Today we should reconsider our past and plan for a future that has never before been so uncertain. The appearance of a global war with nuclear potential makes our life very unstable, and the research and work of contemporary artists fit into this war query. Their recent works invite us to reflect on the perception we have of conflict starting from a personal experience that constantly pushes us towards an insatiable restlessness typical of the human being, such that it fits into our daily relationships and extends to our society of uncertainty (Bauman, 1991).
Since we are currently living in a ‘globalized’ era where all subjects are increasingly embedded in global ‘mediascapes’ (Appadauri, 1996), we make up ‘transnational’ subjectivities. More specifically, during the recent events related to the pandemic and the Ukrainian war the increase of inequalities and disparities between the developed part and the poor of the world is increasingly evident. The consequent rising use of technologies and their impact on the social and ecological system clearly highlighted the differences and contradictions that are representing this globalised world. Globalisation also means division more than unity among various segments of the populations due to an unequal distribution of goods that causes the main stratifying factor of our postmodern times.
Further to this point, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described this century as the one that should be remembered as the Great War of Independence from Space. The time and space compression introduces new freedom from territorial constraints, increased flexibility and mobility that are the most coveted stratifying factors. ‘In the post-space-war world, there is a new asymmetry emerging between the extraterritorial nature of power and the continuing territoriality of the ‘whole life’ (Bauman, 2017). This sentence needs an update since we are currently experiencing a new global crisis; the claimed Third World War. This is involving and approaching social media in an absolutely new way representing for many communication experts: the year zero of social communication in wartime.
This also means that natural and artificial borders of territorial units are changing as well as the consequent needs to have an equal and inclusive cosmopolitan vision to manage the otherness, the fading of national borders – although we are witnessing a raising of nationalisms increased now by the concerns related to the war – and, the osmotic and universal interdependence. What we are still assisting nowadays is a disparity between who enjoys the new freedom of movement with no restrictions and others – for the most part migrants and asylum seekers barely with a few recognised rights – which are not allowed to stay put because they are devoid of visa or other identification documents. This represents a new socioeconomic stratification where mobility – real or virtual is practically almost the same today – is the centre of this consumer society and immobility is considered in a globalisation context the new poverty. The consequence is that for inhabitants of the first world state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances.
Although what we are looking at today is just a progressive ‘end of geography’ (Virilio, 1997) since distance no longer matters, we are not yet acting to include sociocultural and all-embracing changes. For the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws grow taller and they are increasingly marginalised and forgotten.
In the first world, the arts are progressively becoming easy to access – we could provocatively call them ‘domestic’ – since we can have a virtual walk through the museum or gallery spaces, and enjoy an exhibition located on the other part of the globe comfortably and ‘safely’ in our home. Neither matter nor space nor time is what, up until twenty years ago, it always was. We must be prepared for such profound changes to alter the entire technological aspect of the arts, influencing invention itself as a result, and eventually, it may be, contriving to alter the very concept of art in the most magical fashion’ (Valery, 1934).
For the marginalised of the globalised world, art still is a form of cultural appropriation, but it struggles to be shared locally and even more broadcasted abroad as for the people who are living in the first world. This demonstrates as at any historical period corresponds specific art forms and several artistic expressions related to determinate perception skillset, and the history of art has to go along with the history of gaze for getting a new expression and an appropriate sensorial perception. This also means that the medium has to be updated because ‘in all arts there is a physical component that cannot continue to be considered and treated in the same way as before; no longer can it escape the effects of modern knowledge and modern practice’ (Valery, 1934).
We are mostly digitally sharing images and opinions, but the debates are missing that visceral connection offered by eye contact, smell, warmth and touch. Also, an artwork is a multisensorial experience. Even in a traditional medium like sculpture, the digital experience flattens the ‘third spatiality’, it reduces the world to just the visual impression completely missing the texture, the shadows, the smell and so on in order with the senses. This disembodied perception is the modern way to look at the world and specifically in this case at the arts. Furthermore, the sense of belonging as part of an art community or a participant in an exhibition or opening event as part of a social experience is incomparable with the most realistic digital experience. What we need to really experience the arts is the ‘con-text’ of the artwork itself because the human being needs a container (i.e. museums, galleries, etc.), a frame to contextualise the work that it is none other than artistic textuality. Sculptures or installations require to be activated viewers at their centre to interact with them. Besides, sculptures become moneo – from the Latin word “monument” – or rather “memory” of stories that intertwine common reminiscences with those of the single viewer. Thus, sculptural practice becomes a dialogue between the artists and their audience.
This participatory practice makes sculpture a collaborative space where the artwork and the audience becomes part of the work itself building up a peer-to-peer relationship. Therefore, sculptural practice open up to social and cultural engagement that defines our current fragmented times and dystopian society.
On the other end, digital platforms are offering the commodity to visit and explore the arts in high resolution giving us the freedom to navigate and have an immersive vision of the artworks. Besides, this is offering to each one the chance to select and curate our own ‘imaginary exhibition’ (Malraux, 1947) with no physical walls, conceptual barriers or visual borders.
Art provides a democratic site of experimentation for “living in a damaged world” (Gan, Tsing, Swanson, Bubandt, 2017) as Anna Tsing has called it; it is a non-moral form of address that offers a range of discursive, visual, and sensual strategies that are not confined by the regimes of scientific objectivity, political moralism, or sociological health.
The environmental emergency beckons art practice to re-imagine futures beyond the cynical recklessness of a myopic capitalist vision. The role of art therefore becomes exploratory; its position is opened to inquiry in a way that remains open-ended, but nevertheless experimental and activist. Art is not a palliative mode of reconciliation with Nature. Art has to eliminate the contradiction between the concepts of the Anthropocene, art theory, and aesthetics.
It is urgent to bring arts-based resources to bear on scientific discourse to disrupt specialist divisions, democratise debate, and pose critical questions of political significance to discussions on environmental developments, since the Anthropocene has also become part of an expanding discourse in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
At this moment, a visual-cultural perspective grounded in the environmental arts and humanities – whether documentary photography or sculptural projects – invites us to appreciate “the aesthetics of the Anthropocene”. This phenomenon, so called by Nicholas Mirzoeff, “emerged as an unintended supplement to imperial aesthetic – it comes to seem natural, right, then beautiful – and thereby anaesthetised the perception of modern industrial pollution” (Mirzoeff, 2014).
The Anthropocene is a universalising and unifying mechanism ceaselessly invoking the largest possible frames, in which art’s manifold horizon of representations can easily fade into the background. Sculptural practice is not merely a conversation of what we were or a reaction to what we are, but a proper commitment to what we could be; it is the material formalisation of the possible.
Certainly, the geopolitical world is now a different place and it will be even further. We are physically connected again with the world, but with a better awareness of the digital enables on breaking the conformist borders of the (art)world.
Valeria Ceregini
Arts Curator and Historian
www.valeriaceregini.com
Bibliography
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Bauman, Z. (2017) Globalization: The Human Consequences Cambridge: Polity Press
Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Bubandt, N. (2017) “Haunted landscapes of the Anthropocene”, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene Minnesota: University Press
Malraux, A. (1947) Le Musée imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard
Mirzoeff, N. (2014) “Visualizing the Anthropocene”, Public Culture, Volume 26, Number 2 (73), Spring
Valery, P. (1934) ‘La conquête de l’ubiquité’, in Pièce sur l’art, Paris: Gallimard
Accessed online 03/2023: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/Valery_paul/conquete_ubiguite/valery_conquete_ubiquite.pdf
Virilio, P. (1997) ‘Un monde surexposé: fin de l’histoire, ou fin de la géographie?’, Le monde diplomatique, August 1997
Accessed online 03/2023: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1997/08/VIRILIO/4878