that swept through not just North America and Western Europe,14 but whole swathes of the globe – from South America to South-East Asia. Politically, it is often conveniently epitomized in the figure of ‘1968’, although its artistically decisive manifestations were earlier in the decade. This was also the decade of an initial internationalization of contemporary art within its largely North American and residually European hegemonic frame. Japanese and South American artists, in particular, were incorporated into an internationalizing US hegemony.
Despite a conceptual focus on the ontology of the work of art, which derives from a predominantly US narrative frame, this periodization is thus, ironically, more geopolitically expansive in its sense of the artistic terrain than the previous one – although it too has incorporated ‘Second World’ (state socialist) art of the 1960s and 1970s from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China largely only retrospectively (after 1989), as a supplement, rather than as contributing constitutively to art’s contemporaneity. One reason for the expansiveness of this standpoint is that the opening of this period coincides with the intensification of anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation, which had decisive domestic political effects within Western states. Another reason, more simply, was the development of commercial air travel and communications technology. Nonetheless, it is the radically dispersed, materially distributed character of the art – associated with its incorporation of non-traditional means, often from the mass media – that is the unifying principle of the periodization, enacting a decisive break with what went before. Here, contemporary art deploys an open infinity of means, and operates with an institutionally- and philosophically-grounded generic conception of ‘art’ that exceeds the historically received conventions that had previously defined artistic mediums. A significant amount of the institutionally validated art currently produced still fails to attain contemporaneity in this art-critically immanent sense.
The third main periodization of contemporary art one finds in current art-critical discourse is more immediate: ‘art after 1989’ – symbolically, the breaching of the Berlin Wall. With respect to the Cold War, 1989 is the dialectical counterpart to 1945. After 1989, the Cold War is finally over. But with respect to world politics, 1989 is the dialectical counterpart to 1917 (the Russian Revolution). If 1917–89 is a meaningful ‘period’ in world history (the epoch of historical communism) the argument goes, then surely ‘contemporary art should now be redefined as art after 1989? Politically, ‘1989’ signifies the end of historical communism (or ‘actually existing socialism’), the dissolution of independent Left political cultures, and the decisive victory of a neo-liberal globalization of capital – incorporating the current engine of the world economy, capitalism in China.15 This corresponds artistically to three convergent features of institutionally validated art since the 1980s: the apparent closure of the historical horizon of the avant-garde; a qualitative deepening of the integration of autonomous art into the culture industry; and a globalization and transnationalization of the biennale as an exhibition form.16 Of these, it is the first that is most problematic, since the question of the avant-garde is now as much that of the critical construction of historical meanings as it is of any formal, identifiable features of the works themselves. It is further complicated by the existence of two distinct forms of the avant-garde.
Following Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde,17 it has become conventional to distinguish the conjointly artistic and political perspective of the classical or ‘historical’ avant-gardes of the early twentieth century from the purely artistic ‘neo’-avant-gardes of the 1940s and 1950s, which attempted to sustain the avant-garde model of art history independently of its relations to socio-economic and political change. It is this neo-avant-garde art-historical consciousness that is most directly challenged by the sheer diversity of forms of internationally exhibited work produced since 1989 – in fact, since the 1960s. On the other hand, the more socially and politically complex perspective of the historical avant-gardes was also revived in the 1960s and 1970s by a range of work, which was either directly political in character, had strong anti-art elements, or embodied art-institutional and social critique. Such work continued to derive its historical intelligibility from its claim on the future, albeit, increasingly, an abstractly projected (imaginary) future, or mere horizon, rather than a politically actual one. These kinds of work – suspended between the perspectives of the historical- and neo-avant-gardes – continue into the immediate present. Nonetheless, international art-institutions rarely present contemporary work in terms of the historical consciousness of the avant-garde, other than in a ‘retro’ mode, borrowed from some of this work itself (by the Russian group Chto Delat, for example).
One reason for this is that the increasing integration of autonomous art into the culture industry has imposed a more immediate and pragmatic sense of historical time onto the institutional framing of contemporary work – although this remains a profoundly contradictory process. For this integration is by no means an outright negation of autonomy by commodification and political rationality, so much as a new systemic functionalization of autonomy itself – a new kind of ‘affirmative culture’.18 This new systemic functionalization of autonomy (this new ‘use’ of art’s ‘uselessness’) corresponds to the global transnationalization of the biennale as an exhibition form, and its integration into the logics of international politics and regional development. From this point of view, art must reflectively incorporate this new context into its procedures if it is to remain ‘contemporary’. From the standpoint of this last periodization, then, our three periodizations of contemporary art are not so much self-sufficient and competing alternative definitions as different intensities of contemporaneity, different interpenetrating historical strata. Each may become closest to the surface on particular occasions, but always as mediated by its relations to the other two. It is this differential historical temporality of the present that renders dynamic, in any particular instance, a work’s articulation of the structural features that characterize contemporary art ontologically, according to the second definition.
The root idea of the contemporary as a living, existing, or occurring together ‘in’ time, then, requires further specification as a differential historical temporality of the present: a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ times, a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times. As a historical concept, the contemporary thus involves a projection of unity onto the differential totality of the times of human lives that are in principle, or potentially, present to each other in some way, at some particular time – paradigmatically, now, since it is the living present that provides the model of contemporaneity. That is to say, the concept of the contemporary projects a single historical time of the present, as a living present: a common, albeit internally disjunctive, present historical time of human lives. ‘The contemporary’, then, is another way of referring to the historical present. Such a notion is inherently problematic but increasingly inevitable.
It is problematic, theoretically, first because it is an ‘idea’ in Kant’s technical sense of the term: its object (the total conjunction of present times) is beyond possible experience. It is thus an object that exists only ‘in the idea’ and is hence the site of a problem that requires investigation. All ideas, as concepts of the totality or the unconditioned, are problematic for Kant.19 Such concepts depend upon an ‘as if ’ – Kant also calls them ‘heuristic fictions’ – which cannot be objectively validated, but which may legitimately be used to ‘regulate’ experience, so long as they are not contradicted by it. This is the ‘hypothetical’ employment of pure reason: the idea of the contemporary hypothetically projects an internally differentiated and dynamic spatial-temporal unity of human practices within the present. As such it is a hypothetical presupposition of any possible ‘human science’.20
However, the concept of the contemporary is problematic theoretically not only because it goes beyond possible experience (in the narrow Kantian sense of experience as the experience of spatio-temporally given objects of knowledge); it is also problematic, in a more fundamental sense, because of its attribution of unity to the temporal mode of the present, however hypothetical, as such. As Heidegger famously argued, ‘the present’ itself, by itself, in its presentness, cannot be considered