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Currents of world-making in contemporary artTerry SmithPublished online: 20 Feb 2012.

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To cite this article: Terry Smith (2011) Currents of world-making in contemporary art, World Art, 1:2, 171-188, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2011.602712 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2011.602712

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World ArtVol. 1, No. 2, September 2011, 171 188Studies: research article

Currents of world-making in contemporary artTerry Smith*

Contemporary art issues from a new sense of what constitutes ‘the world,’ and from a radically expanded sense of what constitutes ‘art.’ It is distinct in these ways from art produced in any earlier period, including modernity. A limited number of specific worlds are contemporaneous with each other in contemporary life, and in contemporary art. This article offers some methodological ideas as to how we might understand the relationships between these worlds from an art historical perspective: as a worldwide but regionally varied shift from modern to contemporary art that has configured, at present, into three contemporaneous currents.

Keywords: contemporary art; contemporaneity; world-making

Can we say that contemporary art is perhaps for the first time in history truly an art of the world?

Putting this proposition in these terms is to pose a question about the prepositional relationships that might hold between art and the world. Doing so in a rhetorical mode is to imply an answer as to what might be distinctive about those relationships when it comes to contemporary art. I will suggest that contemporary art amounts to something at once much more (significant) and less (encompassing) than the art that the world just happens to be producing today. I will argue that it is more than the latest chapter in the centuries-long History of Art, however defined although it is also, partly, still that. Above all, I propose that it is an art that issues from a very contemporary sense of what constitutes ‘the world,’ and from a radically expanded sense of what constitutes ‘art.’

‘How does one bring [about] the entire representation of the world inside one’s head?’ With this question, itself a response to a question asked of him in 1989, South African artist William Kentridge expressed his anguished recognition of the existential challenge that his art, and his world, demanded of him (Christov-Barkargiev 1998, 136). He had in mind the multiplicity of forces that bore down to shape his experience

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*Email: tes2@pitt.eduISSN 2150-0894 print/ISSN 2150-0908 online# 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2011.602712 http://www.tandfonline.com

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and that of those around him. How might an artist make these forces visible? How else but as effects on that which is observable? We might characterize Kentridge’s individual approach as one of incessant collage: the world’s forcefield is registered as it happens to him, as it impacts on those around him, and as he imagines its effects upon those distant from him. It constantly changes shape, even in its equally constant repetitions. His art, in its modes as much as in its details, suggests that because the world in all its complexity is too much for human vision to encompass, the actions of any one of its particular inhabitants, or even more any group of them, is manifestly incompre- hensible, often to the point of absurdity. Yet this is our world, and we are entirely within it.

A favorite Kentridge image is that of a globe staggering, unsteadily, on tripod-legs, across a blasted, desultory landscape. Sometimes the place is recognizable: the hinterlands of Johannesburg, the environs of Elephant River to the artist a featureless interzone between the city and the tribal lands beyond, as well as the domain of Soho Eckstein’s bewildered wandering, and the terrain of the people’s uprising.1 At other times, his use of this image evokes the improvised settings of the silent film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) by Georges Me´ lie` s, which famously concludes with the out-of-control rocket lodged in the eye of the moon. In Kentridge’s hands the unsteady walker suggests the over- ambition of those who strive to imagine the world, but succeed only in creating more and more absurd scenarios of their falling short. In oneversion, Drawing for Il Sole 24 Ore (World Walking), (2007; Figure 1), the Italian business daily referenced in the title the sun, 24 hours is shown as a symbol of globalization itself, pierced by struts like a wounded matador, signs of its connectedness trailing like unearthed electrical wiring. Blinded by self-absorption, its absurd bow tie signifies that this worldview is all dressed up but has nowhere to go. Instead, it wobbles through the widespread devastation that its policies have created.

Despite its modern lineage, this is a distinctly contemporary image. Its distinctiveness, I suggest, has everything to do with its worldliness. Close readers will have noted that there are at least three distinct ideas of what counts as a world in play in the description I have just given as there are, I suggest, in Kentridge’s art. Close attention to the particularities of place: ‘my world,’ ‘our world,’ in the close-to-hand, material sense place as an immediate, intimate setting. In contrast, there is also present an urge to imagine the world in a larger sense, ‘the wider world’: the

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Figure 1. William Kentridge. Drawing for II Sole 24 Ore (World Walking). 2007. Charcoal, gouache, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 213.5 150cm. Collection of Doris and Donald Fisher. # 2010 William Kentridge. Photo credit:Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

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general laws, supraspecific logic, or just exercise their wills randomly. These forces often impact on me and mine in my place: the two worlds can collide, or more gently interpenetrate. This suggests a third sense of what the world is like: necessarily connected, in a multiplicity of ways, and with varying intensities thus the term ‘the world.’ This last is the least theorized relationship within modern philosophy and political theory, although it has become the sense of ‘world’ that is most important in contemporary conditions. It is also the sense that is proving most difficult for artists to imagine, although the best of them, such as Kentridge, are instinctively drawn to the task. (Thus, we might note, the prepositional nature of his art, filled with figures moving through time and across space that is, between worlds.)

As European and US-centric perspectives decline in dominance, and awareness of the agency of others penetrates even the cultural citadels of what used to known as the First World, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the presumption that art is in essence universal, its objects timeless and the experiences that it offers transcendental in other words, that it is fundamentally unworldly. There will continue to be situations in which these terms make useful sense, but, in contemporary circumstances, such sense will be very specific to the actually existing relativities of time, place and power. To the greatly reduced extent that it remains unworldly, today’s art is, as I will show, deeply embedded in new, contemporary kinds of worldli- ness a condition in which the contemporaneity of many different kinds of world has become the definitive experience of our times.

As biennales have for decades attested, art now comes from the whole world, from a growing accumulation of art-producing localities that no longer depend on the approval of a metropolitan center and are, to an unprecedented degree, connected to each other in a multiplicity of ways, not least regionally and globally. Geopolitical change has shifted the world picture from presumptions about the inevitability of modernization and the universality of EuroAmerican values to recognition of the coexistence of difference, of disjunctive diversity, as characteristic of our contemporary condition. Contempor- ary life draws increasing numbers of artists to imagine the world understood here as comprising a number of contemporaneous ‘natures’: the natural world, built environments (‘second nature’), virtual space (‘third nature’), and lived interiority (‘human nature’) as a highly differentiated yet inevitably connected whole. In this sense, from what we might call a planetary perspective, contemporary art

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may be becoming an art for the world for the world as it is now, and as it might be.

So the first thing to be said about contemporary art is that it is essentially, definitively and distinctively worldly. The next is that, from our position at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, art seems markedly different from what it was during the modern, or any other, era: it is above all, and before it is anything else contemporary. Beneath this awkward tautology lies a profound historical shift, of which the new worldliness of contemporary art is an important indicator. Once modern, or striving to become so (in however differentiated a way), art everywhere now is made within situations where distinctive temporalities coexist in their contingent otherness, move in different directions, and mix in unpredictable ways. Modernism, while still resonant in some contemporary practice, is an historical style. Postmodernism seems to have even less purchase on the present. Unlike the commitments to progress, to universal human development and utopian possibility that inspired modernity in all of its aspects, in contemporary conditions no singular direction, however dialectically driven or internally various, encompasses the present or looks set to shape the future. Globalization, decolonization and fundamentalism are incommensurable, mutually exclusive ‘universalisms,’ destined to fall short of domination, severally and together. In this changed context, modernity’s preoccupation with distinguishing itself from ‘the past’ as a generality, and with periodizing ever-narrowing clusters of activity (including, eventually, itself), has come to seem self-circumscribing, historicist, itself a practice from the past. Modern modes of inquiry are becoming oddly out of place when it comes to understanding the present.

Alertness to the now has become so pervasive in art and in the general culture that thinking about the future, or possible futures, has receded as a concern. This is, of course, a paradox: a companion to the growing fascination with specific moments in the past, as if their contemporaneity could be lived afresh, or, at least, visited for a time. To say that art, and life, has become more contemporary than ever before is not necessarily although it may be, and often is a concession to the superficiality of up-to-datedness, the banal sense of being contemporary, of perfectly, instinctively, matching one’s time. A broader historical perspective shows that the present has thickened considerably: no longer a distraction on the way to utopia nor, from the opposite, conservative political perspective, a fashion-following intrusion upon the persistence of a perfectly adequate past it has

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become a temporal domain of considerable scope, depth and complexity.

It is no accident that terms associated with ‘contemporary’ have come to replace those associated with ‘modern’ as the default designators of new ideas, institutions and art. It may be the case that the concept has finally come into its own; to realize, perhaps, the potential that attended its origins, in the Latin-based languages at least, as a combination of the words con and tempus, that is, ‘with’ and ‘time.’ Taken as a source of internal definition and differentiation, ‘contemporary’ connotes a multiplicity of ways of being in time, of feeling in accord with one’s time or at an angle to it, and of experiencing each of these relationships either separately or at the same time, both individually and with others.

Of course, these meanings of the word ‘contemporary’ are ancient. They have long histories throughout human civilization and were at the core of what it was like to live in modern societies. However, I would argue that it is definitive of our contemporaneity (‘a contemporaneous condition or state’) that they occur to us, nowadays, at the same time, that we have become more intensely aware of this presence of difference all around us (and in us?), and that this quality of contemporary experience has come to override all other factors as the most central thing to be explained when we wish to characterize what it is to be alive today. Similarly, contemporary art is no longer one kind of art, nor does it have a limited set of shared qualities somewhat distinct from those of the art of past periods in the history of art yet, fundamentally, continuous with them. It does not presume inevitable historical development; it has no expectation that present confusion will eventually cohere into a style representative of this historical moment. If you are waiting for the next master narrative, you are probably doing so in vain. Contemporary art is multiple, internallydifferentiating, category shifting, shape changing, and unpredictable (that is, diverse) like contemporaneity itself.2

The condition of contemporaneity my understanding of what we mean when we say ‘the present’ is the world, broadly understood, in which contemporary art is made, and from within which it is already journeying through space and time, both of which are being conceived differently than they were during modernity. In contemporary condi- tions, therefore, ‘world’ means something rather different from what it meant during the modern era indeed, as I have begun to suggest, it means a number of different things. Yet not an infinite number, nor

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even a plurality: rather, a specific cluster of different things. Let us explore these a little more closely.

From modern to contemporary artIn a number of recent studies I have argued that alertness to contemporaneity, while always available to art and often taken up (in the case of Caravaggio, for example) with show-stopping brilliance, has mostly been an occasional factor within it. This started to change during the modern era, when contemporaneity became the necessary entry point for art of the highest aspiration but was never sufficient for its accomplishment. These developments have been placed in the shade, however, by a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary that was prefigured in some late modern art during the 1950s, took definitive shape in the 1980s and that continues to unfold through the present, thus shaping art’s immediate future (itself the ongoing sometimes the self-circling of the thickened present).3 While this is a worldwide indeed, world-historical change it does not follow that it occurred in the same way, much less at the same time, in each cultural region and in each art-producing locality across the globe. Nor that it spread from a major center, disseminating itself in the manner of the great style changes in art during modern times, and provoking the provincialist circuitry that characterized the metropolitan/peripheral exchanges of that era. Given recent geopolitical history, which is characterized above all by incessant conflict between peoples with different world-pictures and distinct senses of their place in the world, it would be na¨ıve in the extreme to expect anything approaching uniform change.

To grasp this change in its specifics, therefore, requires us to understand the intricate connections between the local and the global in a planetary sense that is, to think regionally in the context of a vision of the actual, historical development of the planet and of all who live upon it. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly demonstrated, this is something that we are still learning to do (Chakrabarty 2009). It seems to me that three assumptions are necessary if we are to see more clearly the kinds of art that are being produced within the emerging world (dis)order.

Although worldwide, and thus entailing all visual art, the shift from modern to contemporary art occurred and continues to occur in different ways and to varying degrees in each of the art producing centers of the world, shaped of course by local inheritances and by the

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position of each center relative to relevant others. This assumption is about the specificity but also connectedness of locality.

As a consequence of the geopolitical division of the world into power blocs during the mid-twentieth century itself a manifestation of major historical forces such as late capitalism, decolonization and globalization these differences and variations in intensity were also shaped into regional currents. These continue to be relevant, although of course they change constantly. This assumption is about the specificity but also connectedness of regionality.4

It follows that the historical shift from modern to contemporary art cannot be seen as occurring in the same way all over the world, nor at the same time, or even at similar rates. Indeed, these variations generate the typical condition in which changes of a different kind, occasion and rate are contemporaneous with each other. In turn, this condition enables awareness of such differences, an awareness heightened by the recent acceleration of communications. So, this assumption is about comparativity, the contemporaneousness of difference. It updates previous thinking about provincialism vis-a` -vismetropolitanism, about centers vis-a` -vis peripheries, in cultural theory.5 It also suggests that contemporary art’s present diversity might owe as much to the emergence during the twentieth century of distinctive local, vernacular and alternative modernities in art-producing locales across the globe as it so evidently does to the radical experimentality that broke apart late modern art in the EuroAmerican art centers during the 1950s and 1960s. Here is a story waiting to be fully told.

These assumptions underlay my major proposition about world connectivity in contemporary art today: in contemporary art, the local is connected to regional and global forces through the contemporaneity of three distinct but contingent currents. These currents are different from each other in kind, in scale, and in scope. The first prevails in what were the great metropolitan centers of modernity in Europe and the United States (as well as in societies and subcultures closely related to them) and is a continuation of styles in the history of art, particularly Modernist ones. The second has arisen from movements toward political and economic independence that occurred in former colonies and on the edges of Europe, and is thus shaped above all by clashing ideologies and experiences. The result is that artists prioritize both local and global issues as the urgent content of their work. Meanwhile, artists working within the third current explore concerns that they feel personally yet share with others, particularly of their generation, throughout the world. Taken

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constitute the contemporary art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My proposal, then, is a historical hypothesis, an outline of how, in general terms, art throughout the world has changed since the later decades of the twentieth century, that is, about how modern art become contemporary. Let me offer a summary description drawn from the more detailed accounts offeredin a number of recent publications.6 I will emphasize those aspects ofmy proposal that bear on artistic world-making, and on making art in terms of worlds-within-the-world. In deploying concepts of ‘world’ in this way, I evoke of course famous theorizations of the concept, such as those of Martin Heidegger and Nelson Goodman, but also point to other, more immediate usages, such as the book Place by artist Tacita Dean and critic Jeremy Millar, and to the much-used international artwebsite: universes-in-universe.7

Currents within contemporary artThe first current official, institutionalized Contemporary Art might be seen as an aesthetic of globalization, serving it through both a relentless remodernizing, and a sporadic contemporizing, of art. It has two or three discernable tendencies, each of which are perhaps styles in the traditional sense of being a marked change in the continuing practice of art in some significant place that emerges, takes a shape that attracts others to work within its terms and to elaborate them, prevails for a time, and comes to an end. One internal tendency is the embrace of the rewards and downsides of neoliberal economics, globalizing capital, and neoconservative politics, pursued during the 1980s and since through repeats of previous avant-garde strategies, drawing from both the early twentieth century ‘historical’ avant-gardes (yet lacking their political utopianism) and from the mid-century neo- avantgardes (yet lacking their theoretic radicalism). Damien Hirst and the YBAs are the most obvious examples, but the trajectory has also been pursued by artists such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons in the US, and by Takashi Murakami and his followers in Japan, among many others. There is considerable depth, and world knowledge, in some of this work (that of Hirst as it relates to industries of death; and Murakami as it relates to histories of post-War Japan, for example), but much of it rests content with a kind of in-your-face blatancy. With reference to its overtly retrograde strategies and to the 1997 exhibition at which this

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consternation on the part of conservatives but soon acquired main- stream acceptance, we might call it ‘Retro-Sensationalism.’

This tendency has burgeoned alongside another: the constant efforts of the institutions of Modern Art (now usually designated Contemporary Art) to reign in the impacts of contemporaneity on art, to revive earlier initiatives, to cleave new art to the old modernist impulses and imperatives, to renovate them. This tendency might be called ‘Remodernism.’ Distinct variants of it appear in the projects of Richard Serra, Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter, to cite some outstanding examples. If Serra invites us to enter the precincts of his sculptures as if we were engaging with elemental materials unfolding in space according to an intuitive ‘logic’ unique to each configuration, then this is a deeply modernist impulse, carried out against the ghost of its disruption during the 1960s (not least by Serra himself) and its apparent historical exhaustion. Wall’s tableaux to be photographed are ‘small worlds’. Intense concentrations of observable reality inflected with noticeable strangeness, an element of which is their service as vignettes in an implied narrative of modernist picture-making being carried out again, as if from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings, but in a fresh fashion and in present-day settings. Richter evokes a complex memory world, a house of memory, that consists of the fraught, self-denying imagery of post-War Germany and of the visual memory of every avant-garde art movement since the 1960s, and then subjecting both to each other’s radical doubt. Remodernism, as I understand it, is not simply about tired repetition, or reluctant nostalgia, or even melancholy negation. If it were so, it would be in decline. Instead, it is alive because it is about contemporary practices such as these.

In the work of artists such as Matthew Barney and Cai Guo-Qiang, both aspects come together in a conspicuous consummation, gene- rating an aesthetic of excess that might be tagged (acknowledging its embodiment of what Guy Debord theorized as ‘the society of the spectacle’) the Art of the Spectacle.8 In contemporary architecture, similar impulses shape the buildings designed for the culture industry by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and Daniel Libeskind, among others, above all their museums, such as Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Calatrava’s entrance pavilion for the Milwaukee Art Museum; and Libeskind’s extension to the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. In these projects an international architectural language is at work, a system of cultural self-replication that can erect edifices anywhere, and have them count as nodes within a global network of

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destination points. Sensationalism takes many forms, and tends to create its own cultural capsules. As a visit to any one of the burgeoning private collector museums for example, Inhotim, in the jungles of Minas-Gerais, Brazil soon reveals, it can inflate the work of artists who I would normally see as being committed to other values and thus representative of other currents. Which goes to show that these are, after all, currents in the same stream.

The second current which I call ‘the transnational turn’ emerges from the processes of decolonization within what were the Third, Fourth, and Second Worlds, including its impacts in what was the First World. It has not coalesced into an overall art movement, or even two or three broad ones. Rather, the transnational turn has generated a plethora of works of art shaped by local, national, anti-colonial, independent values (identity, critique, diversity). It has enormous international currency through travelers, expatriates, new markets but especially biennales. Local and internationalist values are in constant dialog in this current sometimes they are enabling, at others disabling, but they are ubiquitous. Cosmopolitanism is the goal, translation the medium. With this situation as their raw material, artists everywhere have, for decades, been producing work that matches the strongest art of the first current. Examples include the collective paintings produced by Aboriginal peoples in Australia to demonstrate their millennia-long relationship to their land; Georges Adeagbo’s accumulations of detritus that amount to traces of history in his part of Africa; the very different evocations of the anxieties of being white during apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa by William Kentridge, Susan Williamson and Kendall Geers; the subversion of official Soviet imagery by the Russian Sots Artists, or that of Mladen Stilinovic´ in Croatia; the outrageous reverse historicism (Retroavant- gardism) of Laibach, Group IRWIN and the NSK in the imploding Yugoslavia and since; the conceptualist strategies of South American artists during the dictatorship periods; the self-conscious politics of parody (of tradition, national expectations and external stereotyping) in the work of many contemporary Chinese artists; the ascendency of women among contemporary artists in what was the Middle East.

To artists participant in the early phases of decolonization for example, those being asked for an art that would help forge an independent culture during the nation-building days of the 1960s in Africa a first move was to revive local traditional imagery and seek to make it contemporary by representing it through formats and styles that were current in Western modern art. Elsewhere, in less severe

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conditions, for artists seeking to break the binds of cultural provinci- alism or of centralist ideologies, becoming contemporary meant making art as experimental as that emanating from the metropolitan centers (thus the proposition about comparativity). Geopolitical changes in the years around 1989 in Europe particularly, but also in China, and then in South America, opened out a degree of access between societies that had been closed for one and sometimes two generations. The work of unknown contemporaries became visible, and the vanquished art of earlier local avant-gardes suddenly became pertinent to current practice. Frenzied knowledge exchange ensued, and hybrids of all kinds appeared. The desire soon arose to create and disseminate a contemporary art that, toughened by the experiences of postcoloniality, and by the break-up of the empires, would be valid throughout the entire world.

During the 1990s, those precipitating, interpreting and undergoing these changes frequently evoked the term ‘postmodern.’ Yet there are some important distinctions to be made between their usage of the term, especially if we apply the principles of locality, regionality and comparativity proposed earlier. In Euroamerica, during the 1970s and 1980s, postmodern critique was directed primarily at the presumed universality of the Enlightenment project and was arguably, at least in part, a direct result of the early impacts of postcolonial critique upon intellectuals in the West. In the arts, however, this was scarcely evident at first. In architecture, postmodernism quickly became a matter of hollow pastiche of historical styles. In painting, it soon became a byword for appropriation, quotation, simulation of spectacle culture, and, eventually, absorption into it. Certain photo-graphic and installation artists developed a resistant strain: among them Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman.9

Elsewhere in Central Europe, Cuba, and China in particular postmodernism offered an aesthetic umbrella for imagining a post-socialist culture (Alesˇ Erjavec 2003). In each of these cases a national culture wasundergoing transition from one state to another, usually into a situation where different models of possible modernities were in open competition, and soon became suspended in antinomic con- temporaneity with each other. These examples only begin to sketch the outpouring of alternatives that occurred in different parts of the world during the 1980s and 1990s. ‘Postmodernism’ is too thin a term for this great change, one that is still in its early stages. Indeed, postmodernism, wherever it occurred, now seems

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more, than a pointer to the first phase of contemporaneity in that place. Now, this seems true on a general, worldwide level as well.

Attempts to save modernism as the basis of significant art today have appeared within this current as well, sometimes in places where they might seem least necessary. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud has suggested the term ‘altermodernism’ as ‘a leap that would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism’ (Bourriaud 2009: 12 13). A broader view shows us that the transnational turn during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century a shift into transitionality, especially with regard to concepts of the nation has led to the art of the second current becoming predominant on international art circuits, in the proliferating biennales, with profound yet protracted effects at the modern metropolitan centers. It is a paradigm shift in slow motion that matches the changing worldgeopolitical and economic order as it increases in complexity: the entire constellation is post-colonial.10

There is a third current in contemporary art, and it is different in kind yet again. It is the outcome, largely, of a generational change and the sheer quantity of people attracted to active participation in the image economy. As art, it usually takes the form of quite personal, small scale and modest offerings, in marked contrast to the generality of statement and monumentality of scale that has increasingly come to characterize remodernizing, retro-sensationalist and spectacular art, and the conflicted witnessing that continues to be the goal of most art consequent on the transnational turn. Younger artists certainly draw on elements of the first two tendencies, but with less and less regard for their fading power structures and styles of struggle and with more concern for the interactive potentialities of various material media, virtual communicative networks and open-ended modes of tangible connectivity. Working collectively, in small groups, in loose associations or individually, these artists seek to arrest the immediate, to grasp the changing nature of time, place, media and mood today. They make visible our sense that these fundamental, familiar constituents of being are becoming, each day, steadily stranger. They raise questions as to the nature of temporality these days, the possibilities of place-making vis-a` -vis dislocation, about what it is to be immersed in mediated interactivity and about the fraught exchanges between affect and effect. Within the world’s turnings, and life’s frictions, they seek sustainable flows of survival, cooperation and growth.

Postcolonial critique, along with a rejection of spectacle capitalism, also informs the work of a number of artists based in

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cultural centers. Mark Lombardi, Allan Sekula, Thomas Hirschhorn, Zoe Leonard, Steve McQueen, Aernout Mik, Alfredo Jaar and Emily Jacir, among many others, developed practices that critically trace and strikingly display the global movements of the new world disorder between the advanced economies and those connected in multiple ways with them. Other artists base their practice around exploring sustainable relationships with specific environments, both social and natural, within the framework of ecological values. These range from the ecological non-interventions of Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin through to the environmental activism of the Critical Art Ensemble. Still others work with electronic communicative media, examining its conceptual, social and material structures: in the context of struggles between free, constrained and commercial access to this media, and its massive colonization by the entertainment industry, artists’ responses have developed from expanded cinema and Net.art towards immersive environments and explorations of avatar-viuser (visual information user) interactivity. Charlotte Davies’s Osmose (1995) is a classic example of this desire: it offers immersants a virtual tour through ‘a boundless oceanic abyss, shimmering swathes of opaque clouds, passing softly glowing dewdrops and translucent swarms of computer-generated insects, into the dense undergrowth of a dark forest,’ to a virtual tree made of visible code (Grau 2003, 193).11 Many other new media artists, including Louis Bec, Thomas McIntosh, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, have pursued this fascination. All of these approaches, whatever the format, medium and situation, are efforts to see clearly what constitutes a world within societies saturated with surveillance and secrecy, to re-imagine known worlds differently, or to imagine possible worlds.

The same range of concerns inspire the dystopian scenarios favored by Blast Theory and the International Necronautical Society, the graffiti bombing of Banksy and the Argentine group Blu, the counter- surveillance activity of Trevor Paglen and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Daniel Joseph Martinez’s fervent protests, Paul Chan’s symbolic shadow profiles, Jeremy Deller’s re-enactments aimed at countering social amnesia, the mass media smarts of Candice Breitz, the transformative immersive environments of iCinema, the interactive public art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, to the insouciant receptivity of Francis Aly¨s. An important strand is that much of this activity is at once subjective and collective: thus the shared knitting of the Institute for Figuring, installations by Zulu artists that display the principle of ubuntu (‘I exist because you do’), and the watchful optimism of

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media immersed artists such as Rivane Neuenschwander, Shaun Gladwell and Cai Fei. Other work takes the form of long-term collaborations with specific local communities, as we see in the activity of groups such as Superflex, Dialogue, Huit Facettes, Ala Plastica, Wockenklauser, Park Fiction, Global Studio and many others. These are direct instances of small-scale, close-valued placemaking.12

Contemporaneous worldsTaking these three currents together, as contemporaneous with each other, they are manifestations within contemporary art practice of deep currents within the broader condition of contemporaneity itself. In the twenty-first century, nation states no longer align themselves according to the tiered system of First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds. Multinational corporations based in the EuroAmerican centers continue to control significant parts of the world’s economy, but, as the global financial crisis demonstrated, can no longer manage the whole, and remain inclined to uncontrollable self-mutilation. New corporations with global ambitions located in South, East, and North Asia may be subject to the same impulses. Manufacturing, distribution, and services are themselves dispersed around the globe, and linked to delivery points by new technologies and old-fashioned labor. Some have argued that, with globalization, capitalism achieved its pure form. Certainly, the living standard of millions has been lifted, but only at enormous cost to social cohesion, peaceful cohabitation, and natural resources. Some national and local governments, as well as many international agencies, seek to regulate this flow and assuage its worst side effects so far without conspicuous success. The institutions that drove modernity seem, to date, incapable of dealing with the most important unexpected outcome of their efforts: the massive disruptions to natural ecosystems that now seem to threaten the survival of the Earth itself. Awareness of this possibility has increased consciousness of our inescapably shared, mutually depen- dent existence on this fragile planet.

The most recent generation of contemporary artists has inherited this daunting complexity. Their responses have been cautious, devo- ted to displaying concrete aspects of this complexity to those who would see it, and to helping in modest, collaborative ways to reshape the human capacity to make worlds on small, local scales. For all its modesty, and pragmatism, theirs is a hope-filled enterprise. Their efforts allow us to hope that contemporary art is becoming perhaps

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for the first time in history truly an art of the world. Certainly, as I have tried to show, it comes from the whole world, from all of its contemporaneous difference, and it increasingly tries to imagine the world as a whole, precisely in all of its contemporaneous difference.

Notes1. Processional figures have been foundational to Kentridge’s art from

his early days as a set designer, notably in Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998). An earlier version of this image appears in the 2007 series of intaglio prints, L’Inesorabile Avanzata (The Inexorable Advance), at #1: The World (Collection of the Middlebury College Museum of Art). A variant, World on its Hind Legs (2009), was commissioned by an Italian newspaper seeking to commemorate the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1934: it shows the image drawn in ink across an issue of The Illustrated London News of 1870. In 2009, Kentridge collaborated with the sculptor Gerhard Marx to create a metal version for the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, where it was shown in 2010. In another variant, the figure appears wearing a gasmask. I discuss the artist’s recent touring exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes in Smith (2011b).

2. For further discussion of the concepts ‘contemporary’ and ‘contempor- aneity,’ see my ‘Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,’ in Smith, Condee, and Enwezor (2008). This volume also contains other reflections on the topic, by Antonio Negri, Boris Groys, Nancy Condee, Wu Hung and others. Giorgio Agamben has recently offered a poetic reflection on this topic in his ‘What is an apparatus?’ and other essays (2009), and in 2006 Jean-Luc Nancy speculated about a variety of resonances between art, contemporaneity and worlds in his lecture ‘Art today’ (Nancy 2010).

3. For example, Smith (2010).4. On the limitations yet, on balance, positive potential of a regional

approach see Lewis and Wigen (1997, 186).5. Early examples include my essay ‘The provincialism problem’ (Smith

1974) and Samir Amin (1977).6. See Smith (2009b) and my contribution to ‘A questionnaire on ‘‘The

contemporary’’’ (2009a, 46 54). The most thorough exposition may be found in Smith (2011a).

7. Heidegger (1977), Goodman (1978). See also Casey (1998, ix xv, 331 42), Tacita Dean, Joseph L Koerner, Jeremy Millar and Simon Schama, ‘Talk,’ in Dean and Millar (2005, 182 92), and Mitchell (2005). Universes-in-Universe is accessible at http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/index.html.

8. Debord (1967, Paris; 1995, 2nd ed.).9. As argued by Hal Foster (1983); and by Craig Owens (1992).10. See Enwezor.11.Osmose is accessible at http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/osmose/.12. Grant Kester has explored these in his recent publications, including

Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art, and

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The one and the many: Agency and identity in contemporary collaborative art (2011).

Notes on ContributorTerry Smith, FAHA, CIHA in Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. He is the 2010 winner of the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA), and is the 2010 Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate. He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern : Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993; inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize 2009) and Contempor- ary Art : World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011).

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N. Bourriaud, pp. 12 13. London: Tate Publishing.Casey, Edward S. 1998. The Fate of Place, a Philosophical History. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four theses. Critical Inquiry

35, no. 2 (Winter): 197 222.Christov-Barkargiev, Carolyn. 1998. William Kentridge. Brussels: Socie´ te des

Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Art.Dean, Tacita, Joseph L Koerner, Jeremy Millar, and Simon Schama.

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Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. 2nd ed. with preface by Guy Debord. New York: Zone Books.

Enwezor, Okwui. 2008. The Postcolonial Constellation. In Antinomies of art and culture, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, pp. 207 234. Durham: Duke University Press.

Erjavec, Alesˇ, ed. 2003. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foster, Hal. 1983. Editorial. In The Anti-Aesthetic:

Essays on PostmodernCulture. Port Townsend: Bay Press.

Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publish- ing Co.

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***. 2011. The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Contemporary Collaborative Art. Durham, NC Duke University Press.

Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Age of the World Picture. In The question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row.

Lewis, Martin W., and Ka¨ren E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2006. Art today. Journal of Visual Culture 9 (April): 91 9. Owens, Craig. 1992. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, Culture.

Berkeley: University of California Press.Smith, T. 1974. The Provincialism Problem. Artforum XIII, no. 1: 54 9.***. 2008. Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question. In Antinomies

of art and culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Nancy Condee, and Okwui Enwezor, pp. 1 19. Durham: Duke University Press.

***. 2009a. A Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’. October no. 130: 46 54.

***. 2009b. What is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.***. 2010. The State of Art History: Contemporary art. Art Bulletin

92: 366 83.***. 2011a. Contemporary art: World currents. London: Laurence

King; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.***. 2011b. William Kentridge’s Activist Uncertainty: Before and

After Apartheid. Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art no. 24: 47 55.

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