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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