Are we approaching an era without labels? Or do we have so many labels that they become moot? I have been contemplating this for a while, after hearing my friend say, in March, that she thinks we're nearly past categorizing people as straight or gay. I've been thinking about this and how it relates to relationships, gender, race, political ideals, music, film, and art. Terri Smith's piece made me think about this in relation to our contemporaneity.
In a class this week, my professor made us pick one woman we most identified with between a selection of 6 one-dimensional characters. She went on to explain, after we all had difficulty choosing one woman, that no one is that one-dimensional, that we are complex. This idea struck me as I was reading Smith's section about political and religious leaders uniting under labels and banners, but that within these factions are more factions, that one set of political ideas cannot satisfy the constituency and thus it creates hostility among believers. We are complex, and we are in a strange and complex time, and I do not think labels or categories can fulfill anything or anyone. There are so many labels and factions that they are no longer really signifiers of anything. Take the label "indie," what does that really mean now? Does it even have value as a category for film or music? Or take "rock", you can list Van Halen, the Beatles, Bon Iver, and Nirvana under that category, which is why there are a million other qualifiers before "rock", "alternative" rock, "classic" rock, but even classic rock can be anything between Elvis and Styx. Which is why I think we're at a point that labels, categories, maybe even periodization has become moot. Art now is just art, even photography as art isn't just "photography" anymore. It's installations, video, mixed media and photographic art no longer fits under the banner of just "photography" but maybe needs to use the more broad term of "art".
One realization and funny connection I made in the "Contemporaneity" essay: on page 697, she quotes and postulates about art historians or critics that put any contemporary works in a canon of sorts ruins it's relevance in current art discourse. I am going to relate this to "hipsters" because once the work of art is mainstream, it isn't cool anymore. Or I should say that once the work of art is popular or recognized, it's "kill[ed] off precisely that power to persist and to attract future critical interest".
Smith also goes on about characteristics of the contemporary: Modern vs. Contemporary and the idea of time. Modern is looking at the past and consciously trying to break from it and become "the future" while contemporary is questioning and focusing on the present while still considering the past. I also thought this quote was telling of the age of globalization, technology and social media:
"We have not had the same past, you and ourselves, but we shall have, strictly, the same future. The era of separate destinies has run its course. In that sense, the end of the world has indeed come for every one of us, because no one can any longer live by the simple carrying out of what he himself is."
(quoted from Cheikh Hamidou Kanes novel Ambiguous Adventure)
We can no longer lose track of anyone because of social media and google. If you have an internet presence, anyone can find you. That long-lost friend you had in kindergarten before you moved to Saudi Arabia--they just requested you on Facebook. Ten year high school reunions are going to become irrelevant since, oh hey, they've been Facebook stalking you since you graduated. There are no more "separate destinies" because we are all so interconnected in the digital and global age. Everything is instantaneous. However, as with everything, there is going to be a reaction against the "contemporary". And maybe we'll be able to be a person that someone thinks about and wonders, "Hey, whatever happened to so-and-so?" again.
SO MANY FASCINATING POINTS! This post is going to go on forever.
Contemporaneity is also characterized by paradoxes (as illustrated in my illustrations). One I found interesting in Smith's essay is:
"In a mediascape characterized by such contrary forces as instant communication of key decisions by poitical leaders and the capacity to demonstrate against them within the same news cycle, the power to force everyone forward in broadly the same direction has been lost....Multiple temporalities are the rule these days, and their conceptions of historical development move in multifarious directions."
Ok, so that isn't a paradox. But, it is notable because of the plethora of ways we can get information and how we get that information colors our views about the information. Our beliefs about one particular event can be completely altered as instantaneous as the event unfolded or information was given. Example: as soon as Obama gave his speech to congress about the American Jobs Act last week, there were criticisms and analyses of it. Fascinating! The wonders of the internet. How does this relate to art? It seems to me that these three readings say that Contemporary Art is all things at once. It confronts, yet distances. It is about the present, yet considers the past. It "is in or with time, even being in and out of time at the same time". It is beyond periodization, yet here we are, periodizing. To sum up here is the best concluding quote from Terri Smith:
"...contemporaneity consists precisely in the constant experience of radical disjunctures of perception, mismatching ways seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between them...No longer does it feel like 'our time' because 'our' cannot stretch to encompass its contrariness. Nor, indeed, is it 'a time' because if the modern were inclined above all to define itself as a period, and sort the past into periods, in contemporaneity periodization is impossible."
This is kind of a "duh" moment for me because it seems obvious that, of course, we all have different ways of seeing the world. Of course I don't think or see the world the same way as the person next to me. Of course everything is grey, not black and white. We must realize that there are multitudes of ways to approach the world.. We all come from diverse backgrounds that shape our views. Periodization is impossible because there is no banner of beliefs that any artist in the contemporary era can stay under for very long. We are in an era that is everything at once.
Side notes and things I should elaborate on later:
Yes! Let's reconcile within a framework of respect for difference! Let's be accepting and consider others and their otherness.
I have in my notes that the Terri Smith essay also made me think of the decline of galleries as a viable option for artists to sell their work... I can't find where I made that connection right now, but I'll come back in and edit this when I remember.
Will come back and cite and edit things later in the week.
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