avant-garde (part 27)

avant-garde What is the contemporary? This is close to the question: what is contemporary art? But it is complicated by the fact that we use the term “contemporary” to define a period of art that begins after World War II and extends to the present. “I would like at this point to propose a definition of contemporariness: the contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience the contemporary, are obscure.” (Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, Stanford University Press, 2011) The contemporary is not the art of the present, nor the latest art. Rather, the contemporary is what art produces: a new, unprecedented, astonishing “time,” which is precisely not a repetition of the present, even though it can have an “obscure” relationship with it. It is instead the production of a caesura…