The modern

The modernEJR

#essay, #dialogue, #museum

Hmm I don’t know? To take an active part in the present, isn’t that more in line with a contemporary way of behaving?

What if you swap the modern with the contemporary… like: ‘to be contemporary means to go with the present flow of things.’

My mother (and these are her words) likes modern art, as in historical artists that are mostly dead, preferably in a museum for modern art with included audio tours. Whenever I take her to see an exhibition (i.e. she takes me, because the exhibitions I’d like to see don’t have audio tours), she takes hours. Carefully listening to everything the mechanic guide has to tell her. Intricate back stories are told giving her information on the personal lives of the artists, like a friend coming over for tea and some steamy gossip. But besides the gossip she will be educated on the meaning of color, texture, material qualities, and of course the history of the museum building will not be missed. Usually we go our two separate ways, and decide to meet after a good few hours (when my mom is finally finished with her seminar in aesthetic and cultural understanding) in the museum shop or cafe. She will be able to give me a lecture on what she has just seen (or heard), but somehow I always wonder if she has really experienced art or if she really liked it. Or, if the contemporary museum of modern art uses our collective memory and understanding of what and what not to find aesthetically pleasing as a tool to tempt the mindless masses with a buffet of bitesize bits. Delicious art snacks, with a nice story. Entertaining, palatable, easily understood, and quick. Unfortunately, these are not very

nutritious. The museum has become like a twinkie. The focus has shifted towards generating income, huge visitor numbers, and nice photographable images.

To be modern means to go with the present flow of things. In other words, to take an active part in the present. The present being an ever revolving period in time, like a video on a constant loop. Therefore, I could almost say that to be modern means to almost not be alive at all. Because, to take an active part in an ever ongoing loop means not to move forward at all, but in essence to be fixed in time. However, in art, to be on a constant loop, is to be contemporary. The modern, on the other hand, is not (and never will be) a fixed entity. The modern is an ever changing fluid thing, that is focused on the future, individuality, and expression.

Strictly speaking the period that is described as the modern falls in between the end of the Renaissance and the 1990s. I do, however, want to emphasize that we are looking at the west now, so west Europe and America. Whether modernity has happened or is happening is an entirely different question, and closely related to the place and temporality. What might be modern for me, might not be on the other side of the globe. Modernity might have happened later, earlier or, according to the west, not at all (Bishop). After the 1990s, speaking from a western viewpoint, we entered the era of contemporary art. After the second world war modern museums started to favor the term ‘contemporary’, when exhibiting 20th century art, using it as a substitute, referring to a certain sense of present, instead of to a period or style, as modern did. The contemporary was meant to encompass the whole present, including global temporalities. However, never being able to do so and failing time and time again (Ingold). Or as Peter Osborne phrased it: ‘The contemporary is an “operative fiction”’. So, the future oriented modernism has been replaced by a fixed, non-changing contemporaneity.

Where the modern and the postmodern have turned into -isms, the contemporary keeps floating like a marooned space ship into the abyss, never really knowing where it’s going and always arriving too late.

Works of art therefore will always grasp onto history. They are temporal knots in time. To be truly modern is to encompass a mix of past, present, and future. History is never history, but simultaneously the present: Moving beyond a canon of valid styles, but one can pick and choose as you go. This is what may help us move to a more politicized and critical understanding of where the future may and should head.

So to come back to my mother, the perfect 21st century museum visitor, she visits the museum, her eyes and ears covered. Only guided by the audio tour that gives her clarity. She has not seen art, as we might expect she has, she has seen palatable stories. Gossip, juicy insides, and background noise. Is it really the artwork that she has seen, or has she seen a glimpse of the artist? I’m wondering and thinking that I don’t know if my mother will ever become a critical thinker concerning art. I hope she will one day, and I envision our conversations. She might be able to understand her cryptic child. I wonder what would happen if we, artists, help the museum in becoming a playground for critical thinking. Maybe the spectator will follow. Guided by a calming voice, leading them through countless temporalities and presents that may all give them some idea of a foreseeable future.

If the present is different globally, contemporaneity doesn’t exist as temporalities will always differ.