Re: <nettime> The Death of the Avant-garde in the Attention Economy

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 01/10/2012 02:39 AM, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> Modernist art has centralized the notions of creativity and
> innovation because it seeks to align with history. Without seeking to
> either diminish or sideline creativity and innovation, we now must
> simultaneously seek to align art with timelessness through a quest for
> authenticity.

The dissolution of the avant-garde through media-flashes of innovation 
and monuments of overwhelming scale is certain. But  I wonder if 
timelessness can be thought, not through any reference to eternity but 
with the Benjaminian category of Jetztzeit -- that is, "now-time"?

I am sure everyone remembers WB's famous declaration from the Theses on 
History: "'History is the object of a construction, whose site is not 
that of homogeneous and empty time, but one filled with now-time."

There is currently a rare and excellent article about art in the Arab 
Spring on the opinion pages of Al Jazeera. The author, Daanish Faruqi, 
comments on what appears to be a quite spectacular exhibition by Cai 
Guo-Quiang at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. With the "biggest 
ever" daylight fireworks show composing the central artistic statement, 
this seems to have exactly those characteristics of scale and innovation 
you are talking about, Prem. Surely we will all forget this almost 
instantly!

Faruqi picks up on Hamid Dabashi's critique of this exhibition for its 
lack of relevance to the present, and though he doesn't bother with 
Walter Benjamin he does offer an insight into where the intensities of 
the present currently gather:

"Art's role, as Dabashi correctly describes, is to imagine the 
emancipatory politics of our impossibilities. To imagine is not to 
chronicle in minute detail. The artists of the Arab Spring are tasked 
with simply igniting a spark, of reinjecting the radical imagination 
into Arab society, through envisioning the utopian possibility of hope 
and a better life, undergirded by the basic dignity of the Arab people 
as non-negotiable and sacrosanct."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/20121612493122450.html

I think the text is really good, check it out. Maybe an actual building 
full of now-time is currently imnpossible. Maybe this is a moment for 
architects who do not build? Who work instead with the grassroots 
transformation of spaces that have been frozen by capital?

warmly, Brian


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