the display one could find a short text
signed by Walter Benjamin. In the text Benjamin claims the following:

The pictures before us represent scenes of times gone by. They were all icons in stories
of religion and of art. Some depicted events from the past, while others anticipated
the future. Today, they are nothing more than artefacts displayed here neither as art
nor as religion. While the pictures of the future became antiquities, the world emerging
before us begins to resemble stories from the distant past. In a way it seems that
the differences between the future and the past are disappearing, as if they are both
becoming the one and the same meta-time that is not-now.13

Although at this point the patient reader of my text could become puzzled by this sudden
re-appearance of Walter Benjamin, one can be assured that Benjamin’s Recent Writings14
have been published just a few years ago, and that he has also recently given an interview
to the magazine Afterall in which he tries to expound this notion of Not-Now. In this
interview Benjamin also made the following claim: “Since the existing social paradigm is
based on chronology, there are two possible options to get out of it. One would be to forget
chronology and return to a rural, non-chronological structure. Another possibility would be

12 ‘Not Now’, Novobeogradska kulturna mreža (New Belgrade Cultural Network), Belgrade, 2013.
13 ‘Not Now’, Novobeogradska kulturna mreža (New Belgrade Cultural Network), Belgrade, 2013.
14 Walter Benjamin, Recent Writings, New Documents, Vancouver, 2013.
a meta-chronology, a structure that would remember or reflect chronology but without itself
being based on chronology. This could be some kind of network, a structure based on
neighbourhood relationships, like the graphs in topology.”15 In exploring the latter
possibility, Benjamin goes beyond the linear triad past-present-future, and proposes a
binary opposition to Now, that is the Not-Now: “This ‘not-now’ is not ‘time’, it is a ‘meta-
time’. For instance, we could hold a photograph of a tree in front of the same tree, and
they both exist now, but the photograph remembers another instance of time that was
once ‘now’ but that is now ‘not-now’. This recorded and frozen ‘now’ is a reflected time, it is
a ‘meta-time’. Similarly, anticipating a future event is imagining it now – in a way
‘remembering’ it in the present, although it didn’t happen yet.”16

If we consider art as “a form of thinking”, rather than only as a “form of production”, we

might become able to configure its capacity beyond the immediacy of its commodification
or/and application for the purposes of already structured (political) discourses. In the words
of Luis Camnitzer: “Art thinking is a meta-discipline that is there to help expand the limits of
other forms of thinking: It creates itself while it allows the play with taxonomies, the making
of illegal and subversive connections, the creation of alternative systems of order, the
defiance of known systems, and the critical thinking and feeling of everything.”17 So it is
not only about “acting” against and “imagining” alternatives to the dominant political order
(like in the canons of “artivism”) but about relating to and expanding any form or structure
of thinking that is narrowed by this order. The question is not how to try to rethink the
notion of artistic autonomy, as its forms are already lost, but how to complete the closure
of the art-process which is subsumed under capital’s valorisation process and which would
present a real negation of contemporary art in the times of its steady decline.

15 David Morris, “Not Now: A Conversation with Walter Benjamin”, Afterall, 42, 2016, pp. 116-123.

16 Ibid.
17Luis Camnitzer, “Thinking about art thinking” (2015), http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-
about-art-thinking/