7/6/2023 0 Comments Moca miami![]() Kyle Trowbridge’s painting, This will stay with you until you die (2014), addresses the capacity of a painting to address the viewer in multiple ways, to “look one way and behave another,” as Trowbridge observes. I found this porosity of the present moment in Jeroen Eisinga’s hauntingly beautiful video Springtime (2010–11), in which the artist is covered with 150,000 bees. It is a means by which the human being, through artistic practice and the experience of art, can break out of the hermetically sealed isolation and eternal return of the “contemporary” into a porous present that is open both to the distinctive pasts and the futures of individuals and communities. Smith argues, “For the history of contemporary art the core subject of inquiry is the art, the ideas, the cultural practices and the values that are created within the condition of contemporaneity.” 2Įxploring this condition thus becomes a means to recover a more concrete, embodied, relational aspect of human action, including artistic practice, both locally and globally. It is also a means of creating a space in the art world that is not defined by The Artworld. ![]() “Contemporaneity” has become a useful category through which Smith and others have sought to return historical, conceptual, and critical judgment and analysis to an art world system that has increasingly become not merely “mindless,” but inhuman. This “upbeat mindlessness” about the nature of contemporary art that allows markets to define it is exemplified by the opinion of Sotheby’s former auctioneer Tobias Meyer, that “the best art is the most expensive because the art market is so smart.” Over the last decade, a few art historians and critics have sought to interrogate the empty and problematic category “contemporary art” and the presumption in the art world that, as Terry Smith observes, “one cannot-indeed should not-have any idea about it.” 1 This has, according to Smith, produced an “upbeat mindlessness that has come to pass for art discourse” that is a symptom of globalization and neoliberal economies that produce dramatic inequalities, that are mediated by image-saturated cultures. This is why, despite its apocalyptic appearance, it is a fundamentally hopeful exhibition.Īlternative Contemporaneity retheorizes contemporary art (and MOCA’s role as a presenting institution) through the conceptual frameworks of “contemporaneity” and “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” both of which offer a way to protect and develop a contemporary artistic (and critical) practice that is self-consciously aware of these dehumanizing systems of power and art’s complicity within them. For the MOCA team, contemporary art has the potential to explore what it means to be human amid the economic, social, and political systems that dehumanize. Adrienne von Lattes to reclaim contemporary art from what M’Bow calls in his catalogue essay the “tiny, economic elite” who consider it (or its possession) solely as currency in the churning global market. And it is also not necessarily for the community.Īlternative Contemporaneity is a courageous attempt by director Babacar M’Bow, artist/curator Richard Haden, and educator Dr. Whether it’s Joseph Goebbels, who reached for his revolver when he heard the word or Groucho Marx who reached for his wallet, “culture” is not for the faint of heart. And this is all the more vicious because it takes place covertly, hidden under the banner of public trust and civic responsibility for bringing culture to the community. ![]() For the stakeholders, the battles are violent, and the casualties real. Underneath the surface of art museums’ public programming-the exhibitions, lectures, and publications-boils a cauldron of cultural politics. The latter decamped to the Design District where they have founded the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in an effort to keep the city on the map as a destination for the international art-world elites. Last year, prompted by a proposed merger with the Bass Museum of Art, the museum’s board of trustees and the city of North Miami engaged in a drawn-out dispute that ultimately resulted in the division of the museum’s collection between the city and the former board. Alternative Contemporaneity is an eclectic and wide-ranging invitational exhibition that has the feel of the apocalyptic about it and the sense that the works included appear in an abandoned-and haunted-battlefield.Īnd indeed they have. This phrase came to mind as I walked through Alternative Contemporaneity: Temporary Autonomous Zones at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and it has remained with me as I continue to think about the show’s implications.
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