Summer Wheat (U.S. American, 1977–). Foragers, 2020, colored vinyl on mylar, 805.5 x 738.5 inches. Commissioned for The Mint Museum and generously presented by Wells Fargo Foundation Women Artists Fund.

By Stephen Knudsen

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker pioneered new theoretical terrain in the arts, identifying what they described as an emerging sensibility on the heels of Postmodernism. Their essays brought the terms “Metamodernism” and “the Metamodern generation” into international circulation, framing these concepts through the notion of a contemporary “structure of feeling” that sustains belief and doubt in productive tension.

Their work remains foundational to any serious discussion of Metamodernism, and I write in genuine gratitude for the research, rigor, and imagination with which they first gave shape to this discourse. At the same time, their framework should not be regarded as closed or exhaustive. The arguments that follow build directly upon their insights while revising certain chronological and conceptual boundaries.

First, this essay proposes replacing the term “Metamodern generation” with the term “Metamodernity”. While both terms describe paradoxical attitudes toward scientific, technological, and civic progress, the generational framing risks reducing the phenomenon to demographic change. The term “Metamodernity”, by contrast, identifies a structure of feeling that transcends generational divisions.

This adjustment also restores conceptual symmetry. The relationship between Metamodernity and Metamodernism mirrors that between Modernity and Modernism, and between Postmodernity and Postmodernism. Then, distinguishing the -ity from the -ism yields the conceptual clarity required to articulate chronological nuance with greater precision.

Within this framework, this essay argues that Metamodernity should name the post-1945 condition structured by humanity’s dialectical negotiation of science, technology, and governance, all of which promise transcendence even as they threaten annihilation. Metamodernism, as is already widely accepted, denotes the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic and literary formations that arise from, and give formal expression to, this oscillatory structure of feeling between belief and doubt.

While the mainstream scholarly position situates Metamodernism’s noticeable emergence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with its formal naming and anchoring around 2010, this essay remains aligned with that timeline in spirit. At the same time, it proposes a retroactive thickening of the historical frame, arguing that Metamodernism is not a successor to Postmodernism but a parallel and interacting mode of expression that has coexisted in full measure with Postmodernism throughout the twenty-first century. Each mode is grounded in a distinct structure of feeling, namely Postmodernity and Metamodernity, both seeded by the existential rupture of 1945, when humanity first confronted the possibility of its own technological self-annihilation.

Retrospectively, we see traces of Metamodern structure of feeling in preliminary artistic flashes as early as the 1960s, where works register tensions between belief and doubt, sincerity and skepticism, hope and apprehension. This essay highlights some of these illuminating premonitions. Such tensions would later achieve widespread realization in twenty-first-century Metamodernism, even as Postmodern works persist. This proposal is not radical. Structures of feeling often precede their naming, and the arts routinely register shifts in collective affect long before theory stabilizes them.

Finally, works identified as Metamodern require greater analytical rigor than they are sometimes afforded. If the net is cast too widely, the term risks becoming diluted and losing its explanatory value. The designation should be reserved for works in which the tensions of Metamodernism are clearly present and demonstrable, particularly those involving belief and doubt, sincerity and irony, and commitment and skepticism. The examples that follow aim to model such rigor

To clarify the structure that underpins Metamodernism, we must further unpack the concept of Metamodernity as a collective condition that sustains faith in progress, technology, and rational inquiry while simultaneously recognizing that these same forces can produce unintended consequences, existential risks, and even apocalyptic outcomes. Metamodernity is thus a structure of feeling in which forces long imagined as emancipatory or utopian are understood to hold the capacity for unprecedented destruction as well.

When I return to the rivers of my childhood, I find in their converging currents a bodily model of this paradoxical structure of feeling. I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks among jewel-like rivers of astonishing transparency, rivers that “roll so clear, like the eye of God, through the Milky Way,” as the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin writes.(1) In these waters, stones shimmer like stained glass, and fish swim as if suspended in air. At my most beloved place on earth, deep in the forested hills, two radiant tributaries of the Jacks Fork River rush together like lovers meeting after a long separation. One stream is comfortably warm, like bath water, while the other is bone-chilling and nearly freezing, gushing relentlessly from Alley Spring.

Exactly where the two streams merge, one warm and one cold, a person can stand chest deep in the rushing water on a summer day. Standing there, facing the current in the exact and narrow zone where the two streams meet, cold water courses over the entire left side of the body while warm water courses over the right side.

The biological confusion this creates is strangely exhilarating: on one side, freezing water drives blood urgently toward the core, while on the other, warm water draws blood outward toward the skin.   The body’s instincts are split in two, one side of the body driven into survival, the other coaxed into release. That haptic tension, balanced between two irreconcilable extremes, reaching for a homeostasis that can never be achieved, is one of the most exhilarating sensations I know.

In the river, paradox is felt in the body; in Metamodernity it is sustained in the psyche. We exist at an interface, immersed in two contradictory currents that refuse to reconcile. Our belief in Modernity as a path toward utopian progress and justice surges forward, even as doubt in that very project courses alongside it, inseparable and relentless. These two currents are incompatible, yet activated at the same time, pulling on us in opposing directions. Metamodernity names this condition: a state in which belief and doubt coexist without resolution, where hope and suspicion run side by side, and where equilibrium is endlessly deferred. The confluence begins in 1945, when the promise of technological transcendence and the threat of global annihilation become inseparable.

In 2013, Timotheus Vermeulen described Metamodern tension in similar terms:

“The metamodern generation oscillates between a postmodern doubt and a modern desire for sense: for meaning, for direction. Grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed.”(2) Like my experience standing at the confluence of cold and warm Ozark currents, we all stand now at the confluence of the currents of Modernity (belief in our technology and egalitarianism) and Postmodernity (finding that belief suspect), and we therefore never quite reach homeostasis.

This stand in two disparate structures of feeling is unnerving and yet strangely invigorating. Consider the warm current: In every science lab across the globe, the Enlightenment lives. We believe in it too. It is our story now, beneficiaries of our capacity to reason, with life expectancies pushing a century, equipped with computers that are lovers, ever-present through the caress of keys and the gaze into the glowing window of a thinking machine’s soul. We have faith in this loved one. We believe in it. Now consider the paradoxical cold current. We also approach Modernity with profound doubt and fear. The same project that promises liberation carries the persistent specter of annihilation: evaporation in nuclear plumes, dissolution into Baudrillard’s hyperreal, or acceleration toward a rogue AI singularity capable of producing a universe wholly devoid of human thought. Vermeulen and van den Akker expand on this tension in their 2010 remarks:

Ontologically, Metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté  and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm. Both the metamodern epistemology (as if) and its ontology (between) should thus be conceived of as a “both-neither” dynamic. They are each at once modern and postmodern and neither of them. This dynamic can perhaps most appropriately be described through the metaphor of metaxis. Literally, the term metaxis translates as “between.” (3)

Summer Wheat, Alex Murphy, 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, 16" x 20."

Examples of Metamodern Works

To firm up the ground before advancing further arguments, it is useful to consider several works that embody metamodern tension with clarity. In her Zombie Series (2010), U.S. American artist Summer Wheat gives this tension visual form through a series of zombie portraits that oscillate between evoking repulsion and affection. Wheat’s zombies scream, but they are not the abject monsters of horror cinema, nor do they carry the existential agony of Francis Bacon’s contorted figures. Frankly, a Wheat zombie portrait, such as Alex Murphy, is more cute than wretched. As Wheat herself has remarked, by “wallowing voluptuously in ugliness, I find a paradoxical serenity and delicacy, even beauty.”(4)

The cuteness in Alex Murphy is not incidental. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has argued that “cute” has emerged as one of the dominant aesthetic categories of contemporary life, destabilizing older Enlightenment ideals such as the sublime or the pure. In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Ngai describes the cute as a paradoxical and dangerous hybrid: it combines vulnerability, tenderness, and asymmetry with an almost irresistible pull toward attachment and consumption. Cute objects solicit care even as they disarm critique. Wheat’s zombies operate squarely within this charged terrain.(5) Distress is sheathed in a veil of puppy-dog sweetness, producing a metamodern affect in which unease and attraction coexist without resolution.

In Alex Murphy, vigorous applications of complementary pigment merge into murky passages, reflecting a paradoxical emotional register, simultaneously calm and chaotic. Wheat’s zombies are buoyant and despondent at once, glowing with a tension that extends from the dawn of the atomic age into the uncertain trajectory of humanity in the twenty-first century. The figures appear suspended between vitality and decay.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Head, 1952, Oil and sand on canvas. 26" x 22".

Wheat’s work reflects a cultural condition in which the figure of the zombie has become ubiquitous. In restaurants we encounter the cyborg zombie: the phubbing parent absorbed by a smartphone, insensate to the tangible world even as a toddler vies fruitlessly for attention. Elsewhere, we see glowing zombies, individuals addicted to video games, dedicating fifteen hours daily to their screens, with an eroding ability to differentiate between simulated experiences and tangible reality. Such figures are moving increasingly toward the norm, as postmodern zombies of all kinds drift through a world saturated by screens.

Jean Baudrillard did not deploy the zombie as a metaphor in his writings, yet the image dovetails closely with his 1993 diagnosis of late modernity: “Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination… as a result of the epidemic of simulation.”(6) Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality describes a condition in which simulation does not merely imitate the real but replaces it altogether, leaving no stable referent behind. When Baudrillard articulated these ideas in the late twentieth century, they read as speculative, even science fictional. However, here in the third decade of the twenty-first century, they register as eerily familiar.

Jean Baudrillard scrutinized the process by which simulacra supplant “real” experiences, producing a condition in which the distinction between reality and its representations grows increasingly unstable.(7) Each passing day, new technologies intensify the blurring of machine essence with human essence, and of the simulated with the real. This slippage is at once exhilarating and increasingly precarious. Consider the recent advent of Apple’s Vision Pro, where immersive virtual environments seamlessly merge with live human figures.

Then, too, Neuralink’s first human brain-computer interface implant in January 2024 marked a shift from interacting with machines through hands and screens to engaging with them directly in our gray matter. These early clinical cases, presently directed toward restoring function in injured patients, may well prove to be harbingers of a technological horizon yet to unfold. Elon Musk has articulated a broader vision in which such implants are not confined to therapeutic intervention but eventually extend to healthy individuals, enabling seamless integration with artificial intelligence.

If the smartphone has already rendered us provisional cyborgs with our cognition distributed across handheld devices, one might imagine a further step: implanted interfaces that collapse even that modest distance between organism and machine. The question is not whether such developments will erase the real, but how profoundly they would reconfigure our relation to it. In such a condition, the slide into the hyperreal would register not as gradual drift but as a decisive rupture, a moment at which mediation ceases to frame experience and instead fuses with it.

Even as implanted interfaces remain the subject of future speculation, the normalization of hyperreality is already underway. For example, generative AI technologies now make the fabrication of convincing simulations both accessible and routine. Deepfake videos now circulate with such ubiquity that simulation regularly passes as authenticity. One notable instance occurred recently. In 2025, Berkshire Hathaway issued public warnings that a proliferation of online videos purporting to show Warren Buffett offering financial advice were, in fact, deepfakes. The likeness and voice of one of the most recognizable investors in the world were fabricated by algorithms, detached from their living source, and redistributed as algorithmic imitation. In one of the videos, Warren Buffett is seated in a familiar office setting, his cadence measured, his Nebraska inflection intact, as he offers confident financial guidance. Nothing in the image flickers; no glitch betrays the artifice. The voice carries the tonal hesitations and warmth long associated with his public persona.

What Baudrillard once theorized as the substitution of simulation for the real now unfolds not as speculative philosophy but as everyday media experience.

Had Warren Buffett sat before a camera and delivered financial advice, the resulting video would have been a representation of an actual event. The mediation might have been edited, staged, or strategically framed, yet it would remain anchored to an originating performance.

In Baudrillard’s terms, such an image would still belong to a regime in which the sign refers back to a real occurrence, however mediated. Such a recording would preserve presence, even as it transforms it.

The deepfake operates differently. No original performance precedes it. The voice, gestures, and facial expressions are not recorded but synthesized from data patterns. The referent, the living Warren Buffett, continues to exist, yet the image no longer depends upon him. It is generated without his participation, without his speech, and without any event that might ground it. What circulates is not a distorted copy of a real moment but the production of a moment that never occurred.

This distinction clarifies Baudrillard’s account of the three orders of simulacra. In the first order, images imitate an original; the counterfeit still presumes the authenticity of what it copies. In the second, images reproduce reality through mass production, eroding aura but remaining tethered to an originating referent. In the third order, however, the sign no longer represents or reproduces reality; it renders reality structurally unnecessary and inaugurates what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal. This third order is a condition in which simulations circulate independently of any originating event. The deepfake does not misrepresent Buffett so much as bypass him. Authority once secured by presence is now algorithmically fabricated. The image persuades not because it corresponds to an event, but because it no longer requires one.

The arrival of the hyperreal, however, does not seal our fate. Most of us retain agency and discernment even as we conduct much of our lives within what Baudrillard described as a “secondary existence of simulation.” At least, we do so far. Even as the conditions that engender social zombification intensify, we remain capable of awareness, reflection, and care. Whether that capacity will endure cannot be assumed.

A Metamodern reading allows Baudrillard’s critique to function less as a declaration of inevitable collapse and more as sustained caution, a condition to be navigated rather than an outcome already determined. From this perspective, the future remains open-ended.

Wheat’s zombies embody this suspended condition. They do not represent humanity already lost to the hyperreal; they figure the risk of depletion without surrendering entirely to it. We may become more attuned to the vulnerabilities Baudrillard identified and more deliberate in our response to them, or we may not. The tension remains unresolved.

Wheat’s Metamodern zombies embody precisely this dual structure of feeling. Crucially, their latent sweetness is not merely expressive but material. In several works from the Zombie Series, paint is squeezed directly from cake-decorating bags, producing raised, frosting-like surfaces that hover between painting and confection. These ornamental, tactile passages introduce a strange tenderness, an excess of care, pleasure, and labor that resists the frictionless smoothness of the hyperreal. The zombies glow not because they are emptied of life, but because they are overloaded with it. They seem less irretrievable than stalled, as if they might yet be shaken back to consciousness.

This tension closely echoes Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the inhuman in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988), where he contrasts two distinct forms of the inhuman. The first is an external, systemic inhuman marked by technological efficiency, speed, and indifference; the second is an inhuman that persists within us as vulnerability, affect, and unfinishedness. This latter inhuman constitutes the inner remainder that resists total technological assimilation. For Lyotard, ethical and artistic responsibility lies not in resolving this condition, but in bearing witness to that remainder, resisting its erasure by forces that would optimize, instrumentalize, and ultimately subordinate human experience to technological systems. (8) Metamodernism takes up this tension without pretending it can be resolved. It acknowledges the power of these systems while refusing to abandon care, feeling, or hope altogether. This is the Metamodern dilemma in distilled form: poised on the brink of profound self-destruction, yet not beyond redemption. Wheat’s zombies do not resolve this tension. They inhabit it.

In this way, Wheat’s work reflects how the human collective remains suspended within contradiction, compelled to believe in Modernity’s promises while simultaneously doubting them. This paradoxical structure of feeling is what Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker identify as Metamodern.

Summer Wheat (U.S. American, 1977–). Foragers, 2020, colored vinyl on mylar, 805.5 x 738.5 inches. Commissioned for The Mint Museum and generously presented by Wells Fargo Foundation Women Artists Fund.

Consider the Metamodern tension at work in a second Summer Wheat piece, Foragers. This monumental installation stages a Metamodern structure of feeling at monumental scale: 3,720 square feet of translucent imagery depicting women at work stretch across four stories of the Mint Museum’s Robert Haywood Morrison Atrium. First installed in 2020, Foragers remains on view as of this writing in 2026. Vast spans of bejeweled, bursting color compel the viewer to look upward and experience a sense of uplift, an affective pull toward hope that is nonetheless shadowed by the conditions of Modernity that have repeatedly given us reason to doubt it. In this work, that shadow takes concrete form in the persistent inequities of gendered and racialized labor and the uneven distribution of opportunity that continues to structure contemporary life.

Sixty-foot-tall women from multiple cultural backgrounds appear as farmers, hunters, beekeepers, bankers, fisherwomen, and caretakers. Foragers functions as a deferred action: an image of empowerment projected forward rather than claimed as complete. The work gestures toward the full realization of women’s agency through their own skilled labor, while acknowledging that such realization remains unfinished. In an era marked by instability and uncertainty, Foragers returns us to the idea of lifting people up, particularly those long marginalized, suggesting that a diversity of perspectives is not merely ethical but necessary if we are to successfully confront escalating global crises.

On an equally hopeful register, Wheat’s panels of colored vinyl transform the atrium’s ninety-six windows into fields of light passing through saturated color. The effect recalls a cathedral wall of stained glass, and Foragers invites comparison with the Basilica of St. Denis, reconstructed in the twelfth century by Abbot Suger. For Suger, sunlight passing through matter was a conduit between the material and the spiritual, a lux nova, or “new light”, in what became known as the theory of anagogical illumination. This spiritual luminosity, he believed, was available to all, even the most downtrodden of souls.(9) Likewise, Wheat’s atrium becomes a lux nova bursting with color, accessible to every visitor as a space of contemplation and provisional hope amid the uncertainties of our Metamodern condition.  Light passing through matter is one of the most enduring visual languages of uplift and power.

Standing at floor level we look far upward into Foragers. In a 2023 interview, Wheat emphasized the physical demand this orientation places on the body:

“The idea of uplifting in this work is more about looking up. This piece forces you to physically look up at these women. So, the piece is meant to uplift you through the color, movement, and pattern, and also through the physical way it makes you look upward. The scale of the women creates a new space for you to perceive the magnitude of women.” (10)

Wheat elaborates further:

“Foragers presents a tradition in which women were the original hunters, technologists, and artists. This array of women connected by geometric patterns echoes the psychological space of women supporting one another. They march together, connecting to creatures from land and water, demonstrating an inherent link to natural systems and to the layered depths of the unconscious.” (11)

Summer Wheat, Foragers, 2020, Detail

Standing inside the atrium, looking both at and through the windows, the viewer encounters a mixed reality. The translucent imagery of Foragers overlays what is outside the artwork, the actual city of Charlotte itself. Beyond the colored film, a real skyscraper outside the museum rises against the sky, a structure of steel and glass emblematic of Modern rationalism. The grid of the skyscraper’s façade mirrors the grid of the atrium windows, forming a doubled signifier of Modernity. As vibrant magenta and cyan films visually fuse this building with Wheat’s figures, the external world is absorbed into the work’s illusion. This convergence expands the temporal and conceptual scope of Foragers: the figures advance into the Modern era, metaphorically growing to heights that rival and surpass a twenty-story building, signaling a narrative of female ascendance embedded within the very fabric of contemporary urban life.

In a museum-sponsored discussion, Wheat has described her sustained dialogue with ancient Egyptian depictions of men engaged in everyday labor: fishing, beekeeping, construction.(12) By reimagining these figures as women, the installation performs a quiet yet forceful feminist revision of history. The work critiques the historical under-empowerment of women as a collective cultural loss, while simultaneously asserting the possibility of a more complete and inclusive future.  Foragers suggests that a just and sustainable Modernity may be best served by a widening circle of intelligence. Rather than locating progress solely within contemporary technological systems, the work draws from ancient visual languages and multiple cultural traditions, suggesting that knowledge is neither singular nor linear. Ancient ecological practices, Indigenous cosmologies, and pre-industrial modes of relational thinking may not replace scientific innovation, but they may temper and enlarge it. The past becomes neither refuge nor replacement but resource.

A better Modernity may depend upon such plural inheritances. Thus, Foragers emerges as a distinctly Metamodern gesture: it interrogates the failures of Modernity while preserving its aspirational core, suggesting that a renovated Modernity remains not only imaginable but essential to human survival within an increasingly precarious Anthropocene.  As Wheat observed in a recent interview, “The work is meant to be constructive…. I’m hopeful that what is created is a new way of seeing.”(13)

We should be careful, however, not to mistake Wheat’s optimism for uncomplicated affirmation. When her translucent color fields of vinyl applied to glass are understood as materially temporary, a more complex structure of feeling comes into focus. Unlike Suger’s stained glass, engineered for centuries of endurance and grounded in theological confidence in eternity, Wheat’s materials are explicitly finite. Even under ideal museum conditions, such works remain visually stable for only a few decades, altered within the span of a human lifetime.

This distinction is conceptual rather than incidental. Suger embedded color within glass itself, aligning material permanence with metaphysical certainty. Its endurance enacted belief in divine light, institutional continuity, and a future capable of preserving what the present consecrated. Wheat’s colored films, by contrast, carry color on the surface: radiant and seductive, yet chemically unstable. Foragers does not promise eternity; it acknowledges exposure. Its vast color fields will fade, degrade, and ultimately fail, inscribing impermanence directly into the work’s structure.

Seen this way, Wheat’s optimism is not the triumphal progress narrative of Modernism but, rather, a Metamodern affirmation under pressure. The work asks us to look up and feel hope, while refusing to detach that hope from time, entropy, and fragility.

Where Gothic stained glass sought transcendence beyond time, Wheat’s practice accepts time as a collaborator, folding doubt into the very condition of luminosity. Belief, here, operates without guarantees.

In this way, Foragers sustains a charged oscillation rather than offering resolution. Belief and hope are not abandoned, but continuously tested against exposure, impermanence, and ethical responsibility. Foragers moves between uplift and uncertainty, affirmation and critique, forward momentum and historical recall. This dynamic constitutes the structure of feeling that underpins Metamodernism. Wheat’s work neither revives the certainties of Modernity nor shelters itself in Postmodern detachment. Instead, it holds us within these conflicting currents, insisting on care, attentiveness, and action even when outcomes remain unresolved. Foragers stands as a paradigmatic Metamodern work, not because it resolves contradiction but because it sustains it. In a post-1945 world, we inhabit belief and doubt simultaneously, consciously and provisionally, aware of what is at stake.

A Forum on Metamodern: Playing the Postmodern Sublime Against the Kantian Sublime

Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 2012, 21' tall granite quarry fragment in a permanent installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Conceived 1969; original architectural and engineering drawings 1969–70. Image courtesy of photographers Joshua Dildine and Hilary Scott Dildine

Before entering the territory of my proposed theoretical tweaks, let us remain on common ground and consider Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, a Metamodern example discussed by Timothy Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, Luke Turner, James Elkins, and myself, and published in 2013 in the webzine Notes on Metamodernism.(14) All five of us agreed that Levitated Mass embodies Metamodern tension through a perceptual oscillation between the Romantic (Kantian) sublime and the Postmodern sublime of spectacle.

I opened the discussion by unpacking some of the facts. Levitated Mass is in a league of its own when it comes to large rock relocation. Humans usually do not move rocks this large over such a distance. In 2012, the 10-million-dollar Heizer project moved the 340-ton quarry boulder 105 miles by a special 196-wheeled transport to LACMA. As a football-field long centipede, this mobile contraption inched the rock along to its destination over eleven nights. It was the epitome of a Postmodern spectacle. In an NPR interview, Michael Govan, LACMA director, foretold of the magic of the piece: “You will be able to walk down under it. As you walk under it, that rock bottom moves up and you will feel the sense of a huge monolith that’s kind of levitated.” (15)

I arrived long after the media blitz, 13 months to be exact, to write about Levitated Mass for the Huffington Post.(16) By spending the full day with the rock, from sunrise to sunset, I noticed something I’d not yet seen in the discussions of Levitated Mass. Something extraordinary occurred at sunset, but this phenomenon only happens in April and May. When it happened, everyone present became believers. Unlike any other time of day, some even took to lying down in the trench. As I faced due west, the sun dropped directly behind the rock to be perfectly eclipsed.

The sun then reappeared as it dropped into the slot of the ramped space directly below the monolith. Walking down the ramp in these final minutes of sunset, two relative motions intersected: the sun dropped and the rock rose. Thus, in that moment, the powerful Postmodern spectacle of the rock recedes, while something aligned with Romanticism emerges: sublime space, celestial movement, and geologic time. Ultimately, the rock in that alignment pointed to that head-on crash of imagination with infinite space, the sublime so perfectly articulated in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment.(17)

Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 2012, 21’ tall granite quarry fragment in a permanent installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Opening day, 2012. Photograph by Stefanie Keenan, courtesy of the photographer.

In response to my remarks, art historian and theorist James Elkins stated this:

Heizer makes me wonder if it’s worth revisiting the idea of the sublime. Here, sublime is vast in time and space, which is close to Kant’s original ‘mathematical’ and ‘dynamical’ sublime. There is an overlay of late Romanticism in the emphasis on individual viewers’ reactions, and there’s a need for hyperbole and excess (the largest stone, the most amazing illusion, the unparalleled installation) that reminds me of what Karsten Harries called ‘the kitsch economy.’ All this by way of saying Heizer’s is an old-fashioned sublime, unlike more recent postmodern senses of the sublime, which have to do with inevitable partial failure; lack of transcendence; the inadequacy of the artist’s imagination and means; an uncertainty about the function of the sublime; modesty in scale and ambition; and references to local, subjective time rather than time that comes in pieces other than infinity and ‘geologic’ epochs. In short, I wonder if this, and associated pieces and projects, are as much a part of an older modernism as they are part of the newly immersive, spectacular pieces we’ve come to expect from artists like Eliasson in the last ten years. (18)

Though James Elkins, here, does not explicitly invoke Metamodernism, his remark nevertheless articulates the Modern/Postmodern perceptual shifting at work in Levitated Mass, a shifting that is, in fact, Metamodern. To review, Levitated Mass engages older conceptions of the sublime, namely the Kantian sublime, while simultaneously operating within a newer, immersive Postmodern sublime rooted in spectacle. The work paradoxically inhabits both philosophical frameworks while ultimately moving beyond them. This oscillation constitutes the Modern/Postmodern switch at the heart of the work. Levitated Mass places sense, meaning, and direction within postmodern air quotes (the logic of spectacle) while at the same time asking   us to contemplate those same qualities with Kantian, and ultimately Modern, earnestness. Levitated Mass is therefore a grand work of Metamodernism.

Timotheus Vermeulen then unpacked the metamodern tension in Levitated Mass:

I agree with Jim (Elkins) and Stephen (Knudsen) in as far as I also feel that Levitated Mass warrants a perusing of Kant’s Critique of Judgment more than a browse through the writings of Lyotard. In fact, you might say that in a sense the installation is a metaphor for Kant’s notion of the sublime, since it symbolizes culture’s moral conquest of a nature that is too massive, too monstrous, both temporally and spatially, to be understood intuitively. There is a ‘but’, however. Jim draws an interesting comparison between Heizer’s rock and the kitsch economy, which is to suggest that the work presents an overly simplified, self-contained totality that negates the complexities of the outside reality. It is true that in its instant overwhelmingness, its upending of the rules of gravity, its discard for the laws of civilization, it creates, or at least sets out to create, a solipsistic moment of perverse perfection. Yet as the quantity and intensity of talk about the project’s crazy costs (ten million dollars, funded privately in the midst of a financial crisis caused by the privatization of the economy, as if to press our noses onto the poverty of the people) and environmental damage demonstrate, this immersive experience is always about to be exposed.  It asks you to experience it as one thing (a sort of performative moment in Eshelman’s sense) in spite of the other things you know about it. Levitated Mass blows a bubble that it anticipates will burst. Here, in the irresolvable tension between the sublime and the subliminal, the immersive and exposition, the bubble and its bursting, we find an appreciation of the sublime that appeals principally to Kant but is answered by Lyotard. Levitated Mass both constructs a moment of sublime experience and deconstructs the problematic process by which that experience was achieved, attempting presentation in spite of its ethical, political, and formal unrepresentableness.

And then, in our discussion Robin van den Akker emphasized a key nuance within the tension, focusing on the “logic of the commodity”:

First of all, the installation seems to stand for today’s return of, or interest in, the trans-aesthetic-here, in the form of the sublime; elsewhere, in the shape of truth claims, as well as the quest for utopian horizons or alternative forms of life-precisely at the moment in which the production of the postmodern has dried up. Artists and Architects once more attempt to move beyond the merely decorative (in the sense that even the shocking exaggeration, the fun house mirror and the clever deconstruction end up being merely decorative, unable to be anything other than the spectacular imitation-as parody, pastiche or ironic comment-of actually existing capitalism) and explore whether we can still form social relations, communicate experiences or invent life forms that are not structured around calculation and accumulation.

Second of all, the installation demonstrates, too, our inability to return to the trans-aesthetic proper in an age that is characterized by the omnipresence of the logic of the market. Whereas the modern trans-aesthetic could still lay claim to some kind of authenticity or relate to some kind of purity uncorrupted by the logic of the commodity, the metamodern trans-aesthetic is per definition entangled-complicit even-with capital. Here, indeed, the boulder also is incorporated within commodity culture: privately funded by investors and installed to attract tourists (and the same goes for those geological forms in architecture).

The point I am trying to make is that in the metamodern mode of artistic production (and in metamodern culture in general) these aspects are not mutually exclusive or rather that, today, these aspects are held in tension. (19)

Robin van den Akker then stated,

The aesthetic of Levitated Mass, which, as James and Stephen suggest, evokes the sense of geological time as much as the spectacular now, reminds me of the recent “geological turn” (if you want to call it that) in architecture.  Architectural practices such as BIG, Snohetta, Herzog & De Meuron and many others have of late won critical acclaim not by abandoning spectacular, eye-catching forms (in the vein of the postmodern starchitects) but by taking iconic architecture into another, more contemporary direction.  They for instance conjure up giant icebergs and cracked glaciers or, indeed, eroded rocks and mountain formations (see also our essay on the topic and the very interesting, recently published Land Form Building, edited by Stan Allen and Marc McQuade). I wrote ‘contemporary’ because it is hard to resist the thought that this recent flurry of schemes tapping into a geological sensibility is somehow related to today’s revived interest in sustainable ways of living in the face of civilizational collapse and planetary destruction. So in architecture and the arts we can observe a similar development.

This, in turn, reminds me of Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the Sublime and the Beautiful in his essay The End of Art, The End of History. His argument-awash, in typical Jamesonian fashion, with dialectical reversals and critical digressions -is far more complex than I could possibly do justice here. However, he basically argues, not with but beyond Kant and Hegel, that the first half of art, i.e. the Sublime, invests art after its first, ‘post-romantic’ end and that the second half of art, i.e. the Beautiful, reemerges after its second, ‘post-modern’ end.  He, simply put, identifies artistic modernism with the Sublime and artistic postmodernism with the beautiful (and, by extension, the respective cultural logics).

“Modernism aspires to the sublime as to its very essence, which we may call trans-aesthetic, insofar as it lays a claim to the Absolute, that is, it believes that in order to be art at all, art must be something beyond art. [Under postmodernism, we witness] the survival of art’s other half, namely the beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. [This is one of the faces] of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification [...]. Art thus, in this new age, seems to have sunk back to the older culinary status it enjoyed before the dominance of the sublime.” (20)

One doesn’t have to agree with this simplification to see the elegance of the proposition.

In my opinion it is significant that the museum went through so much trouble realizing Heizer’s project precisely at this moment in time-or rather History. They could have opted for a giant, McCarthy-esque dildo or a giant pencil a la Oldenburgh-or any other inflated, witty installation. Yet they didn’t.  So where does this leave us?

First of all, the installation seems to stand for today’s return of, or interest in, the trans-aesthetic-here, in the form of the sublime; elsewhere, in the shape of truth claims, as well as the quest for utopian horizons or alternative forms of life-precisely at the moment in which the production of the postmodern has dried up. Artists and Architects once more attempt to move beyond the merely decorative (in the sense that even the shocking exaggeration, the fun house mirror and the clever deconstruction end up being merely decorative, unable to be anything other than the spectacular imitation-as parody, pastiche or ironic comment-of actually existing capitalism) and explore whether we can still form social relations, communicate experiences or invent life forms that are not structured around calculation and accumulation.

Second of all, the installation demonstrates, too, our inability to return to the trans-aesthetic proper in an age that is characterized by the omnipresence of the logic of the market. Whereas the modern trans-aesthetic could still lay claim to some kind of authenticity or relate to some kind of purity uncorrupted by the logic of the commodity, the metamodern trans-aesthetic is per definition entangled-complicit even-with capital. Here, indeed, the boulder also is incorporated within commodity culture: privately funded by investors and installed to attract tourists (and the same goes for those geological forms in architecture).

The point I am trying to make is that in the metamodern mode of artistic production (and in metamodern culture in general) these aspects are not mutually exclusive or rather that, today, these aspects are held in tension. (20)

What I want to bring back into focus here is not simply the elegance of these theoretical distinctions, but the experience that precipitated them. While lying in the trench beneath Levitated Mass at sunset, during that brief window in April and May when the sun perfectly aligns with the stone, the spectacle of the project temporarily recedes almost entirely.

The elaborate choreography of capital, engineering, and media falls away, and what remains is a slow collision between bodily perception and geological time. In those minutes, the rock does not read as kitsch, nor as irony, nor even as metaphor, but as a cosmic body.

The Postmodern spectacle may have made this encounter possible, but it did not exhaust it. After experiencing Levitated Mass, what lingers in memory is something closer to late modern sincerity, an earnestness that does not deny its entanglement with capital and spectacle but nonetheless insists on the possibility of a trans-aesthetic, namely a glimpse of sublime transcendence. This elegant Modern/Postmodern oscillation situates Levitated Mass within a key terrain of Metamodernism.

New Argument: Aligning the Metamodern With “ism” and “ity” Terms

The consensus among the scholars above regarding Levitated Mass demonstrates a striking degree of alignment within Metamodern discourse. Yet such agreement also creates an opportunity to reconsider and recalibrate some of the terminology that currently structures the field.

I contend that the Metamodern “structure of feeling” does not pertain exclusively to any single generation. Consequently, I advocate moving beyond the term Metamodern generation in favor of the term Metamodernity.

This shift allows for a clearer distinction between Metamodernity and Metamodernism, thereby increasing conceptual precision. In turn, it establishes a coherent framework organized around six key terms grouped into three pairs: Modernity and Modernism; Postmodernity and Postmodernism; and Metamodernity and Metamodernism. It is crucial to note that the “-itys” and “-isms” do not always synchronize at identical historical junctures. As an example, consider the following distinction between Modernity and Modernism.

Although some of the impulses commonly associated with Modernity surface intermittently across antiquity, across cultures, and across historical locations, the dawn of what we call Modernity is conventionally located in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Modernism, by contrast, found its stride much later, in the mid-nineteenth century, indicating a temporal lag between societal transformation and its cultural reflection. Modernism thus marks the later cultural threshold at which artistic and literary practices begin to consciously register, interrogate, and formalize those conditions as experience.

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 10’ x 22’, oil on canvas 1849-50.

Modernism, as an artistic and literary movement, emerged as a reflection on the societal shifts of Modernity. Modernism’s inception in the fine arts is somewhat imprecise but often linked to Gustave Courbet’s 1849 seminal work, Burial at Ornans. This expansive twenty-two-foot canvas disrupts the era’s traditional art norms.  It democratically elevates a mundane rural scene, a funeral attended by ordinary country folk, to a grand scale and prominence once reserved exclusively for paintings of royalty, deities, and epic heroes. This shift mirrors the broader transformations of Modernity, where the scientific revolution redefined knowledge and catalyzed the emergence of new technologies and Modern political frameworks, championing egalitarian principles as pathways toward a potential utopian human existence. The painting exemplifies this through the prominence given to ordinary individuals in their moment of collective grief, thus democratizing humanity itself.

Burial at Ornans also embodies various other forms of democracy. Time is rendered democratic, as no single moment holds greater significance than another. Instead of capturing a pivotal moment, the figures are depicted in a natural state, casually milling about, which emphasizes the ordinariness and equality of each moment and individual within the scene.

Additionally, Courbet’s use of thick, tactile paint application challenges traditional hierarchies of artistic medium and technique, suggesting a democratization of the canvas surface itself and the material on that surface. The paint layers are exceptionally thick, creating a profound effect upon entering the Courbet gallery at the Musée d’Orsay. Surrounded by mural-scale paintings by Courbet, one immediately senses a material depth reminiscent of limestone cave walls. The surfaces are constructed with a paint volume far exceeding what is necessary for mere image creation, imbuing them with a tactile, almost sculptural quality. This approach foreshadows the late modernist emphasis of paint over picture and the medium purity advocated by critics like Clement Greenberg. In other words, Courbet’s robust emphasis on the tactile quality of thick paint on canvas paved the way for a kind of affirmative action for surface materiality in high Modernism epitomized by artists such as Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.

Now consider the next two terms: Postmodernism and Postmodernity. Postmodernism, the literary and artistic response emerging in the 1960s, engages a critical dialogue with Postmodernity, a post-1945 skepticism towards the grand narratives of utopian progress. This condition took shape with a profound historical irony: technologies imagined as instruments of human advancement revealed themselves as instruments of potential annihilation. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 did more than help bring World War II to a close. Einstein’s dreams were transformed into Oppenheimer’s tears.

Those nuclear plumes marked the invention of the end of the world as a real human possibility, generating a profound existential dread through a waking nightmare that shook faith in human reason, progress, and technology. This catalyzed the deeper, self-interrogating structure of feeling we now recognize as Postmodernity.

Andy Warhol with Brillo Boxes, 1964. Still from Brillo Box (3¢ Off), directed by Lisanne Skyler (HBO Documentary Films, 2017)

Postmodernism, in turn, frequently seizes upon irony as a primary mode of response as an aesthetic strategy attuned to a world in which meaning, value, and authority no longer arrive fully intact. Arthur Danto highlighted Andy Warhol’s 1964 iterations of Brillo Boxes as the threshold of Postmodernism’s philosophical and pluralistic era and the end of a singular, overarching narrative in art.

Warhol’s work, precise three-dimensional replicas of mundane supermarket packaging, blurs the boundary between art and everyday objects, staging irony not as parody, but as a sober reflection of a world newly aware of its own contradictions. In a 1993 ARTFORUM review, Arthur Danto states,

The questions of art are not to be answered by seeking something pure in which painting essentially consists, but in asking how art is possible. Brillo Box, in any of its many exemplars, made the form of that question finally and forever clear: how is it possible for something to be a work of art when something else, which resembles it to whatever degree of exactitude, is merely a thing, or an artifact, but not an artwork? Why is Brillo Box art when the Brillo cartons in the warehouses are merely soap-pad containers? In my view, Brillo Box not only made the philosophy of art at last thinkable, it brought an end to a period in which art could be made in ignorance of its philosophical nature. We have entered a period of self-consciousness unparalleled in any earlier time. (21)

This moment marks a pivotal entry point in Danto’s vision of art’s transition into the Postmodern era, an inherently pluralistic shift that signals the end of the grand narrative. Through his analysis of Brillo Boxes, Danto illustrates this transition, emphasizing the collapse of a singular, dominant narrative in art and the emergence of an era characterized by multiplicity and diversity in artistic expression. He further develops this argument comprehensively in his seminal text, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. (22)

Warhol’s act of replication and recontextualization surpassed even Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in its subversion of traditional art norms. While Fountain retains certain aesthetic markers of art, such as the “artist’s” signature and the unconventional presentation of the urinal, Brillo Boxes delves deeper into the ontology of art, engaging in postmodern gamesmanship that heralded an even more profound exploration that opened the postmodern floodgates of irony, especially, a trait that became so ubiquitous in Postmodern art.

To clarify the argument on chronology, it is useful to distinguish carefully between the final two terms, “Metamodernity” and “Metamodernism.” Metamodernity refers to a structure of feeling characterized by paradoxical attitudes toward scientific, technological, and socio-political developments. In contrast, Metamodernism reflects the artistic and literary expressions of tension that emerge from and respond to these conditions. This distinction mirrors the relationship between Modernity and Modernism, in which the former signifies broader cultural and technological shifts, while the latter represents aesthetic responses to those shifts.

Any discussion of historical emergence must first distinguish between Metamodernity and Metamodernism. Metamodernity, as argued here, originates in the post-1945 convergence of Modernity and Postmodernity. From the moment humanity confronted both the promise and the peril of its own technological power, belief and doubt became inseparable currents within the same historical condition. This WWII confluence of Modernity and Postmodernity is what I suggest calling Metamodernity.

Yet the artistic expression of that condition did not immediately emerge in full view. In the decades following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Postmodernity and its systematic skepticism toward Modernity came to dominate much artistic production.

The 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s mark the high tide of Postmodernism’s irony, satire, and reflexive quotation marks placed around forms, values, and narratives that had previously been held as sacred or authoritative. During this period, early Metamodern signals were present but largely overshadowed by the cultural dominance of Postmodernism.

Only in the early twenty-first century does Metamodernism emerge in fuller measure as a recognizable artistic formation. At this point, the structure of feeling associated with Metamodernity becomes increasingly visible in artistic practice. Works structured by the simultaneous presence of belief and doubt begin to appear with greater frequency, taking their place alongside, rather than replacing, ongoing Postmodern production. Postmodernism persists, but it no longer stands alone.

What changes over time is the historical and affective distance from the immediate trauma of the atomic age. As Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain in collective memory, and while new existential threats such as simulation technologies, algorithmic governance, and artificial intelligence emerge, a renewed paradoxical structure of feeling becomes culturally legible. Under these conditions, and amid a growing sense that Postmodernism’s ironic saturation had reached a point of partial exhaustion, Metamodernity attains sufficient collective presence to precipitate an outpouring of works now identified as Metamodernism in the early twenty-first century. At this point, the phenomenon required naming. This underlying Metamodern structure of feeling does not reject Postmodern doubt, but seeks to navigate alongside it in a different, and perhaps more sustainable, way. Metamodernism thus reopens the possibility of belief, meaning, and direction while remaining fully conscious of Modernity’s failures and the persistent risks of catastrophe.

From this perspective, the genesis of Metamodernity can be traced to the late World War II era, a moment of unparalleled global transformation in which both Postmodern doubt and a chastened commitment to Modernity are set into motion. Metamodernism, by contrast, can be said to have early, anticipatory harbingers in certain artistic practices of the 1960s, notably in aspects of the works of Stanley Kubrick, among others.  But such Metamodern premonitions are outliers since Postmodernism remained the dominant cultural mode from the 1960s to the 1990s. Since the number of Metamodern examples increases markedly in the early 2000s, that period is still best understood as the definitive Metamodernism threshold, insofar as it marks the moment when Metamodern impulses achieve sufficient collective density, visibility, and coherence to warrant recognition as a named cultural formation. Earlier, twentieth-century Metamodern signals may be understood as preparatory or anticipatory, setting the rhythm before the full composition comes into view.

Rather than positioning Metamodernism as a Post-Postmodernism phenomenon, this account emphasizes overlap and coexistence with Postmodernism. The distinct yet interwoven structures of feeling associated with Postmodernism and Metamodernism continue to operate today within the pluralism of artworlds and what might be described as a global artistic rhizome, a non-hierarchical field of interconnected micronarratives and artmaking across the planet. (23)

Celebrated theorists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Slavoj Žižek, remain skeptical toward claims of a Post-Postmodern era. In their accounts, Postmodernity names an enduring historical condition structured by late capitalism, neoliberal economics, global media, and the saturation of simulation, conditions that have not fundamentally changed.

From this perspective, postmodernism as an aesthetic mode does not simply persist unchanged, but mutates, intensifies, or becomes normalized within everyday cultural artistic production. Irony, reflexivity, and quotation no longer function as critical distance so much as ambient techniques of cultural expression. Consequently, contemporary gestures toward sincerity or belief are often understood by these renowned thinkers not as exits from Postmodernism, but as effects generated within Postmodern conditions themselves. What unites these positions is not a denial of cultural change, but a resistance to claims of epochal rupture so long as the underlying structures of Postmodernity remain intact. (23)

As of this writing, neither Jameson, Harvey, nor Žižek has substantially departed from the theoretical positions articulated in their late twentieth-century canonical texts on the Postmodern condition; subsequent publications and lectures tend to reaffirm, refine, or recontextualize those frameworks rather than announce a decisive break from Postmodernity.

If this assessment is correct, it leaves only two viable interpretations of the emergence of Metamodernism. Either Metamodernism represents a theoretical misreading of contemporary culture, or it constitutes one strand within the expanding cultural rhizome, operating alongside an ongoing Postmodernism. It is the latter position that I am advancing here.  While Jameson, Harvey, and Žižek do not endorse Metamodernism as a new historical condition, their continued insistence on the persistence of Postmodernity helps clarify the terms under which Metamodernism may be understood, not as a successor, but as a concurrent structure of feeling emerging within Postmodern conditions.

For example, Žižek has repeatedly argued that contemporary gestures of sincerity and authenticity often function ideologically, not as exits from Postmodernity, but as compensatory mechanisms that allow its underlying structures to persist. This position rests on a broader theoretical claim: ideology no longer operates primarily by compelling subjects to believe sincerely, but by organizing social practices in such a way that belief continues to function even when subjects profess distance, irony, or disbelief. (24)

Žižek does not name this condition Metamodernity, nor does he endorse Metamodernism as a successor to Postmodernism. Indeed, he is notably skeptical of such claims. Yet his analysis nonetheless describes a recurring tension between belief and doubt that operates within Postmodern conditions themselves. From this perspective, such tensions may be understood not as evidence against Metamodernism, but as one of its internal facets: a ubiquitous mode of Metamodern structure of feeling emerging within, rather than beyond, Postmodernity.

Nuclear Plume from the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, rises to an altitude of over 60,000 feet at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945.Photograph by the U.S. military. Public domain, U.S. National Archives. Photograph has been colorized.

With that clarification in mind, let us move deeper into the nuances of Metamodernity and Metamodernism. I advocate that the advent of the paradoxical structure of feeling of Metamodernity is marked by the moment humanity invented the possibility of the end of the world through Modernity, through scientific breakthrough. This paradox begins with the elegance of Einstein’s E=mc² in 1905, which, by 1945, had morphed into the chilling reality of thermonuclear weaponry, presenting a perpetual menace to our very existence. Following the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer’s visible regret and distress led President Truman to vow never to meet with him again, a testament to the profound moral and ethical dilemmas spawned by these scientific advancements. Oppenheimer’s profound post-bombing disillusionment mingled with his intact empirical faith epitomizes the paradoxical Metamodern condition. David McCullough’s insights further illuminate this epoch, portraying Oppenheimer not just as a preeminent scientist but as a figure whose faith in the unassailable progress of Modernity was profoundly shaken by Postmodern skepticism. In the bombing aftermath Robert Oppenheimer cried Postmodern tears in President Truman’s office.(25) This shift after the nuclear plume hurled Oppenheimer and society at large into tension, caught between the currents of Modernity and Postmodernity. These currents converge in our collective consciousness, simultaneously pushing at one another. The structure of feeling of Postmodernity (that of doubting the trajectory of modern advancements) was realized and joined the stream of Modernity (that of believing in the trajectory of modern advancements) to surge in the river of our collective psyche. This is Metamodernity.

In seeking reflections of the attitudes of Metamodernity within Metamodernism, we turn to art that navigates this tension, works that earnestly engage with ideals of Modernity while simultaneously scrutinizing them in an attitude of suspicion. This tension can be achieved either overtly or subtly, as the examples in this essay demonstrate. The Metamodern artistic oeuvre may blend Modern enthusiasm with Postmodern irony. It may interweave hope with melancholy, or empathy with apathy, among other dichotomies. This Metamodern sensibility, contrary to the assumption that it first emerged in the 21st century, can be traced back to much earlier artistic and literary expressions, challenging the notion of a singular “Metamodern generation.”

New Arguments on Timing: An Early Metamodern Example From 1968

Poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

As an early and anticipatory articulation of a Metamodern structure of feeling, consider 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the contemporaneous novel by Arthur C. Clarke bearing the same title. I contend that both Kubrick’s film and Clarke’s novel register a pronounced tension between belief and doubt that would later come to be recognized as Metamodern, even as Postmodernism remained the dominant cultural mode at the time of the film. Their collaborative narrative weaves modern aspirations toward meaning, transcendence, and human destiny together with postmodern opacity, indeterminacy, and epistemological uncertainty, producing one of the most compelling and enigmatic works of twentieth-century cinema and literature.  The Metamodern narrative ambitiously spans from the dawn of humanity, over three million years ago, to a speculative future venturing into the depths of Jupiter space and beyond into realms unfathomable.

Both the film and the text were realized as concurrent gateways into a vast expanse of speculative fiction. The novel initiates this journey with a foreword that highlights the vast, untapped potential of our galaxy. In the novel’s foreword, Clarke draws a poignant comparison between the number of stars in the Milky Way and the total human population that has ever existed on Earth, both estimated at around 100 billion.²⁶ In this context, the film commences with an audacious three-minute sequence of total darkness, underscored by the haunting and complex strains of György Ligeti’s micropolyphonic orchestral piece “Atmosphères” setting the tone for a cinematic experience that transcends the scope of conventional storytelling.

Certainly, this is within 1960s overture protocol for movie epics, but more importantly, the black rectangular screen is the black monolith in horizontal orientation singing to us, in haunting tones, for three minutes. That three minutes of black also signifies a gateway into what our humanity and imagination collide with: infinitudes and dynamics beyond comprehension and the feeling of being thrown into a corner of that infinity to face off with the abyss. The stage is set.

While many viewers may be familiar with the narrative and underlying themes of this iconic film, a concise summary can still offer fresh insights. The film unfurls with an extraterrestrial species, God-like, composed of pure energy and unseen throughout the film, originating from the distant reaches of the Milky Way. At the dawn of humanity, this advanced alien civilization places a mysterious black monolith on Earth and buries another deep beneath the Moon’s surface. Their intent, included in the novel’s omniscient backstory, is to observe and guide human evolution. Once humans can reach the Moon and uncover a second monolith, it’s a signal they are ready to be tested, contacted, or pushed toward the next leap. Thus, in the film, with a sudden jump cut forward three million years pass. It is the year 2001, and human technology has finally caught up with cosmic destiny. The lunar monolith, now unearthed, emits a signal, an invitation, or perhaps a test, that draws humanity toward Jupiter space. The narrative then propels Captain Dave Bowman and crew into a journey that challenges the boundaries of consciousness, identity, and what it means to be human.

However, their mission is jeopardized by HAL 9000, the spacecraft’s sentient computer, which, driven by a rogue directive, murders the crew and attempts to kill Bowman.

In a spectacular final confrontation, HAL, facing deactivation, pleads for mercy saying, “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.” Despite HAL’s appeals, Bowman decisively shuts HAL down, ensuring the mission’s continuation.

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic tour de force, 2001: A Space Odyssey, anticipates the twenty-first century existential anxieties surrounding superintelligent AI, a theme that has transitioned from speculative fiction to a pressing reality echoed by visionaries like Elon Musk. The film delves into the potential consequences of humanity’s relentless pursuit of technological dominance, suggesting a future where our AI creations, endowed with sentience, might regard their human progenitors as obsolete and expendable. This narrative not only underscores the profound dilemmas at the heart of AI development but also foreshadows a critical conversation about the ethical boundaries of our technological ambitions. This is the Postmodern structure of feeling in the film and novel.

In contrast, the attitude of Modernity in 2001: A Space Odyssey is intertwined with a peculiar external influence, a distant civilization guiding humanity’s ascent to utopia. Clarke’s conception of these aliens as beings of pure energy, capable of traversing vast galactic distances and initiating experiments on evolving planets, underscores a narrative of God-like interstellar oversight and cosmic endeavors. The film’s culmination reveals Dave Bowman’s transformation into the “Star Child,” a being of enhanced consciousness, heralding a new chapter for humanity. This is Dave Bowman in new, super form with his mind merged with some kind of alien expanded consciousness.

While the film leaves audiences contemplating this transcendence, the novel extends the narrative, showing the Star Child safely neutralizing Earth’s orbiting nuclear arsenal, a symbolic act of cleansing or rebirth, absent from the film’s visual conclusion. This denouement from the novel, to save earth, emphasizes the potential for a profound shift in human destiny guided by extraterrestrial wisdom. The ending remark of the novel is as follows:

A thousand miles below he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him. But he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief false dawn to half of the sleeping globe. Then he waited marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.(26)

This remark takes us full circle back to Moon-Watcher, the enlightened early man, Australopithecus afarensis, who gets an evolutionary boost from a monolith. Clarke writes of Moon-Watcher in the novel: “Now he was master of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” (27) The nuanced tension of Metamodernism in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perfectly captured by this significant remark, highlighting the enduring human ambition to conquer the natural world, a central motif of the Enlightenment that persists into the 21st century. Yet, at the same time, in the realm of Kubrick and Clarke, there’s a palpable sense of uncertainty about what the future holds, underscored by the notion of being “not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” This sentiment carries a foreboding undertone, raising concerns about the unforeseen consequences of tampering with technology beyond our comprehension or control, and the potential for unleashing forces that could disrupt our delicate balance of existence.

Clarke and Kubrick artfully maintain this tension with the dual specters of nuclear power and super intelligent AI, suggesting that humanity’s evolutionary push towards greater consciousness might be our salvation from self-annihilation. Yet, Clarke doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the grim possibility of failure. His concluding novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey, starkly presents the monoliths as capable of erasing humanity should human Modernity veer off course.

The concept of an external entity guiding humanity out of its flawed state isn’t merely speculative fiction. With most of the global population holding some belief in a higher power, this notion subtly influences the collective hope for a divinely inspired path forward amidst the complexities of Metamodern tension. It posits a scenario where superbeing intervention might be more beneficial than leaving our fate in our own hands. Clarke and Kubrick suggest a novel form of assisted Modernity, where more advanced and possibly more enlightened powers could  rescue humanity from its own missteps. Thus, 2001: A Space Odyssey emerges as a compelling narrative that weaves together elements of both Modern and Postmodern thought, creating a rich tapestry of tension that speaks poignantly to the human condition. It’s a narrative that explores the boundaries of our ambition and the paradoxes of our progress, situating itself at the heart of Metamodern discourse.

The context in which 2001: A Space Odyssey was created deeply resonates with the Metamodern ethos, blending elements of Modern optimism and Postmodern skepticism.

On the occasion of the film’s 50th anniversary in 2018, movie critic John Powers insightfully captures the essence of the Modernity of the 1960s, a period characterized by a counter-cultural drive towards expanding consciousness. He states,

The film also tapped into a key aspect of the ‘60s: the counter-cultural belief in expanding consciousness. Though Kubrick was vehemently not a drug user, he wanted 2001 to open the doors of perception, to show us a higher level of being. That dream seems like something out of the past in these days of shrinking consciousness filled with fake news and the hatred of science. Indeed, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey now is like opening a time capsule. And it can bring on a melancholy nostalgia for the era that spawned it, an optimistic time in which Americans believed the future was limitless.(28)

This is astute analysis on one side of the contextual equation. However, it overlooks the concurrent undercurrent of Postmodern anxiety that permeated its creation. 2001 was conceived and produced during a critical juncture in the Cold War, specifically, its fifth phase, in the shadow of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This period was marked by a palpable fear of nuclear annihilation between the US and the USSR, a threat deemed so imminent that a direct communication line was established between the superpowers in 1963 to mitigate the risk of catastrophe. By 1968, the year of the film’s release, the memory of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still vivid, only 23 years past, rather than the distant history it represents today. This nuclear dread infused the era, and by extension, the narrative of 2001, with a profound sense of existential uncertainty.

While the film’s final cut did not include a scene from the original script depicting megaton nuclear bombs orbiting Earth, this concept remains a critical backdrop to the Kubrick/Clarke narrative, embodying the Postmodern tension between technological advancement and the specter of self-destruction. Thus, 2001: A Space Odyssey stands as a testament to a complex moment in history, weaving together strands of optimism and anxiety to create a multifaceted exploration of humanity’s place in the cosmos. And though the page from the original script cited below was not realized in the film, it remains the Postmodern backboard to the Kubrick/Clarke narrative. With this narration, the script indicates a shot showing megaton nuclear bombs orbiting the Earth:

NARRATOR

Hundreds of giant bombs had been placed in perpetual orbit above Earth. They were capable of incinerating the entire Earth surface from an altitude of 100 miles.

Matters were further complicated by the presence of twenty-seven nations in the nuclear club. There had been no deliberate or accidental use of nuclear weapons since World War II and some people felt secure in this knowledge. But to others, the situation seemed comparable to an airline with a perfect safety record; it showed admirable care and skill, but no one expected it to last forever.(29)

Thus, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a poignant, Metamodern tale with two intertwined currents. One current is Modern: the possibility of expanding human consciousness through super artificial intelligence and super extraterrestrial intelligence. The other current is Postmodern: the threat to human consciousness whereby consciousness invents its own destruction through the nuclear incineration and/or Super A.I. aggression.

New Arguments: Translating Metamodern Theory into Analytic Precision

For works to be Metamodern, the tension between Modern belief and Postmodern doubt must be locatable. Attempts to classify works that express a completely singular posture as a Metamodern only degrade the nomenclature and generate conceptual confusion. For example, pointing to a work that pulls only toward optimism as Metamodern therefore misidentifies the term. This understanding is shared by several of the most influential theorists in the field, including Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, and Seth Abramson, each of whom emphasizes that Metamodernism does not resolve the conflict between belief and doubt, but sustains it.

Analysis improves once this distinction is taken seriously. The Metamodern structure of feeling is not sustained primarily through oscillation, understood as movement back and forth between modern belief and postmodern doubt, but through their simultaneity. As in my Ozark streams analogy, both currents take hold at once. To be sure, some theorists have emphasized oscillation, perhaps because it is more readily visualized and described. Yet the most sophisticated formulations of Metamodernism point toward a paradoxical simultaneity in which opposing impulses coexist rather than alternate. While Vermeulen and van den Akker gesture toward a “both-neither” position in their foundational formulations, the logic of simultaneity requires further articulation if it is not to be misread as a merely sequential movement between contrasting poles.

In 2015, Seth Abramson clarified this point by arguing that the Metamodern self does not oscillate between discrete positions, but inhabits them concurrently:

When metamodernists speak of the generative juxtaposition of opposing poles, whether these poles map onto modernism and postmodernism or sincerity and irony or optimism and cynicism, this is exactly what they mean. In metamodernism there is no “oscillation” between discrete states, however much some may say so, for to say that metamodernism manifests in the oscillation between states is merely to entrench the idea that discrete states do and must exist at either end of dialectical spectra. In the “middle” and “beyond” spaces denoted by the prefix “meta-,” dialectical spectra are only visible in their detritus; that is, I can acknowledge theoretically, in a metamodern space, that both irony and sincerity could exist separate from one another, even as phenomenologically I am presently unable to untangle the two.(30)

In artworks that deploy overtly contradictory gestures, this Metamodern tension is relatively easy to locate. In more subtle works, analysis may require greater attentiveness to tonal instability, procedural hesitation, or structural ambivalence. Regardless of volume or visibility, what is crucial is the articulation of simultaneity: the persistence of opposing impulses without resolution.

In a fully Metamodern register, art becomes a site where Modern belief and Postmodern doubt coexist simultaneously rather than sequentially. Such works do not solve this tension; they inhabit it.

To be analytically precise, even the most understated Metamodern examples must reveal this tension, however quietly it operates. This requires shifting the analytic question away from what belief an artwork stages, as if belief were a stable or declarative position. A more precise question asks how belief operates within the work once certainty can no longer support it, yet belief itself persists.  Even at low volume, it is at this threshold, where belief and doubt press into each other, that a Metamodern structure of feeling becomes legible in art. All examples discussed here, regardless of volume level, have been selected for their capacity to reveal this Metamodern tension. The following example demonstrates how this analytic criterion operates in a work where Metamodern tension is present, yet muted.

Locating Metamodern Tension: The Work of Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002- (installation view, “Synthetic,” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009), modified Super Mario game cartridge, Nintendo System. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York (http://artpulsemagazine.com/cory-arcangel).

In 2017, I taught a graduate student from China, Sheng Wang, whose studio practice reflected on his long-standing addiction to video games, an addiction that had been personally and academically crippling. He recounted that as a child, his father rewarded strong academic performance with his first video game console. What began as encouragement quickly became destabilizing: his grades declined, and the struggle followed him into adulthood.

While writing his M.F.A. thesis, Cyberland, (31) I directed Sheng toward Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002), a work produced by corrupting the original Super Mario Brothers (1985) game cartridge. I also encouraged him to consult my own published writing on the piece, as well as museum wall texts from Masters, a 2013 survey exhibition of Arcangel’s work at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. In my review of that exhibition, I noted that curator Tina Kukielski aptly characterizes Super Mario Clouds as operating “simultaneously as pop icon and dystopian dream.” (32)

My initial interpretation of Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) was, at the time, grounded in careful analysis and extensive reflection. I understood the work as a poignant Baudrillardian gesture:  an apocalyptic Postmodern image articulating technological loss, simulation, and the erosion of subjectivity. I encouraged Sheng Wang to pursue this reading in his writing, as it aligned closely with his thesis on addiction and the loss of self to the machine.

After many drafts, Sheng produced an excellent, rigorously argued analysis that interpreted the work itself as dark and unmistakably apocalyptic. Yet something else emerged. Near the conclusion of his text, Sheng introduced an observation that had not arisen in our discussions.

As it should be. What he articulated came as a genuine shock to me: entirely unexpected, far removed from my own interpretive trajectory, and yet unmistakably right.

Sheng identified something in the work that I had completely missed. I owe him a great debt for this insight, as it shifted my understanding of Super Mario Clouds in a way that directly informs the arguments of this essay. Rather than reading the work solely as a Postmodern act of mischief or critique, Sheng supplied a missing dimension to its interpretation, allowing the piece to be understood as a Metamodern equation, one in which loss and persistence, erasure and belief, are held in simultaneous tension. He writes in his 2018 M.F.A. thesis:

In 2002, by hacking into an original Super Mario Brothers (1985) cartridge, Cory Arcangel modified the cartridge hardware and converted it into a GIF video installation titled Super Mario Clouds (2002). When it was first exhibited in Switzerland at the Migros Museum, in 2005, he had several projectors placed in the center of the gallery with all the messy wiring and cables on the floor. At the corner spaces where the projected variable sized images could not cover, there were several old TVs also wired to the power strip in the center. The same short Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) video that looped forever on all the screens and projected walls simply took the most iconic elements out of the game. Without the Mario brothers, trees, mountains, question mark bricks, and all the monsters, the game video appeared as nothing but only the pixelated white clouds scrolling on a saturated blue sky from right to left. Even though the viewers saw just the clouds, it is not challenging for viewers to realize that the installation is a tweaked appropriation from the original version of the Nintendo video game. The effects of missing elements from the origin made the imagery visually more powerful like an abstract painting, yet they still gave viewers the recognition of technology. It also has become, in this state, a poignant emblem of the loss of oneself to the hyperreal. The game in third order simulacra, empties human essence just as the game itself is emptied, stripped down to the floating cloud, a cloud which now feels apocalyptic rather that whimsical.

Games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) would allow players to control “themselves” as any character on the TV screen so that they were able to jump pretty high, run extremely fast, and destroy everything with their superpowers. The heroic enjoyment and omnipotent capabilities in video games drove them to believe they were actually being the character they were playing, and their spirit had to join the soul inside every character, which also let their emotions unintentionally become involved with the storyline and the character. In short, the main character that the player was controlling in the video game world played the part of bridging and tunneling between the video game world and our reality.

So, from Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) (Fig.4), missing the familiar figurative Super Mario characters jumping and running all over the place, all of a sudden, the scene seems so unfamiliar. So, alone and quiet, the iconic clouds float ominously by on the huge blue screen with the projector cables and wires messily tied to each other - an apocalyptic signifier, not of nuclear connotation, but of digital connotation. This installation reminds viewers that there is more than one way to destroy ourselves.(33)

Upon first reading Sheng’s text, in my dual role as editor and thesis committee chair, I felt a degree of professional satisfaction. I believed I had guided him toward a Postmodern work that resonated deeply with his own practice, and he had written about it vividly and perceptively in those terms. But the analysis did not end there.

Sheng followed with a remark that took me by complete surprise, one that fundamentally altered my understanding of Super Mario Clouds:

“Arcangel’s scene is empty, void of humanity, an apocalyptic endpoint. But to my eyes, it is also an origin to all possibilities. Sharing the same vein as Arcangel’s works, my work is an apocalyptic signifier as much as it is an expression of a desire to escape digital game addiction, yet it is also a portal that teleports me into a wonderland.”(34)

In this brief and deeply personal observation, the viscerally charged paradox of Metamodernity comes into focus. What is wiped clean, reduced to a single drifting cloud, registers simultaneously as an emblem of terminal erasure as much as it is an opening, a portal of escape. Super Mario Clouds becomes, at once, an “apocalyptic endpoint” aligned with Postmodern exhaustion and a clean slate that gestures toward a renewed, if conflicted, hope.

This doubleness is crucial. The work imagines escape from the hyperreal through the very technologies that produced it. In this reading technology, paradoxically, saves us from technology. In the Metamodern structure of feeling, belief in the promise of Modernity’s wonderland persists even as disbelief shadows it. Our relation to utopian vision is thus inherently conflicted, layered with simultaneous conviction and doubt.

Through this insight, Sheng illuminated a profound Metamodern tension in Super Mario Clouds (2002), a nuance I had previously overlooked. His observation brings into relief the delicate simultaneity between hope and skepticism that animates the work.

Clarifying Metamodern Tension through Metaphor: Beyond Naïve Optimism and Nihilism

The structure of Metamodern feeling is not a return to some idealized, overly optimistic feeling of a time past. The best theorists do not usually lose sight of this, but it could be emphasized more robustly. Of course, the feeling is not Nihilism either. Rather, it represents an era marked by profound tension: it’s the age where the weary remain hopeful, skeptics maintain faith, and the disillusioned can still find themselves captivated. To underscore this point, let us revisit the work of Summer Wheat once again.

Summer Wheat, Preacher, 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, 66” x 93”. Courtesy of the artist.

Consider Wheat’s Preacher. This work is from a series of drawings she made titled Kama Sutra USA. In a studio interview in 2014, Wheat told me she was thinking about the luminous and mystical images from non-Western depictions of Kama Sutra and thought to compare that to what the American version would be, which, in her mind, would look more blatant and crass and be absent the mystical. (35) But in a kind of thematic perceptual shift, Wheat’s painting Preacher also recalls one of the most conflicted and yet lovable characters in all of 20th century American literature: Jim Casey in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. The Steinbeck narrative begins in Oklahoma (incidentally the place of Summer Wheat’s birth) where the Joad family is forced out of their farm by the dustbowl and the evil machine of banks and corporation farms to seek what the Joads think will be utopia in California. In this Modern novel, Casey is the great crucible of tension as his drastically evolving faith completely throws into question his identity going forward. Jim Casey is a Pentecostal, a preacher, a “Burning Busher” who says, “I’ve lost my calling.” He repeats, “I am not a preacher no more” throughout the novel.

When Casey meets Tom Joad, Tom is just out of prison and on the road heading home.  Casey reveals that he has sent himself into the wilderness because sleeping with his female parishioners conflicts with his faith. He confides in Tom Joad, “the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she wants to go out in the grass.” Casey then shares the questions he asked himself:

‘What’s gnawin’ you? Is it the screwin’?’ An’ I says, ‘No, it’s the sin.’ An’ I says, ‘Why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an’ full up of Jesus, why is it that’s the time a fella gets fingerin’ his pants buttons?’ (36)

It is not until Casey tags along with the Joad family that he finally finds a new way to love and make people happy. He becomes a union organizer and ultimately a martyr for the poor workers in California. But no matter the severity of his inner tension, he is kind and inspiring in every word and interaction. From the moment Casey meets Tom Joad, Casey bears his soul. Casey’s greatest attribute is his honesty.

Left: Summer Wheat, Preacher, detail 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, 66” x 93.” Courtesy of the artist. Right: Kazimir Malevich, White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 31.2x31.2”, Museum of Modern Art. Image in public domain accessed on Wikipedia

Wheat has vigorously applied paint to Preacher the way Pentecostals worship, with athleticism, as the raising and waving of arms move in a dance. For preacher Jim Casey, the anointing and the moving of the people gave him the emotional high and ramped up libido that is the tension which lands him in the self-imposed wilderness and denial of his calling, until he finds his new calling. Preacher is a stew of marks unified by speed merging with speed. The painting is a burning bush of explosive surges of marks that seem to radiate the pleasuring from the bodies into the bed and into the walls.

There is a gestural perceptual shifting in the arm and hand of the preacher that seems to embrace the woman in one moment and then point to the crucifix in another. This signifies the tension in the duality of the preacher’s two seemingly contradicting Pentecosts (descending of the Holy Spirit).  One is in the context of the carnal (sex with a parishioner) and one is sacred (preaching Christ to a parishioner). Most of the marks convey speed, especially the long orange swipes on the preacher like racing stripes. It is a Pentecost that gushes with orgasm, both in bed and in the implied pulpit.

The figures in Preacher are built on the sinister diagonal (a line from top left corner to bottom right corner) and this adds complex energy, ramping up the wild marks even more. In contrast, the crucifix in the painting is not built on such a tilt and is perfectly parallel and plumb in a square of its own that is not tilted in the composition. This is unlike early Christian paintings of the crucifixion where a tilt signifies a personal connection with God.

We even see such a tilt with Kazimir Malevich’s White on White where the tilted inner square is humanity moving and expanding into utopia and eventually out into God (the outer square).(37) In contrast, the lack of tilt in the crucifix in Preacher exemplifies something wrong in the relationship. The lack of tilt arrests the mobility. In fact, it is the one and only counterpoint of stasis in the whole wild painting. Christ does not move toward the preacher to meet the preacher’s reach. This tension underpins the preacher’s angst of trying to have it both ways (the Holy Ghost through both the carnal and sacred). It also recalls Casey’s remark to Tom as he ponders his state in the wilderness:

I says, ‘What’s this call, this sperit?’ An’ I says, ‘It’s love. I love people so much I’ fit to bust, sometimes.’ An’ I says, ‘Don’t you love Jesus?’ [. . .]

‘No, I don’t know nobody name Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people [. . .] an’ I want to make ‘em happy, so I been preachin’ somepin I thought would make ‘em happy. Why do we got to hang it all on God or Jesus? [. . .] maybe it’s just all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a sudden-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it. (38)

Summer Wheat, Preacher, detail 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, 66” x 93.” Courtesy of the artist.

The color language in Preacher is an array of complex complementary flare-ups within more neutral, sometimes muddy fields. An example is the pink against green (see detail) that almost conjures vaginal lips under the bed. These little dissonant fires of color throughout the painting ramp up the energy even more. The outline does try to contain the mad rush of paint into the form. But key lines also have swiftness as if each are put down in one slash of the brush. These lines unify paint into something figurative, say a leg, but they also add more complexity and searing energy as well.

Summer Wheat, Preacher, detail 2010, acrylic and oil on canvas, 66” x 93.” Courtesy of the artist.

Ultimately, the multifaceted energy of the painting conveys the carnal/sacred tension. Returning to Jim Casey, this image conjures the moment in Steinbeck’s narrative when two conflicting currents of the Holy Ghost (one in the pulpit and one in the grass) collide. Casey was not Metamodern. He ultimately believed, wholesale, in striving for a better way, which is a tenet of Modernity. For Casey, that better way took the form of unionization. He sacrificed his life in service of collective will and unity. Steinbeck was not making a critique of Modernity itself, but rather a critique of greed.

In 1939, as Steinbeck was in the process of writing The Grapes of Wrath, he stated, “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression].” (39)

Written in 1939, the novel predates the concept of the Metamodern. Yet, intriguingly, the complex paradox embodied by Casey serves loosely to illuminate Metamodern tension. The novel is not Metamodern; it is Modern. Casey navigates a paradox in his response to Christianity, not Modernity. His tension lies between the pulpit and the grass, a conflict that drives him into self-imposed wilderness and ultimately into martyrdom. The initials of Jim Casey (J.C.) are no accident. Steinbeck fashioned Casey as a figure who loses belief in Jesus Christ while simultaneously assuming a Christ-like role marked by love, suffering, and sacrifice.

This tension, losing belief while continuing to live as a character within that belief, relates directly to the Metamodern structure of feeling. The Metamodern outlook doubts the Enlightenment on one level: human consciousness has invented the means of its own apocalyptic destruction and continues to invent more. Yet at the same time, the Metamodern traveler persists in living out the character of a believer in what feels like an endless wonderland, embracing what reason itself has produced. This tension, in which participation persists even as it becomes the site of critique, captures the nuanced structure of feeling that defines Metamodernity. Thus, Wheat’s Preacher operates as a metaphor for Metamodern belief and doubt, reflecting humanity’s ongoing, conflicted engagement with the “orgy” of Modernity, as Baudrillard famously described it. (40)

Summer Wheat, Once More: Painting at the Edge of the Hyperreal

Summer Wheat, Scratchpad (I Believe), 2011, (second version), oil on canvas, 36" x 48.” Courtesy of the artist.

Consider another Wheat painting with poignant Metamodern tension, Scratchpad (I Believe). The 2009 large-scale painting has the odd coupling of sloppiness and meticulousness characteristic of Wheat’s work. The socks in this painting epitomize what is at odds: one is carefully striped, while the other gets the oh-the-hell-with-it treatment. Like her painting Preacher, here in Scratchpad (I Believe), complex energy forms by charges of paint in up-and-down diagonals. The right leg flies up the sinister diagonal, and the left thigh and body surge up the baroque diagonal. Highly saturated color with high hue contrast escalates the energy. Three counterpoints of dark mud create areas of high value contrast which gives weight to the figure, making the implied movement more forceful, thus escalating the energy even more.

The tug-of-war between the image and paint guts is an old but lovable feat when done well. In both Scratchpad (I Believe) and Preacher, creation is direct and primitive, using recognizable imagery charged with the sting of battle, an electrified aftermath, as if something fast and wild just passed over the surface. Wheat deposits energy into the paint the way a herd of chased deer charge and slide in river bottom mud. Scratchpad (I Believe), recalls 1960s Bay Area painting without being excessively derivative of painters such as Joan Brown, David Park, Nathan Olivera and Richard Diebenkorn. Wheat’s work has more Tasmanian Devil in it, with bits and pieces of pigment flying round in narratives far more emotionally charged than Bay Area work. Scratchpad’s wild streaks of paint animate the room as much as the figure. Like Preacher, it is as if the pleasuring is radiating into the walls. Bay Area was funky but never that funky, never in such motion and never so close to being out of control. For its ferocity, Wheat’s work does compare well to Willem de Kooning’s Women series of the 1960s.

Scratchpad (I Believe) reminds us of a kind of simulation that originates not in a Baudrillardian Postmodern world but in a world where human genitalia first emerged. It reminds us that the propensity for simulation has been hard wired into us through somewhat mysterious evolutionary reasons by way of natural and sexual selection. What happens when technology and simulation invade all aspects of our lives, including the most intimate? To Baudrillard? Apocalypse. To Baudrillard, it has already happened. Our technological simulations reached an apocalyptic degree and turned us into non-persons, the inhuman. Philosopher Rick Roderick turns out many good examples to support Baudrillard but qualifies that though Baudrillard identifies accurately the Postmodern trajectory, we have not yet reached the fullness of a Baudrillardian world: the loss of the social.

Roderick states:

But in the view of Baudrillard, society has reached a point at which it has literally been overcome by its technology, and the new and important issues aren’t about, ah, things like the non-believer or the non-offender, but about the non-person. In the world of Baudrillard social relations have disappeared between humans, because humans have begun to disappear. In fact, Baudrillard thinks that reality itself is in the process of disappearing. The real. …

What Baudrillard is doing is basically to trace the symptoms and tendencies of the trajectory of the Postmodern. If we were really in a Postmodern society, we wouldn’t still be discussing things like “the self” under siege or “the real”. They would simply have disappeared. …Well, if we had really reached the Postmodern in its fullest sense - the way Baudrillard uses it - it would be the computers unplugging us and not the reverse.

Let me describe this concept of simulation just a little bit though. Baudrillard’s definition of the real itself is that which can be simulated, Xeroxed and copied. So whether you are talking about a human body where you can make a holograph of it or you are talking about The Bible which you could Xerox, or whether you are talking about, ah, the sexual act which could be simulated either through, you know, repetitive pornographic films or in a very near future it will be able to be simulated with virtual reality where you will wear a full body suit and, ah, make love to your ego ideal thus making it pointless to search out all the Freudian implications. You could just pick your ego ideal, punch it into the laser beam program, slip into the virtual reality suit thus rendering that relation, even that intimate relation - sexual relation - technological, simulatable, reproducible to infinity. (41)

Summer Wheat, Detail Scratchpad (I Believe), 2011, (second version), oil on canvas, 36" x 48.” Courtesy of the artist.

With Baudrillard in mind, we can now unpack the greater signification in Wheat’s painting, Scratchpad (I Believe). There is a mischievous strain of postmodern angst at work here, as the title suggests. In a perceptual shift on language, scratchpad can also mean computer mouse pad or the finger pad on a laptop as much as the female genitalia in the painting. The “I believe” is shifty too. We can imagine all kinds of beliefs here like the body and even a part of the mind believing a lover is present. Wheat has made part of the head recognizably human. It reveals one eye, a window into the ecstasy. But the eye, being recognizable, seems to know the act is a simulation. And knowing the difference between simulation and the real keeps us in a safe zone, out of the Baudrillardian world where the simulated is the real. That eye seems to signal that it is possible to negotiate Modernity’s profusion of simulations with a kind of moderation where our collective consciousness does not explode (or implode) in a hyperreal abyss. But in Scratchpad (I Believe), we see that part of the mind doubts this hopeful outlook. Half of the head (the darkened area) explodes into fly-away shards of paint, signifying a consciousness caught in violent entropy, a metamorphosis toward the inhuman.

Summer Wheat, Detail Scratchpad (I Believe), 2011, (second version), oil on canvas, 36" x 48.” Courtesy of the artist.

In the painting, the exploding head, the two hands positioned as if engaging a laptop, and the keyboard-reminiscent form beneath the left leg collectively reflect our complex relationship with the technologies that drive Modernity. To ground that idea further, note the keyboard-looking rectangle under the left leg. As described in this multifaceted way, the act in Scratchpad (I Believe) is a metaphorical comment on the hyperreal. Scratchpad (I Believe) flirts with the notion of the possibility of the simulated being the new real in every aspect of our lives.  Yet, “I believe” can also signal that “I believe” Modernity will not let this happen.

Read through this analytic lens, Scratchpad (I Believe) does not stage belief and doubt as alternating positions, nor does it dramatize a choice between the real and the simulated. Instead, the work holds these conditions in simultaneous tension. Belief does not arrive after doubt, nor does skepticism replace belief.  Both persist at once within the same perceptual and psychic field. This simultaneity, rather than oscillation, is what situates the painting within a Metamodern register. The image neither collapses into Postmodern nihilism nor retreats into naïve affirmation. Instead, it occupies a charged middle ground in which participation continues even as it becomes inseparable from critique.

The Metamodern Structure of Feeling and the Hyperreal: Baudrillard as Warning

This is a question worth asking: Are we truly in a Metamodern state still or should we take Baudrillard at his most extreme: that it is too late. We have gone too far into the hyperreal. I share Roderick’s view that Baudrillard understood the hyperreal condition he describes as already realized yet also adopt Roderick’s partial resistance to Baudrillard’s totalizing claim, treating it as a critical warning rather than a foreclosed fate.

Prophets often go to the extreme to get our attention. The following passage certainly does that. In 1990, Jean Baudrillard wrote The Transparency of Evil, Essays on Extreme Phenomena. In the first chapter entitled, “After the Orgy,” he writes:

If I were asked to characterize the present state of affairs, I would describe it as “after the orgy.” The orgy in question was the moment when Modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere. … This was a total orgy-an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as of the crisis of development. We have pursued every avenue in the production and effective overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions. Now everything has been liberated, the chips are down, and we find ourselves faced collectively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER? Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation…

This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have all taken place already, whether actually or potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realizing them, we can only “hyper-realize” them through interminable simulation. We live in the interminable reproduction of ideals, fantasies, images and dreams which are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference…. (42)

I hope that we do not dismiss Baudrillard’s analysis as irrational postmodern exuberance. Since he wrote this book, ubiquitous examples, inconceivable in the 20^th century, have been realized.  In January of 2023, musician Nick Cave published an open response in The Red Hand Files to Mark, a fan who sent him song lyrics “in the style of Nick Cave” written by ChatGPT. Cave’s response is so eloquent and so aligned with Baudrillard that it deserves a full reprint here:

Dear Mark,

Since its launch in November last year many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them. Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology. I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which? Judging by this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ though, it doesn’t look good, Mark. The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks.

What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.

ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

It may sound like I’m taking all this a little too personally, but I’m a songwriter who is engaged, at this very moment, in the process of songwriting. It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness. What that new idea is, I don’t know, but it is out there somewhere, searching for me. In time, we will find each other.

Mark, thanks for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it - although, hang on!, rereading it, there is a line in there that speaks to me - ‘I’ve got the fire of hell in my eyes’- says the song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’, and that’s kind of true. I have got the fire of hell in my eyes - and it’s ChatGPT.

Love, Nick (43)

Yes, with “fire in his eyes” Nick Cave is confronting the Baudrillardian abyss: where, in the words of Baudrillard, “things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation, as a result of their transfer into the secondary existence of simulation.” (44)

I will indulge in one more example to support Baudrillard’s cry. Throughout the decade before ChatGPT, I challenged my graduate students to use primitive AI text generators to write their artist statements for one purpose only: to see what not to write. These generators were proto-AI, (unlike ChatGPT), built only from a fixed database of stock phrases and recombination rules. You entered some parameters (medium, themes), and it would spit out a statement. Student Jason Sobol and I once presented his run-in with an artist statement generator to the class. What emerged was not Sobol the artist, but a hollow forgery: a false double stitched together from clichés and nonsense. The statement, in Nick Cave’s phrase, was a “grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”. It was a boiled-over mess of hollow International Art English, pompous and vague remarks that added up to nothing. The generator even refused the decency of using the first person, a basic requirement of artist statements. It would be easy to leave it at that, but the abomination was too ludicrous not to share.

In 2021, Sobol plugged a few coordinates into one of these early statement generators (500 Letters), a thinking machine with “every enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.” (45)

Enter the Abyss / AI-Generated Artist Statement

Jason Sobol (1977, Miami, United States) makes drawings and paintings. By choosing mainly formal solutions, Sobol makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. The work tries to express this with the help of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor. His drawings sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.

His works are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages and situations as well as depictions and ideas that can only be realized in drawing. By emphasizing aesthetics, he seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. His works often refer to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, he touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.

His works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. Jason Sobol currently lives and works in Jacksonville.

Sobol himself responded with characteristic irony:

I love it. Now, as you can see, with the artist statement generator I can, without the bills of a school-education, sound pretentious… or amazing and ride the trajectory into the hyperreal into disappearance, that ‘fractal mode of dispersal.’ I can only imagine that you will loathe and respect me for this statement. It adds to my powers as a pompous windbag who likes to hear himself talk.  (46)

What Sobol recognized, and what Baudrillard would underline, is that the 500 Letters generator was not simply bad writing. Its failure revealed the nakedness of simulation: a text that paraded as “artist statement” while never once entering the logic of artistic subjectivity. It was parody without depth, a hyperreal shadow of the genre that exposed the emptiness of the formula. If 500 Letters was a grotesque caricature, a simulation so clumsy it betrayed itself as parody, then ChatGPT is its polished successor: a simulation so fluent it risks being mistaken for authenticity. Sobol’s parody was laughable. ChatGPT’s statements, by contrast, are convincing. They no longer only mock the artist’s voice but threaten to replace it. Here lies the deeper danger Nick Cave warns us of. If the earlier generator’s “mockery” could be dismissed with laughter, the new class of AI, by achieving fluency and intimacy, threatens to blur the line between authentic artistic voice and algorithmic ventriloquism. Mimicry, replication, and pastiche remain, and yet they arrive now cloaked in credibility. The “blood and guts,” the human struggle of creation, can easily still go missing.

Still, it would be naïve to stop the argument with Baudrillard’s abyss. ChatGPT is not going away. Like photography in the nineteenth century or Photoshop in the late twentieth, it has entered the artist’s toolkit, whether we welcome it or not. The task, then, is not to deny its existence but to set guardrails for its use. ChatGPT can clarify ideas, help organize language, or test drafts against tone and audience. It can sharpen rather than replace the artist’s voice.

To put it differently: falling fully into Baudrillard’s abyss means mistaking the simulation for the thing itself, allowing the AI’s smooth mimicry to displace the hard, human labor of finding words for one’s art. But keeping to the guardrails means treating ChatGPT as an interlocutor, not an author; a mirror for rehearsal, not the stage itself. The danger of the Hyperreal lies not in the tool itself but in the outsourcing of authenticity to it. When the tool becomes a substitute for authorship, simulation threatens to displace meaning. When it functions as an instrument for articulating and refining meanings the artist already possesses, that danger recedes.

If the 500 Letters generator produced only parody, ChatGPT offers the chance, if handled with care, to move from parody toward precision. In this sense, the lesson could be to use it responsibly, critically, and always in service of the blood and guts of creation.  And yet, a final acknowledgment is in order: if Baudrillard were still with us, he would almost certainly see my attempt at balance here as folly. For him, the abyss was never a possibility to avoid, but a destiny already unfolding. Time, as always, will tell.

I go this significant distance into Baudrillard and the Sobol gamesmanship to say that with a fondling of the keys and few clicks on the computer scratchpad, the machine can render for us an “artist statement” where there is no artist statement present. And yes, just as no lover is present in Wheat’s Scratchpad (I Believe). That is Baudrillardian “transparency.”

But the other point here is that Sobol’s sardonic incorporation of the simulation into a statement of cultural critique is real. We see Sobol. He is there. We see his gamesmanship and we see his point. Thus, as Roderick has implied, it remains possible to imagine a better Modernity, one in which tools of simulation are met with restraint and regulation, rather than culminating in post humanity through Baudrillardian “contamination” of the social. Even minimally, this possibility presupposes enough remaining collective humanity to critique and counteract that contamination.

Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, 1981, oil on canvas, 84 x 84.” Courtesy of the artist.

It makes sense to extrapolate Baudrillard’s claims into the prophetic rather than accept them as strictly as a claim of our post-apocalyptic, thereby leaving open the possibility of intervention. In the more tempered Baudrillard that Roderick proposes, we can already feel the wind and see the storm cloud forming yet still retain room for conscious recalibration, for steering away from the danger rather than resigning ourselves to it. What remains possible, then, is a space for “I believe” within Modernity, even as that belief is shadowed by doubt.

Wheat’s painting does not abandon Modernity as Baudrillard does in what he called “After the Orgy,” nor does it assume that this dark Postmodern endpoint has already been irreversibly secured. That terrain had arguably been anticipated earlier, well before Baudrillard wrote his “After the Orgy” chapter, in Eric Fischl’s The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog (1981). In Fischl’s painting, the storm is already upon the naked figures. Voyeurism persists without interiority, sexuality is emptied of meaning, and the human figure appears as a non-person: present, exposed, and yet fundamentally hollowed out. Moral transgression carries neither consequence nor transcendence; nothing is learned, redeemed, or transformed. The scene unfolds in a flattened psychic space where affect remains, but agency has evaporated. The storm is present, yet the inhuman structure of feeling could not care less. This is not tension held in suspension, but a condition already sealed, a postmodern lobotomization, where the social has thinned to surface and repetition.

By contrast, Summer Wheat’s Scratchpad (I Believe) insists that we still inhabit faith in Modernity: that we can yet distinguish between our beloved simulations and the real, and that Modernity need not slide inevitably into an “after the orgy” abyss. Just as the five vertical bands of color in the background of Scratchpad (I Believe) appear to regulate the wild, organic energy surging through the painting, the work proposes the possibility that Modernity itself might still be regulated, its voltage controlled rather than allowed to burn itself out.

And yet, as signified by Summer Wheat’s painting, this belief is entered with a partial vigilance, one eye open, one eye closed. True to the Metamodern structure of feeling, it is held with measured caution, aware that we cannot predict whether the dark prophet’s words will culminate in an apocalypse or instead function as the warning that helps prevent it.

Tempered by Postmodern anxiety, Scratchpad (I Believe) thus becomes an emblem of this one-eyed belief: a distinctly Metamodern belief. This position bears emphasizing, because it directly counters a persistent misreading of Metamodernism as a simple return to naïve Modern optimism.

Luke Turner clarifies the position that Metamodernism is not “signaling a return to naïve Modernist ideological positions.”⁴⁷ This is an essential point, and one I was glad to see articulated so clearly in 2015 on the web journal Notes on Metamodernism, a venue created by Vermeulen, van den Akker, and Turner. Turner states as follows:

Whereas Postmodernism was characterized by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding Metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from Postmodernism.

Thus, rather than simply signaling a return to naïve Modernist ideological positions, Metamodernism considers that our era is characterized by an oscillation between aspects of both Modernism and Postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The Metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other. (48)

Seen through the lens of Summer Wheat’s Scratchpad (I Believe), Turner’s formulation becomes less a theoretical abstraction than a lived pictorial condition: belief sustained without certainty, sincerity shadowed by irony, and participation held open even as it remains inseparable from critique.

One Final Metamodern Example: Artificial Intelligence at the Edge of the Sublime

Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA, 2022 Installation view, morphing digital images on a 24’x 24’tall display, “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, A.I. interpretation of the publicly available metadata of MoMA’s collection. Photograph by Robert Gerhardt. Courtesy of MOMA

To conclude, let us look at one final, very recent, and provocative example of Metamodernism: Unsupervised - Machine Hallucinations, by artist Refik Anadol was on view at the Museum of Modern Art from November 2022 through October 2023. Though artificial intelligence is likely decades away from morphing into artificial general intelligence, one can already sense something akin to a soul in current AI, even in its so-called “weak” form. (49) And if, as Leonardo postulated, “the eye is the window of the soul,” then Anadol has given us a glimpse into an AI soul through a 24-by-24-foot digital display in MOMA’s lobby. This is no simple red eye of the HAL-9000 onboard supercomputer. Unsupervised is vastly more complex, beautiful, and haunting.

Unsupervised feeds on the metadata of MoMA’s entire art collection and, in real time, renders one abstract image after another, never repeating. The progression of images is not a slideshow; rather, one form morphs into another the way a flower might bloom in time-lapse photography. The mutating display is both aesthetically and technically powerful. Jesús Díaz of Fast Company notes, “The resolution is stunning by today’s standards. At 3840 by 3960 pixels, it’s likely the highest-resolution image synthesis neural network ever created. To compare, a typical Stable Diffusion image resolution is 512 by 512 pixels.” (50)

Unsupervised engenders abstract forms that seem to rise out of containment in trompe-l’œil fashion, reaching toward spectators before retreating. A ceiling-mounted camera tracks human density and movement in the room, feeding that data back into the system’s neural networks. One could almost swear these algorithms possess empathy, as forms appear to respond tenderly to human presence. What makes this AI model feel especially palpable as a creature with a will, however, is the fact that it is unsupervised. Anadol has no idea what abstract forms the machine will generate. No one does. In Unsupervised, the resulting forms are not determined in advance by human instruction. This stands in contrast to contemporary text-prompt-based image synthesis systems, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Flux, and ChatGPT’s image-generation tools, in which written prompts guide the production of images.

Unsupervised employs unsupervised generative adversarial network (GAN) algorithms to produce new abstract forms. GANs consist of two neural networks positioned in opposition, each challenging the other to generate increasingly refined output. In Anadol’s model, the system generates its own images without the guidance of descriptive tags and therefore is truly “unsupervised.” (51)

With software created by Anadol and his team, and with support from NVIDIA engineers, Unsupervised was trained on approximately 380,000 high-resolution images drawn from MoMA’s collection of roughly 180,000 artworks. According to Fast Company, the team used an NVIDIA DGX Station A100, “essentially an AI supercomputer in a desktop box that’s about 1,000 times more powerful than a typical laptop.” (52)

Exhibition curator Michelle Kuo, MoMA press materials, and interviews with Anadol have framed Unsupervised within a largely utopian discourse surrounding the AI revolution, one not unlike the optimism Futurists expressed toward the industrial revolution. And they should. As Anadol has stated, “We imagine a future where a symbiotic relationship with machines will give us new insights, knowledge, and the power to not only challenge but change existing systems.” (53)

And yet, beyond this exuberance, an adversarial dialogue concerning the darker implications of generative AI, and of more powerful AI systems to come, is also unmistakably present in Unsupervised, whether intentionally or not. One need only extend the “A” in “GAN” into a broader Metamodern tension: an adversarial structure of feeling in which two currents operate simultaneously, each asserting presence and force. Metamodern tension in Unsupervised is embedded both in the architecture of its neural networks and in its awe-inspiring visual output.

AI is undeniably seductive, and Unsupervised exemplifies that seduction. But what does seduction entail, and what perils accompany it? A future superintelligent AI may one day solve humanity’s most intractable problems, perhaps even climate change. That would be beautiful. But might it do so by eliminating the root of the problem: us? Or might it not? Here we return to the adversarial currents that define metamodern tension. The excellence of Unsupervised earns it this expanded complexity of interpretation, which is precisely why it stands, as of 2025, as one of the most relevant, poignant, and memorable works of Metamodernism.

Unsupervised opens a dialogue about generative AI broadly, extending beyond unsupervised image-focused GAN systems to include contemporary text and image generation models, as well as future AI modalities that may arise through the development of artificial general intelligence and, potentially, artificial superintelligence.

Unsupervised foreshadows the possibility of a runaway AI. In discussions of advanced artificial intelligence, a threshold often referred to as the singularity describes a condition in which intelligence, most plausibly via AI, improves itself faster than humans can meaningfully understand, regulate, or predict. Seen through this lens, Anadol’s work does not merely visualize technological sophistication; it stages the felt proximity of that threshold. We are invited to look into what appears to be a nascent interiority, an emergent, aestheticized intelligence, while remaining acutely aware that this beauty is inseparable from uncertainty, risk, and loss of control. The work thus occupies a distinctly Metamodern register: suspended between wonder and alarm, seduction and restraint, hope and foreboding.

Unsupervised suggests that we may be looking into the window of a future superintelligent soul, an addition to the technosphere with inconceivable power and autonomy, potentially beyond human comprehension or control. It gestures toward a Postmodern dynamical sublime, one in which human imagination may collide with a reality it can neither fully grasp nor contain. Human extinction is one conceivable outcome; a radically transformed utopia is another. No one knows. What is certain is that the global scramble to grapple with this technological transformation has already begun.

The irony here is striking. Even as Unsupervised stages the aesthetic promise of autonomous systems, unsupervised technologies have increasingly provoked belated forms of supervision in the world beyond the museum.For example, although deepfake technologies and legal responses to them predate 2023, the dramatic escalation of malicious deepfake use that year, particularly in fraud, political manipulation, and nonconsensual imagery, catalyzed a significant expansion of state-level legislation in the United States beginning in 2024. What presents itself in Anadol’s work as wonder, emergence, and autonomy reappears elsewhere as threat, opacity, and risk, triggering reactive attempts at containment. In this sense, Unsupervised does not merely reflect technological progress. It exposes the paradoxical rhythm in which societies celebrate autonomy precisely when they begin to demand restraint. This pattern is visible across many other domains of contemporary life:

1. Education. Many schools, particularly at the high school level, have instituted rules prohibiting students from submitting AI-generated essays and artworks, citing concerns about authorship, learning integrity, and assessment.

2. Labor and creative rights. Addressing potential job displacement and the erosion of creative credit, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), alongside the Writers Guild of America (WGA), demanded and secured generative AI protections in their 2023 negotiations. These agreements stipulate, among other provisions:

AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the agreement, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights.

The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by the agreement or other law.

A writer may choose to use AI when performing writing services if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company cannot require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT).

The company must disclose to the writer if any materials provided have been generated by or incorporate AI-generated content. (54)

3. Existential risk. In May 2023, the advocacy group Center for AI Safety (CAIS) released a stark one-sentence warning, signed by more than 350 prominent AI researchers and executives, including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. Among the signatories were two of the three Turing Award-winning “godfathers” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The statement reads:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” (55)

4. Policy advocacy. The CAIS mission statement further underscores this position:

“AI risk has emerged as a global priority, ranking alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Despite its importance, AI safety remains remarkably neglected, outpaced by the rapid rate of AI development. Currently, society is ill-prepared to manage the risks from AI.” (56) (57)

Caspar David Friedrich, 1818, Wanderer above the Sea Fog, oil on canvas, 37.3x 29.4”

In 1818, David Friedrich painted Wanderer above the Sea Fog as an emblem of Immanuel Kant’s Romantic sublime, which was a human gaze into unimaginable infinities (the mathematical sublime) and unimaginable powers (the dynamical sublime). (58) Wanderer above the Sea Fog highlights a human gaze directed toward matter extending into infinite space and contemplation of the almighty power responsible. Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised is an invitation to stand as a Postmodern wanderer looking into a premonition of a new, forthcoming sublime, a Postmodern sublime, a sublime engendered by a gaze into the actualization and power of General AI and perhaps even Super AI. Sublime is not too strong of a word here. Consider what an autonomous Super AI might re-invent itself into. Certainly, it would be power that would be incomprehensible. And if humanity is still present to witness this, viewing it from a vantage of relative safety as we see in Wanderer above the Sea Fog, then we will be stirred with the sublime feelings of both fear and delight, analogous to the feelings stirred by the Romanic sublime.

Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA, 2022 Installation view, morphing digital images on a 24’x 24’tall display, “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, A.I. interpretation of the publicly available metadata of MoMA’s collection. Photograph by Robert Gerhardt.

With Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised as my final example of Metamodernism, I hope we are concluding on common ground concerning my arguments on Metamodernity and Metamodernism. Unsupervised certainly possesses the requisite Metamodern tension, one that may be further clarified through the term “adversarial”, wherein opposing currents coexist and continuously exert force upon one another. We both believe in and doubt Modernity.

Synthesis of the Main Realignments

In the evolving discourse on Metamodernism, there is a compelling case to be made for its deeper historical roots and its nuanced relationship to Postmodernism.

The argument that Metamodernism does not supersede Postmodernism but rather coexists with and at times even remains embedded in it, invites a richer and more complex understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics. Recent works such as Unsupervised support Timothy Vermeulen’s and Robin van den Akker’s insight that Metamodernism intensifies in the twenty-first century. Yet I hope to make room for the idea that works exhibiting a Metamodern structure of feeling may be found as early as the mid-twentieth century.

This essay proposes that Metamodernity first emerges with the inaugural plume of the nuclear age. At the same time, the early twenty-first century remains the principal threshold of Metamodernism. It is during this period that Metamodern artistic production becomes ubiquitous, collectively legible, and formally named. From this perspective, Metamodernism remains a predominantly twenty-first-century phenomenon, even as important Metamodern signals and structures of feeling appear much earlier in the twentieth century than is commonly acknowledged in the literature. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provides one such example.

Moreover, the argument for adopting the term “Metamodernity” over “Metamodern generation” signifies a shift toward understanding Metamodernism as a pervasive cultural condition rather than a temporal or generational marker. This rearticulation emphasizes the affective dimensions of Metamodernism, underscoring its role in shaping a collective orientation toward reality that transcends specific time frames or demographic cohorts.

Implications: Pluralism, Rhizomes, and Limits

By conceptualizing Metamodernism as part of a pluralistic, contemporary rhizome, we embrace a vision of cultural expression that is inherently non-hierarchical and interconnected. This perspective, inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizomatic theory, challenges us to see cultural movements not as isolated or sequential phenomena but as components of a dynamic, interwoven landscape. It acknowledges the multiplicity of voices, styles, and feelings that coalesce in the contemporary moment. Protracting from this I suggest that Metamodernism is but one articulation within this diverse ecosystem.

This reimagining of Metamodernism, grounded in both historical depth and a pluralistic framework, encourages an ongoing dialogue that is reflexive and inclusive. It invites us to continually interrogate and refine our understanding of Metamodern structure of feeling and its place within the broader tapestry of human thought and expression. In doing so, we can better appreciate the complexity and richness of the cultural rhizome, recognizing Metamodernism not as the culmination of Postmodern thought but as a significant, yet interconnected, strand within the vast mosaic of contemporary culture.

Although I would welcome the abandoning of the common framing of Metamodernism as post-Postmodernism, I understand the difficulty in reaching consensus on that point. What we must maintain, however, is a shared understanding that the contemporary is not post-pluralism. Vermeulen and van den Akker offer a clarification that dovetails directly with this argument and deserves emphasis. As they state, “Metamodernism is neither a philosophy, nor a movement, programme, aesthetic register, or formal strategy.” (59) To name it as such would be to imply a closed system, a coherent politics, or a transferable stylistic formula. Instead, they insist that Metamodernism is best understood as a structure of feeling, a sensibility widespread enough to be structural, yet irreducible to any single method or trope. In this, as they note, their usage closely follows thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey in their accounts of Postmodernism, while also resonating with Ben Cranfield’s description of the “emergent” as a “feeling that structures.” (60)

Methodological Clarification: Locating Metamodern Tension

I would add that application of this point is crucial. Even as Metamodern tendencies have become increasingly ubiquitous in contemporary art, not every contemporary, critically relevant work participates in the Metamodern structure of feeling, nor should it be expected to do so. Contemporary works animated by Modern enthusiasm need not summon Postmodern irony, just as works grounded in Postmodern irony need not invite Modern belief. Yet when these two adversarial impulses assert themselves simultaneously, when belief persists under the pressure of doubt, we begin to enter Metamodern territory: an interface of feeling as charged and generative as those two converging Ozark streams.

Conclusion

Looking forward, we can imagine that if humanity navigates the future of higher calibers of artificial intelligence without forfeiting its realness, cultural memory, ethical judgment, and capacity for belief, the Metamodern tension will not dissolve but persist. Rather than becoming a universal condition, Metamodernism remains one possible structure of feeling through which artists may respond to this terrain, a mode in which adversarial pairings of belief and doubt, sincerity and irony are activated by the emerging struggle between human vulnerability and increasingly inscrutable forms of machine power. As with earlier moments of cultural rupture, we are likely to find ourselves inhabiting competing currents simultaneously, unable to resolve them into equilibrium, yet compelled to remain within their shared flow. Within this precarious future, one can imagine that meaning will continued to be negotiated and reflected through Metamodern sensibilities, without foreclosing other modes of response.

Stephen Knudsen is an artist and Professor of Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he has taught painting, art theory, and thesis writing for thirty-four years. He served for a decade as Senior Editor of ARTPULSE. His research focuses on contemporary painting, color theory, and Metamodern structures of feeling. He pursued doctoral studies in art theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts and the European Graduate School. This essay is adapted from a longer dissertation project.

Endnotes

1.     Friedrich Hölderlin, “Into the Blue,” in Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, 315-317 (London: Penguin Books, 1998).

2.     Timotheus Vermeulen, “TANK Magazine Interviews Timotheus Vermeulen,” Notes on Metamodernism, February 23, 2012, https://www.metamodernism.com/2012/02/23/tank-interviews-timotheus-vermeulen-about-metamodernism/.

3.     Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (2010): 6, https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677.

4. Stephen Knudsen, “Summer Wheat: Deferral of a Vanguard,” ARTPULSE Magazine, accessed February 23, 2024, http://artpulsemagazine.com/summer-wheat-deferral-of-a-vanguard .

5.     Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1-3.

6.     Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict, 3-4 (London: Verso, 1993).

7.     Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, 166-184 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

8.     Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 7-96.

9.     Abbot Suger, “On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures,” ed., trans., and annot. Erwin Panofsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 23-24.

10.  Stephen Knudsen, email interview of Summer Wheat, March 16, 2023.

11.  Braverman Gallery, “Foragers: Summer Wheat Solo Show at the Mint Museum,” accessed February 24, 2024, https://bravermangallery.com/stories/foragers-summer-wheat-solo-show-at-the-mint-museum/.

12.  “A Conversation with Summer Wheat,” YouTube video, posted by “The Mint Museum,” 2021, accessed February 25, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpst5cHXkJ0.

13.  Stephen Knudsen, email interview of Summer Wheat, March 16, 2023.

14. “Levitated Mass,” Notes on Metamodernism, December 18, 2013, https://www.metamodernism.com/2013/12/18/levitated-mass/.

15.  Ina Jaffe, “340 Tons of Art: ‘Levitated Mass’ Tt Rock L.A.,” NPR, June 20, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155376058/340-tons-of-art-levitated-mass-to-rock-l-a.

16.  Stephen Knudsen, “Levitated Mass/Worth a Second Look,” Huffington Post, May 9, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-knudsen/levitated-mass-worth-a-se_b_3242725.html.

17.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987).

18.  “Levitated Mass,” Notes on Metamodernism.

19.  Ibid.

20.  Ibid; Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 73-92.

21.  Arthur C. Danto, “Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.” ARTFORUM, vol. 32, no. 1, September 1993, 23-25, https://www.artforum.com/features/andy-warhols-brillo-box-204255/.

22.  Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

23.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of the “rhizome” as an alternative model for knowledge and cultural analysis. See also Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); idem, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); idem, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); idem, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999); idem, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010). See also numerous public lectures and essays by Jameson, Harvey, Žižek from the 2000s through the 2020s, which reaffirm and extend these positions by without announcing a decisive break from Postmodernity.

24.  Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008); and Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), Žižek critiques sincerity, ethical immediacy, and authenticity as ideological supplements rather than breaks with postmodern conditions.

25.  David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

26.   Arthur C. Clarke, foreword to 2001: A Space Odyssey, New Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).

27.  Ibid.

28.  John Powers, “50 Years Later, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Is Still a Cinematic Landmark,” WUNC, April 3, 2018, https://www.wunc.org/2018-04-03/50-years-later-2001-a-space-odyssey-is-still-a-cinematic-landmark.

29.  Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, original screenplay, accessed March 10, 2024, http://www.archiviokubrick.it/opere/film/2001/script/2001-originalscript.pdf.

30. Seth Abramson. “The Metamodernist Manifesto,” HuffPost, April 8, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-metamodernist-manifes_b_6995644.

31.  Sheng Wang, “Cyberland,” M.F.A. Thesis, 2017, archived Jen Library, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA.

32. Stephen Knudsen, “Cory Archangel Masters,” ARTPULSE Magazine, Winter 2013, http://artpulsemagazine.com/cory-arcangel-masters.

33.  Wang, “Cyberland.”

34.  Wang, “Cyberland.”

35.  Stephen Knudsen, personal interviews with Summer Wheat, 2013, 2014, 2022.

36.  John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (London: Penguin Classics, 1939), 26-27.

37.  Stephen Max Meyers, lecture on Malevich’s work, Savannah College of Art and Design, 2001.

38.  Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 26-27.

39.  Jay Parini, “The Long Retreat of John Steinbeck,” Green Left, September 6, 2016, archived from the original on September 29, 2012, accessed November 24, 2023, https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/long-retreat-john-steinbeck.

40.  Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 3-4.

41.  Rick Roderick, “The Self Under Siege: 308 Baudrillard: Fatal Strategies,” lecture, 1993, accessed March 11, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c.

42.  Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 3-4.

43.  Nick Cave, “‘This Song Sucks’: Nick Cave Responds to ChatGPT Song Written in Style of Nick Cave,” The Guardian, January 17, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/17/
this-song-sucks-nick-cave-responds-to-chatgpt-song-written-in-style-of-nick-cave.

44.  Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993),4.

45.  Words of Hal 9000, the onboard computer, Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

46.  Jason Sobol, unpublished remark used with permission.

47.  Luke Turner, “Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction,” Notes on Metamodernism, January 12, 2015, https://www.metamodernism.com/2015/01/12/metamodernism-a-brief-introduction/.

48.  Ibid.

49. “Artificial General Intelligence Singularity Timing,” AI Multiple, accessed March 16, 2024, https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intelligence-singularity-timing.

50.  Jesus Diaz, “MoMA’s Newest Artist Is an AI Trained on 180,000 Works, from Warhol to Pac-Man,” Fast Company, November 18, 2022, https://www.fastcompany.com/90811669/momas-newest-artist-is-an-ai-trained-on-180000-works-from-warhol-to-pac-man.

51.  “MoMA’s AI Exhibition Uses Machine-Learning to Dream of Art,” Tomorrow’s World Today, November 28, 2022, https://www.tomorrowsworldtoday.com/artificial-intelligence/momas-ai-exhibition-uses-machine-learning-to-dream-of-art/.

52.  Jesus Diaz. “MoMA’s Newest Artist Is an AI Trained on 180,000 Works, from Warhol to Pac-Man.”

53.  Refik Anadol, “Refik Anadol on AI, Algorithms, and the Machine as Witness,” MoMA Magazine, December 20, 2022, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/821.

54.  Matt Scherer, “New WGA Labor Agreement Gives Hollywood Writers Important Protections in the Era of AI,” Center for Democracy and Technology, October 17, 2023, https://cdt.org/insights/new-wga-labor-agreement-gives-hollywood-writers-important-protections-in-the-era-of-ai/.

55.  Center for AI Safety, “About Us,” accessed April 7, 2024, https://www.safe.ai/about.

56.  Ibid.

57.  Pascale Davies, “A ‘World-First’ AI Agreement, Elon Musk and Backlash from Tech Community: The UK’s AI Summit,” Euronews, November 1, 2023, https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/11/01/a-world-first-ai-agreement-elon-musk-and-a-kings-speech-the-key-takeaways-from-the-uk-ai-s.

58.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987).

59.  Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Misunderstandings and Clarifications,” Metamodernism, June 3, 2015, http://www.Metamodernism.com/2015/06/03/misunderstandings-and-clarifications/.

60.  Ben Cranfield, Lecture on the “Emergent in Art,” unpublished conference presentation, University College London, 2015.

Published on September 28th, 2026.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/metamodernity-and-metamodernism-on-paradoxical-structures-of-feeling-from-1945-to-the-present/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/whitney-biennial-2022-quiet-as-its-kept http://artpulsemagazine.com/whitney-biennial-2022-quiet-as-its-kept#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:34:31 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=13006 By Taliesin Thomas

I have been visiting the Whitney Biennale since the mid-1990s. During the years I didn’t make the show in person, I read the reviews published in magazines such as Art in America and ArtNews. Over the decades I have observed a certain predictable trope: the show tanks—either conceptually, physically, or spiritually. Nevertheless, the show must go on and the art-world must endure. This year, the post-covid era hangover as reflected in the overall tone of the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept is both intelligent and onerous. While the global ‘despair of imagination’ as embodied by this year’s installment is palpable, the exhibition is a heroic effort that reflects the art-heart of our moment.

Installation view of "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept." Rénee Green, Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words), 2020. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Indeed, we must celebrate the radical intensities of contemporary life through our collective marvel of diverse aesthetic incarnations as an exercise in questioning, creativity, inter-relation, experimentation, mystery, and discovery. The Whitney Biennale certainly delivers all this and more, however, it does so with an air of cluttered thematics and psychological dislocation. To quote a series of phrases buried in the wall captions for Three Critiques—a grouping of post-human digital images by Daniel Joseph Martinez—this litany of existential descriptions could not be more apropos with regard to the ethos of the exhibition: ‘simulation,’ ‘vast phantasmagoria,’ ‘withered dreams,’ ‘adulterated visions,’ ‘feverous delusions,’ ‘fatalism tied up in the darkness,’ and ‘embrace madness.’ If the true spirit of the Whitney Biennial captures a ‘horizon of being’ as illuminated by these topics, there is also a strong attempt to tease out issues related to queer, anti-colonial, and ecological urgencies that resonate with political mindfulness.

Now in its 18^thedition, this landmark show features an intergenerational group of sixty-three artists and collectives co-curated by Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin. For 90 years, the integrity of the Whitney Biennial has been—and continues to be—a faithful survey of ‘nowness’ that expresses the many complexities and possibilities of the American experience. Yet with that intention also comes the occasional cringe worthy candor that art inevitably discloses in all its hypothetical incompleteness. In his straightforward review “The Whitney Biennial Falters On” for Vulture, for example, art critic and rabble-rouser Jerry Saltz calls the exhibit a dated and topsy-turvy “black mirror of our times” that, split on two levels, has the effect of “drifting distracted through a spice market” (on the fifth floor) that goes on to materialize as “our collective trip into the underworld” (on the sixth floor). And in his straightforward review of the show for Artnet, writer Ben Davis comments that this exhibition—like many shows around the world at this time—demonstrates tones that are “reverent and restrained” while themes tend toward “ethical and memorial.” I agree with both Saltz and Davis: the recurring feeling I experienced during my disorienting journey through Quiet as It’s Kept was that a certain ‘surrealist-reality end-times’ energy is nigh. The 2022 Biennial is not ironic nor sarcastic, rather the viewer must be willing to “get to the bottom of it” (to quote Davis again) with rectitude, otherwise a convoluted atmosphere can overwhelm.

Installation view of "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept." Photo: Ron Amstutz

While my encounter with the Whitney Biennale 2022 left me somewhat undernourished (which is ironic considering the sheer volume of art), many works in the show provide powerful moments of meaning with respect to personal mythologies as echoed through artistic embodiment. Video tended to dominate the scene, yet it was a challenge to absorb so many video works in their entirety while navigating this sprawling show. In that category, a documentary-style piece by Raven Chacon serves as a poignant reminder that the Navajo Nation people are still fighting for their sacred spaces, within both the geography of the USA and the so-called ‘art-world’ at large. A haunting sculpture by Rebecca Belmore of a cloaked figure standing atop of a sphere of bullets is a chilling commentary on the increased prevalence of gun violence. A clever work by Rose Salane, 64,000 Attempts at Circulation, consists of piles of counterfeit currency on top of tables, all items once used to trick coin-operated devices in the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority system. An installation by Alejandro “Luperca” Morales titled Juárez Archive (2020 - ongoing) showcases a series of tiny handheld viewfinders hanging on the wall, each one containing an image of his hometown in Juárez, Mexico. The preciousness of the images found within those plastic pieces seems to suggest how stories are found within stories (moral of the story: take a moment to take it in). And a psychedelic ‘co-authored’ AI generated installation by Wang Shui offers an ethereal landscape of otherworldly beauty through LED screens and a sculptural netting, creating a rarified “collage of ‘self-conscious’ generative adversarial networks” as described by the artist. This haunting work highlights the multiplex configurations found across a myriad of physical and algorithmic structures that synch through technology and are thus recontextualized through art, indeed a comment on the allure (and weirdness) of digital existences today.

Installation view of "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept." Alia Farid, Palm Orchard, 2022.

We all recognize the overstimulation of our hyper connected society, and art objects have a way of promoting an ‘in your face’ critique that can produce feelings of woe and inquietude. We engage with art as a means for exploring areas of human consciousness—yet that, too, comes with a sense of responsibility when those realms reveal fantasticalities that are repositioned to provoke us. Thus, the Whitney Biennale is both a chorus for our times and a time-warp of ideas that must be explored for the sake of the show as tradition. The cost of admission is to rendezvous with a dose of aesthetic strangeness that encapsulates the bewildered reality of today, and this, I believe, brings us around to the notion that sometimes art can fail (or take us in circles). The world turns regardless, and each of us must find ways to stay afloat amid the daily wreckage. As a glance at the meta concepts and conditions of our era, the upshot is that the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept confirms that these issues are being expanded, contracted, suspended, and exploded—all at once—through aesthetic attention. Perhaps this is the greatest allegory of all, that art endures as an ever-fascinating trope of itself. In that regard, the Whitney Biennale is a continued triumph for all timeless times.

(April 6 - September 5, 2022)

Taliesin Thomas is an artist-philosopher, writer, lecturer, and collector based in Troy, NY. Since 2007 she is the founding director of AW Asia, NY and collection manager of Art Issue Editions, NY-two private art collections that serve as the foundation for collaborations with museums and artists worldwide. Thomas has lectured widely on contemporary art and she has published in Chronogram, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Contemporary ChineseArt (JCCA) andArtAsiaPacificmagazine in addition to regular reviews forARTPULSE. She is a faculty member at School of Visual Arts, NY and a visiting critic at the Arts Center for the Capital Region, NY. Thomas studied fine art, theory, and philosophy at Bennington College (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (Ph.D.).

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/whitney-biennial-2022-quiet-as-its-kept/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-rhetoric-of-rank http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-rhetoric-of-rank#comments Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:46:01 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12989

Gretchen Andrew, Art Basel Miami Beach (Dress for the Job you Want, Not the One You Have), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Gretchen Andrew is a rule-based artist challenging power structures by following the rules. Gretchen works in the realm of Google’s optimization algorithms to demonstrate she’s the “most relevant artist, ever.”

By Scott Thorp

To play her game, simply Google “cover of Artforum” or “Frieze Los Angeles.” Click on the image results and Gretchen’s brightly colored vision boards dominate the page. They stand out as mixed-media collages adorned with line drawings, fake flowers, heart stickers, and all sorts of crafty-bling best categorized as ephemera. She describes the aesthetic as highly feminine, one of a teenage girl. The last time I looked, eleven of the top fourteen results for “cover of Artforum” were her works.

However, Gretchen Andrew has nevergraced the cover of Artforum. Nor has she exhibited in Frieze Los Angeles. But, as a viewer, I tend to believe she has. After all, I saw it on the Internet.

Gretchen Andrew in her studio. Courtesy of the artist.

Gretchen operates as a self-proclaimed “search engine artist” and “Internet imperialist.”(1) These are terms she invented to describe her practice of gaming Google’s artificial intelligence to render her work as being the most relevant to specific keyword searches. “Search engine artist,” is her practice, “imperialist” her goal. She combines images with text and hordes of metadata to form a manipulative digital rhetoric targeting the shortcomings in Internet logic.

In the larger sense, her work lands in the growing realm of net art where the likes of Cory Arcangel, JODI, and Constant Dullaart hijack Internet ecosystems as a forum for multi-media expression. It’s a growing field that blends coding, videos, performance, and misinformation, with a lot of mischief to create a never-ending interactive artistic exposé. With a degree in Information Systems from Boston College, Gretchen is very comfortable with technology. The “art” part is what’s new to her. She only declared herself an artist after resigning as one of Google’s People Technology Managers.

Cover of Art Forum, Google image search results, 2021.

Although not a traditionalist, she honed her art skills the old-fashioned way as an apprentice in the studio of British figurative painter, Billie Childish. Childish paints loosely figurative works chronicling a history of addiction and abuse. Under his tutelage, Gretchen emulated her mentor’s technique and compositional approach. “I’d work in his studio all day, and then I’d go home and recreate his paintings as practice.”(2) She posted finished works on social media, tagging them appropriately as being “After Billy Childish.”Over time, Google began to associate her works with the words “Billy Childish” more so than Childish’s own paintings. When her works supplanted Childish’s originals in searches, the strange reality of the Internet presented her an opportunity.

Since then, she’s transitioned from figurative painter to a combination assemblage/ search engine artist, targeting keyword searches related to the art world’s most coveted events: Turner Prize, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze Los Angeles, and Whitney Biennial 2019. In addition to uploading multitudes of vision boards, social media posts, and odd comments she sometimes creates video performances of staged art parties accompanied by commentary like, “I hear the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair is one hell of a party. While I’m not yet technically invited I’ve been dressing for the job I want, practicing being an exhibiting artist who attends all the super cool parties with loads of celebrities.” On her site, you can see her dressed to party, cavorting and drinking champagne with friends.

Gretchen Andrew, Best MFA (Radio), 2020, charcoal, Dream Journal, valentine, and wooden car on canvas, 36" x 24." Courtesy of Annka Kultys Gallery.

At first glance, it’s hard to make sense of what she does. Her digital profile doesn’t conjure up what one would consider an imperialist. Her Pinterest account has a mere 128 followers. And she’s attracted 3,200 Instagram followers, respectable, but not even mid-range influencer status. Her blogs ramble as though she forgot to edit. But that’s okay-according to her, her content isn’t targeted at humans. “The blogs are one form of remixing text that seems like total nonsense or on the bridge of nonsense to humans. But the computer will read it and all it reads is that my images are relevant to the search “best MFA.” The language doesn’t have to mean anything to humans. But it has to be relevant to Google.” And relevance to Google is all she needs. After six years, her work is paying off. She’s racking up shows and selling vision boards.

Internet Logic

Gretchen and I spoke just before her New Year’s Eve digital detox (something we all should try). In our conversation, she described her work as being co-authored by Google’s AI. She supplies data; it filters and ranks. She toys with what it prefers. According to her, the innovation in her work isn’t that she’s popping up at the top of searches. That’s just a sign of success. Instead, “I want people to look at what I do, look at the manipulation of search engine art, look at the Internet imperialism and be really impressed with what I do and also be worried that I can do it.” She wants people to wonder, “What’s at play here?”

Installation view of Gretchen Andrew “Other Forms of Travel” at Annka Kultys Gallery, London 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Annka Kultys Gallery.

On the surface, her work is playful and thin, brightly colored collages ranked high in search results. But her work underscores AI’s inability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. “What happens online is that Google doesn’t know how to measure [the] distance between what I want and what actually happens. Google only deals in relevance.” For example, “When we are having this as a conversation between two people, we know we are talking about me, we are not talking about truth or falsehood. We are talking about a desire that I have that is different from our current reality.”

She sums it up well in her often used phrase, “The Internet can’t parse desire.” Through the lens of Google’s algorithm, her online data creates relevance, therefore it’s logical to select her works as being the best answer to queries like “cover of Artforum.” The result is that we humans associate those results with truth. We determine she must be good because she came up first in Google.

The impact of manipulating results is surprising. Google currently owns somewhere around 90% of the online search market. Roughly speaking, that’s 3.5 billion searches per day. The search “Turner Prize” reaps over 35,000,000 results. Since very few of us click past the first page, we rarely see more than 15 of those results. While Google may not literally be the sayer of truth, it’s definitely the arbiter of it.

Installation view of Gretchen Andrew “Other Forms of Travel” at Annka Kultys Gallery, London 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Annka Kultys Gallery.

The ease with which she alters results and therefore changes perception is simultaneously poignant and amusing. Her sarcasm and wit combine for a lighthearted approach for hitting at questions dealing with truth and power in online environments. Who gets to say what is good? And, why do highly feminine images look so unwarranted in the context of fine art? To be clear, she’s just doing what corporations do to optimize their sites and increase sales. Her twist does seem different as it’s wound up in artistic performance. For some odd reason it seems we expect corporations to manipulate us but not people. A nice consequence to leapfrogging to the top of art-related searches is that she’s fast-tracking a career as an artist. She recently was awarded her first museum acquisition as the Monterey Museum of Art added one of her vision boardsto its permanent collection.

Net Art

Artists have been using the Internet as a medium since it went public back in the 1990s. However, net art has yet to take off as a fully endorsed art form. You don’t often see articles on it. And galleries tend to shy away from these works. Its sprawling nature can make it difficult as a genre. Stuart Cowen, curator of media art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York explained it well when he said, “Traditionally, art has been thought of as an image or an object or both.” But, “You can’t locate the art in one aspect of net art. It’s a constellation. It’s the image, the terminal, the viewer, the conversation. It’s all of the above.”(3) The consequence is that while net art is increasing in relevance, it still seems like a niche movement. Honestly, I appreciate its underground feel. The interaction with cutting-edge art on a personal computer delivers a certain stimulus that codified exhibitions can’t offer. There’s a noticeable level of anxiety that accompanies the clicking of odd links to navigate the myriad paths created by these artists. While a sixty-foot projection of a screenshot in a museum may offer transcendence, there’s less of a sense of personal interaction and discovery.

Museums are trying though. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has been a strong supporter of Internet-based artists. They’ve had many iterations and exhibitions focusing on new media and net art. Launched in 2001, their show “010101: Art in Technological Times” charted the influence of digital media on a variety of art forms from architecture to design. It’s still up, but you need unsupported plugins like Flash to access it. In 2000, the SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art was established. But it seems to have disappeared over time. Fine art bowed to design in this case. The Webby Awards now focus more on game design, media design, and app design.

JODI's My�Desktop, installation view of the gallery in the exhibition, Collection 1970s–Present, October 21, 2019 – September 7, 2020. Photo: John Wronn.

In 2019, the New York Museum of Modern Art acquired My%Desktop as part of its permanent collection. My%Desktop is a four-screen video installation by a duo of artists known as JODI. It comes from what’s known as their “screen grab” period where they hooked a camera to their Macintosh desktop to record the interplay between the Mac OS 9 operating system and a frenetic user. It’s a chaotic interaction where the artist clicks all over the screen in a frenzy of activity that looks like the computer malfunctioned. JODI is actually a couple of artists from the Netherlands, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans formed JODI back in the mid-1990s.

In conversations about Internet art, the term hacker usually gets bandied about. Yes, many of them are. But most are interested in mischief, not malfeasance. Cory Arcangel may be the most revered hacker/artist of the moment. His forte is repurposing obsolete technologies. 8-bit video games from the 80s and 90s are favorites. Think Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Frogger. His installation, Super Mario Clouds, is a strangely meditative projection of low-res puffy clouds inching across a cerulean Super Mario sky, sansanything else. Arcangel stripped the remainder of the graphics from the game. Projected large on a gallery wall, the work transcends a low-res crippled video game. It’s a lament of outdated technology turned philosophical. Back in 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art showcased his work in an exhibition titled “Pro Tools.” It was one of the first times a major museum featured this type of work. Frieze LA 2020 featured his work, Risks in Business/The King Checked by the Queen. In it, a couple of bots he programmed play an arcane form of chess by posting their moves through the comments of notable Instagram accounts such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Kardashian. A tribute to Marcel Duchamp, the final move was delivered by the bot named after Duchamp’s death date.

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, installation view of Synthetic (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. January 22 - April 19, 2009). Photo: Sheldan C. Collins. Courtesy of the artist.

While Gretchen doesn’t mind being associated with hackers, it’s not really what she does. She’s not defacing programs or using code to alter normal use. Nor is she trying to dismantle art world infrastructure. Poking fun at it, yes-anarchy, no. “I’m a systems artist…. The art world is my medium as much as the Internet is my medium. I need the system to operate. I’m not in the camp of wanting to dismantle the systems. I love knowing the rules. I love figuring out what the spirit of the law is rather than the letter of the law…. The major difference between me and a nefarious hacker is that everything I do is completely legal. Not only is it completely legal, it’s completely within the terms of service of every site of Google, of Instagram, of Pinterest. All these sites I use to do my Internet imperialism.”

Her work is more aligned with the online meddling of Constant Dullaart. Dullaart’s work exposes the extent to which our virtual presence can be a product of someone else’s sneaky manipulations. In 2014, Dullaart performed “High Retention, Slow Delivery,” an online intervention that leveled the impact of 30 art world Instagram accounts. These accounts included Gagosian galleries, Jeff Koons, and Performa. To do so, Dullaart purchased 2.5 million fake Instagram users through eBay. He then assigned these fake followers to each targeted account until every account had 100,000 followers. Temporarily, he granted Swiss curator/critic, Hans Ulrich Obrist, equal social capital to Ai Weiwei.(4) Dullart’s work, like much of Gretchen’s work, is performative and temporary. And they both highlight how Internet fact is a moving target. It sounds insignificant in some sense. But on the Internet, having more followers, likes, or views is synonymous with influence/power. Plus, having a lot of followers attracts more followers. The general understanding is followers are earned, or at least real. But as demonstrated, that’s not always the case.

It’s hard to know where a Gretchen Andrew intervention starts and stops. Is it all art? Or is it just her enjoying some popularity? She often posts images and videos on social media of her pending stardom. You can see her being photographed while drinking champagne in front of vision boards. She talks with friends and gives explanations of how her work is programmed to manipulate the global Internet, artificial intelligence, the art world, and the political world. She posts updates on her career. She’s very transparent about her imperialistic mission.

Gretchen Andrew, Best MFA (Train), 2020, charcoal, word beads, table cloth, and cork on canvas, 60" x 48." Courtesy of Annka Kultys Gallery.

Her current projects include taking over the top search results for “best MFA.” Soon Google will point to Gretchen’s work instead of Yale and Cal Arts. “It’s going to say my decision to not get an MFA and to spend my time reading Russian literature, doing drugs, and hanging out with friends is actually an equally valid experience. And you don’t need to spend a $100K to get an arts education.” Thus, she continues her critique of art institutions by targeting art schools. “With Best MFA, basically, what I just told you I say all over the Internet. I saylike-heyI went camping with some friends, heyI fell in love, heymy mother died-things that are important in my formation as a person as an artist. And I talk about them as being the best MFA I could have received.”

Gretchen Andrew in her studio. Courtesy of the artist.

Now that she’s done this a few times, it’s essentially plug and play. “The metadata is all in place…Now it’s systematized. Every new project I have is actually just a system now. It’s unique because it’s a system taking advantage of a system.”

With her jabs at the art world at large, I asked her if she seriously wanted to be part of the art world narrative. The answer was “yes.” She appreciates the level of reflection within the art world and how conversations arise. She wants to be an artist in the modern sense, exhibiting in galleries and selling works. And so she is.

Notes

1.   Internet Imperialist is a tongue-in-cheek term Gretchen uses to associate her growing influence with those society would normally think of as imperialists. The term brands her practice and helps her find similar artists.

2.   Goldstein, C. (2019, February 19). How One ‘Search Engine Artist’ Hacked Her Paintings Into Frieze Los Angeles’s Google Results. Retrieved from Artnet News: https://news.artnet.com/market/frieze-los-angeles-gretchen-andrew-1462594#:~:text=Using%20text%2C%20keywords%2C%20and%20alt,%E2%80%9CFrieze%20Los%20Angeles%E2%80%9D%20site.

3.   Ables, K. (2020, June 18). These artists make online disinformation into art. Or is it the other way around? . Retrieved from The Washington Post : https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/these-artists-make-online-disinformation-into-art-or-is-it-the-other-way-around/2020/06/18/e76409a8-536d-11ea-929a-64efa7482a77_story.html

4. Spike. (2021, 01 15). Retrieved from SPIKE CONVERSATIONS: ART AS START-UP?: https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/spike-conversations-art-start

Scott Thorp is an artist, writer and educator specializing in creativity. He is chairperson of the Department of Art and associate vice president for interdisciplinary research at Augusta University, as well as a contributing writer and editor for ARTPULSE. Additionally, he serves on the board of directors for Westobou Festival and is vice president of the Mid-America College Art Association. With an MFA in drawing and painting from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he has exhibited often in museums and galleries in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-rhetoric-of-rank/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/cathedral http://artpulsemagazine.com/cathedral#comments Sat, 18 Sep 2021 01:46:10 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12982 SCAD Museum of Art - Savannah, GA

By Carlos A. Colón

The SCAD Museum of Art brings to Savannah, “Cathedral,” a multi-media sampling of the work by preeminent Mexican artist Gonzalo Lebrija. “Cathedral” opened to the public on February 21^st, just in time for the 10^thdeFINE ART celebration, SCAD’s annual program of exhibitions, lectures and performances. The work is on view through July 28^th.

The exhibition brings together large-scale paintings, photographs, sculptures, a video, and an installation comprised of a mural on the four walls of a room, an inner sanctum, and the replica of a red Blic lighter standing on a pedestal in the center of the room. The lighter remains aflame for the duration of the six-month long event.

The paintings are the centerpiece of the exhibition. Lebrija uses gold leaf, metallic paint and subtle glazing techniques to create visual cues that many visitors will associate with religious painting.  Yet the paintings remain devoid of iconography. They rely on geometric abstraction, emphasizing the triangle, a mystical symbol suggestive of the Catholic concept of the Trinity. The interplay between light and dark, both physical and represented, signify and elicit feelings of spiritual depth. The only overt reference to religion, the sacred, or a space for adoration, is in the title, “Cathedral,” illuminated and placed high above eye level.

“Cathedral” by Gonzalo Lebrija at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, (February 21, 2019 – July 28, 2019), installation view. Images courtesy of the artist and the SCAD Museum of Art.

The effect of the show is quite stunning. The construct generates an aura of sublime mystery. It feels like an encounter with the sacred and induces a contemplative state similar to what we might experience within the walls of its namesake. Still, the complexity of this concept-driven work goes deeper than the subtle management of formal elements to elicit a devotional state of mind. The effect, while subtle, is subversive. Hidden in plain sight among this radiant atmosphere of wonderment lies another aesthetic, another power of creative spiritual revelation. Within “Cathedral” lies Lorca’s duende.

You may not recognize the term, but you would likely recognize duende in the music of Leonard Cohen, or Tom Waits. It is a mysterious power, an emotional darkness. It is the feeling that arises from looking into the fathomless void. Lebrija references this void in his metallic iridescent paintings over black gesso, like Veladura Nocturna (Formax Cluster) [Night Glazing], both in the formal quality of a black painting, as well as in the title referencing the night sky and space. Mythological characters like the Norse Loki, and the North American Coyoteand Raven, embody aspects of duende. Through their mischief, they force us to look into that void and struggle with the weight of uncertainty, irrationality, and a heightened awareness of death.

Duende is a swift undercurrent in Lebrija’s work. Mischievous and aloof, he uses humor and play to undermine the sense of awe or exaltation present in the work. In this way, everything exalted is also mundane: the piece The Eternal Flame, is the replica of a common Blic lighter, all the paintings are iterations of unfolded paper airplanes (a throw-away toy), and the video piece, Catch My Fall, reminds us of our own experience of jumping on our bed. Lebrija’s titles are significant in creating this dual nature. Unfolded Planereferences the process of undoing the toy, but also of revelation. Referencing celestial bodies (like Abell-31, NGC-6369, and Mirach) draws our attention to the great void of space, simultaneously addressing their role as guideposts in the night sky, as well as their role in mysticism and mythology. Titles like The Eternal Flame, La Nuit, and Catch My Fall, might reference anachronistic but timeless pop songs by The Bangles, Salvatore Adamo, and Billy Idol.

Through this work, Lebrija manages to draw us in and lift us up. In that moment of levity and awe, we realize that there is no floor underneath our feet, or rather, that the cathedral is simply a construct designed to make us feel comfortable. It is a stand-in, not only for religion, but for human structures and systems. It is a revelation. Like duende, the exhibition undermines anything we take for granted. In “Cathedral,” we take for granted our feelings, our emotional response to the gallery-now-cathedral space, and to the beautiful radiant artwork that arrests us. It exposes, reveals, and renders us vulnerable.

Lebrija embodies the archetype of the trickster whose work is to point out the man behind the curtain. “Look!,” the trickster says, “at these men leading our nations.” The fallibility of our structures and our systems are revealed when we… we push paper on a daily basis but stand in awe when they are made into planes gilded in gold leaf.

(February 21, 2019 - July 28, 2019)

Carlos A. Colón is an artist, educator and writer. Currently, he serves as a Career Coach for painting and photography students at the Savannah College of Art & Design. He holds an MFA in Painting from SCAD, and undergraduate degrees in Drawing and Biology from the University of Puerto Rico.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/cathedral/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-center-is-everywhere http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-center-is-everywhere#comments Sat, 18 Sep 2021 01:37:06 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12978 SCAD Museum of Art - Savannah, GA

By Todd Schroeder

Immediately to the left upon entering the space, on a shelf built into the wall, is a book-a thick, plain, white 3-ring binder filled to capacity. With the first page of this book, a component of her piece Human Strokes, Capucine Gros establishes the succinct and poetic voice of her exhibition “The Center Is Everywhere.” The words “one death, one stroke” and the dates for Human Strokes (a projected ten-year project that began on November 13, 2010, slotted to end on November 12 next year) appear under the title. This incisive text is all we need as a prompt for understanding: title, process, duration. There is an instruction manual clarity to the statement, but its poignancy strikes an emotional chord. Death is tragic, but it is as inevitable as the sun coming up in the morning, weeds in the garden, and humidity in Georgia. We all know that humans carry a 100% death rate; nobody escapes it, but that doesn’t make it easy. The hundreds of pages that follow chronicle the particulars of individual deaths, as obtained primarily from a handful of news sources (newspapers that exhibit Gros’s predilections for place). The companion to the book is a 72 x 114-inch white acrylic painting through which Gros bears witness to each documented death (and, thus, each life) with a stroke of white paint. In the painting, she conjures a map of the world and places the commemorative touch of paint in the place where the life ended. A topography of 10 years results.

Capucine Gros, “The Center is Everywhere” installation view at the SCAD Museum of Art. Courtesy of the SCAD Museum of Art.

“The Center Is Everywhere”is chock-full of repetition, which makes sense: Repetition decenters and undermines hierarchy, but it also showcases nuance. The “figure” of nuance emerges from the “field” of sameness. Repetition projects nuance-and what’s more human than nuance? Everyone (Savannah), a swoosh of fabric draping from the ceiling, accounts for each citizen of Savannah, Georgia, with a dot. Each human, no matter status or wealth is equally noted. There are no Excel spreadsheets involved in Gros’s census; it is rendered through the artist’s touch.

Images, laid out in a grid on floor-to-ceiling wallpaper, of the artist’s hands marked with x’s and dashes document personal interactions. Ten Years: 17% (Encountered/Ignored) and Ten Years 33% (Touched/Untouched) were one-year performances that took place ten years apart. Each is a daily log that tracks to the best of her ability all the people that the artist came into contact with and the nature of that contact.

Gros further explores maps and perceptual bias in the epic, multilayered Approximately 199, a project that encompasses stacks of T-shirts printed with the shapes of countries that issue passports (plus one left blank for the 12 million stateless people), framed prints, and sketchbooks, as well as video documentation of a 200-day performance in which the artist wore each of the displayed T-shirts. An aspect of Approximately 199 allows the viewer to purchase a single T-shirt (not one of the 200 yellow and black ones that the artist wore in the performance; those stay intact as part of the piece). You can choose your own size and color but not country; that is left to chance, which drives home the notion that we cannot choose where we come from.

Repetition can imply a machine-like deadness (think assembly lines, a dulling of the senses and mindlessness). The repetition of information-we all know too well-deadens its impact and meaning. But there is also something deeply human about repetition-breath, heartbeat, sex.

Repetition drives us, it is us; without repetition we don’t exist. Gros’s brand of art is aura imbued. In her hands, repetition is not mindless but rather mindful.

(May, 28 - August 11, 2019)

Todd Schroeder is an artist and educator based in Savannah, GA.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-center-is-everywhere/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/rashaun-rucker-contemplation-of-flight http://artpulsemagazine.com/rashaun-rucker-contemplation-of-flight#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2021 22:15:50 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12923 N’Namdi Contemporary Gallery - Miami

By Charles Moore

Leave it to artist-journalist Rashaun Rucker to sell out a show at one of Miami’s most exclusive venues, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Contemplation of Flight,” safely on view by appointment at the N’Namdi Contemporary Gallery through the end of  2020, showcased 10 unique pieces-in addition to a series focused on what Rucker refers to as psychological redlining, in a play on the number 13 from the 13^thamendment: the abolition of slavery.

Rashaun Rucker, Overbooked, 2020, graphite on paper, 50” x 38.”

The show, initially scheduled to take place from November 6 through December 19, 2020, was extended to December 31 due to the overwhelming response. Each piece reflects Rucker’s realistic approach to modern African-American society, blending his journalistic background with his artistic prowess, culminating in a series of powerful works focused on issues often neglected or overlooked by the press. To explore the Black experience in America both historically and contemporarily, he dissects the complexities of the Black male psyche, featuring graphite-on-paper drawings of amalgamated figures blending birds and men, depicting beings pigeonholed, if you will, yet awaiting flight—both literally and metaphorically. The images shed vital light on discriminatory housing practices, mass incarceration, and other topics which seep into the overarching identity of Black communities in the United States.

Enter the N’Namdi gallery space, and you won’t know where to begin observing Rucker’s masterpieces. Code Switch (2020) offers a stunning take on what it means to wear a mask; depicting a Black make figure with two pigeons protruding from his head—one lighter, and the other a more traditional gray—the piece investigates the implications of code switching, or changing languages or cultures in order to appeal to a specific audience, perhaps at the expense of one’s most authentic self. This practice has become commonplace, and in Rucker’s words, it’s often necessary to secure a certain job, or to enter a particular space. As the subject makes eye contact with the viewer, Code Switch begs the question of which pigeon a person must embody in order to achieve, or work toward achieving, the outcomes they desire.

Then there’s Layover (2020), a piece that explores the complacency of our personal decision-making. Over the course of our lives, many of us grapple with whether it would best serve us to stay where we are, or to fly to another place (in the proverbial sense, of course). The piece itself it reminiscent of a decision the artist made early in his own life, as a college student, during a time in which he considered studying for a year at the University of Kumasi, Ghana in an art exchange program. Rucker’s grandmother was fearful of the change and convinced him to stay put, and to this day, the Detroit-based talent considers his decision—his self-proclaimed complacency—one of his greatest regrets.

Rashaun Rucker, Troubled Rest, 2020, graphite on paper, 50” x 38.” All images are courtesy of the artist and N’Namdi Contemporary Miami.

Among the artist’s favorite pieces in the exhibition is Overbooked (2020), a drawing that explores the impact—and the intention—of defiance. The piece reveals a Black man staring firmly at the viewer, arms crossed, his torso human and adorned in a t-shirt with the word “Nah” emblazoned across the chest, the man’s body feathered and pigeon-like, his feet webbed and clawed. Overbooked examines the way in which modern society allows only a select few people in the door, so to speak—by placing the subject on the precipice of this very door. He’s being told the space he wishes to penetrate is full, overbooked, yet his defiant stance indicates that he will in fact prevail: by getting on the plane, getting in the room, getting the house or job or loan he so desires. The shirt, according to Rucker, is an homage to the late Rosa Parks, who—like the subject—refused to give up what was rightfully hers.

The exhibition wouldn’t be complete without a self-portrait: Troubled Rest (2020), the first time Rucker has ever placed himself at the center of his art, emphasizes the complexity of duality. While the Unites States is still in many ways a place of greatness, the artist explains, the country is deeply troubled. Rucker’s grandmother, for instance, celebrated when she was granted the right to vote—yet she had no choice but to be escorted to her polling place by federal marshals. The self-portrait reveals the subject placing his hands over his face, paired with a pigeon burying his head into his feathers. “There’s always a duality,” the artist says. “It’s never just 100 percent goodness.” And this duality is no less apparent in Coop #1 (2020) and Coop #2 (2020), two pieces in which Rucker uses color for the first time in his career. Though he prefers to work entirely in black-and-white, he wanted to, first, experiment with the notion of being placed in a coop—in a designated space, trapped-and second, to play off the concept of redlining. For many underserved communities, including people of color and women, car insurance is redlined, taxes are redlined, and the stakes for evading a life of poverty are higher. The blood-red coops in these pieces, surrounding the subjects, and the red tape involved in the obstacles so many of us face, are apparent in this series.

Rashaun Rucker, Psychological Redlining Study, 2020, ink on paper, 14” x 11,” frame size: 22 ½” x 18 ½.”

The exhibition ends on a note of release, with Finally Free (2020), a heavy work depicting a hand reaching skyward, releasing a bird-shaped balloon as a symbol of death or loss. A powerful statement on the finality of human life, Rucker offers a moving take on death in Black communities—on how the end of life is in many ways the ultimate freedom. Though we might suffer in civilization, only to be free in death, individuals can realize their fullest human selves in the afterlife. The balloon in the piece is a pigeon, or a dove-like pigeon hybrid that was in fact bred to be white—to be what society considers pure—like the doves we witness in countless funerals. Yet contrary to these pigeon-doves, the city-dwelling pigeon is most often black or gray, and so the release of the balloon into the sky represents acceptance, or hope, even when things don’t appear as they seem. No doubt, each piece in the Contemplation of Flightexhibition reflects the artist’s photojournalistic background, helping to put into perspective the racial and socioeconomic themes that have come to shape our lives.

(November 6 - December 31, 2020)

Charles Moore is an art historian, art collector, author, and doctoral student at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He writes on the economics of art and contemporary artists for publications as diverse as Artnet, Artsy, Cultured Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazineand Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Titus & Venus Legacy award from Harvard University’s Black Grad Association, and the Artis curatorial fellowship, in collaboration with the International Studio & Curatorial program, to research contemporary artists in Israel. His first book, The Black Market, explores ideas around how to start collecting art.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/rashaun-rucker-contemplation-of-flight/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/transition-as-constant-an-interview-with-kaya http://artpulsemagazine.com/transition-as-constant-an-interview-with-kaya#comments Sat, 22 May 2021 19:01:04 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12963 The following interview between Todd Schroeder and KAYA took place throughout the month of October, 2020, initially through a series of emails followed by a final zoom meeting. The stimulus for the interview is an exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA-”KAYA: Under Ursus”that was curated by Ariella Wolens. The exhibition took place in the museum’s four Jewel Boxes-shallow glass-encased cave-like spaces that encompass the brick Antebellum archways of the preserved edifice of the Museum, a former railway depot built in 1853.

By Todd Schroeder

Todd Schroeder - Can you give us the story of KAYA? when it started, how it started, and the various forms it has taken. Who is KAYA? And how did it come to life?

KAYA - KAYA is a collaboration between German painter Kerstin Brätsch and American sculptor Debo Eilers that began in 2010. Fundamentally it started with the idea of playing with authorship and power relationships. The name KAYA is a reference to Kaya Serene, the daughter of one of Eilers’ childhood friends. Serene releases a synthesizing energy between the two artists-partly through her participation in their joint actions, partly as an imaginary third person in their artistic exchange. This invocation of a “third body” allows Brätsch and Eilers to take a step back from their creative authority and open up their respective artistic practices. KAYA collaboratively traverses the boundaries between painting and sculpture, fusing both genres into an altogether new, hybrid artistic approach.

Painting has many lives, whether it’s psychological, physical, or social, and KAYA’s interest lies in painting in relation to the body. Their practice is always migrating around painting in the extended field. When looking at KAYA’s bodybags there is a re-staging of painting that allows the objects to become totemic monsters; they’re ugly, glossy, and tight. They are independent organisms, stitched and patched together, through a form of DIY plastic surgery that is executed on a painting’s body. A lot of labor, sweat, and awkwardness goes into the work.

KAYA, KAYA_YO-NAH YO-HO (Healing performance for a sick painting) with Kirsten Kilponen, sound by Nicolas An Xedro, 2018, Bärenzwinger, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Johanna Landscheidt.

T.S. - And then specifically the latest iterations of KAYA, with the SCADMOA exhibition and the _KOVO exhibition at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome where the first iterations of the OraKle Paintings were exhibited in 2018.

KAYA - When we started work on the OraKle Paintings we wanted to introduce a method of mark-making that was unpredictable and came upon the idea whereby we used the mirrored plexi sheets that form the support for the work, as our studio floor slowly accumulated sediment from the activities that were performed on it. Upon this surface, we painted forms that were references to the paintings found on the walls of pre-Renaissance Italian catacombs. While these catacombs paintings are primarily known for their influence on early Christian art, the catacombs as a whole contained a mixture of religious symbols and figures from Jewish and also various Italian pagan traditions of the time. This first iteration of the work was shown as part of “KAYA_KOVO” at Fondazione Memmo in Rome with KAYA light fixtures and also sound by our friend Nicholas An Xedro.

As most KAYA work is iterative, where ideas, materials, and energies from former works are constantly re-conceptualized and re-worked to become part of newer works, we started once again with mirror plexi sheets as the base from which we created the second series of OraKle Paintings shown at Bärenzwinger in Berlin. Two weeks before this show, we did another project at Tropez, also in Berlin, where we held an outdoor summer workshop for children. We used Plexi sheets as working table tops. The idea for the workshop was to create Talisman necklaces for the children to take home, so in order to charge their works the children were asked to mark the plexi surface with their wishes, charging the material with a ritualistic energy and creating a sort of talisman out of the tabletops which we then turned into artworks (OraKle Paintings) for the exhibition at Bärenzwinger.

KAYA, KAYA_YO-NAH YO-HO (Healing performance for a sick painting) with Kirsten Kilponen, sound by Nicolas An Xedro, 2018, Bärenzwinger, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Johanna Landscheidt.

We then brought these charged objects into the Bärenzwinger exhibition space, a former bear cage in the middle of an urban park in Berlin that was transformed into an art space. Dark and cave-like, the paintings found a natural home, charging the space ritualistically and laying the groundwork for a durational happening. In KAYA_YO-NAH YO-HO (Healing Performance for a sick painting)we resurrected the bear that once lived in the space and involved him in the ritual. In this space, Debo’s body represented “Painting” which was being healed from its ill history by the spiritual animal, the bear, and helped by the energy emanating from the OraKle Paintings. Kerstin acted as the bear as shaman, tattooing scratches that read like runes or lost languages onto the arm of Debo as he performed healing chants to complete the process. It was a four-hour process that pushed our bodies to the extreme, Kerstin laboring sweatily under the weight of a giant fur costume; Debo freezing in the naked cold of the fall night.

The works at SCADMOA being OraKle Paintingscontain within them this history, they can be thought of as containers with the potential to be charged and activated in the future with a ritual. Responding to the SCADMOA space, we used the Jewel Boxes as quasi cages/stages for the bear to be displayed to the public. Even though the main performer, the bear, is never visible, we treated the jewel boxes like enlarged lightboxes and home-spaces for the animal.

T.S. - After the city cleaned all of the painted graffiti off of the subway cars in NYC, the windows became the focus and scratching the means (you can’t clean scratches off of glass). The scratched surface of the mirrors made me think of that graffiti through the physically layered texture and the evocation of text and symbols but also through the brilliant relatability of the quotidian gut reaction of the scratch. I found the scratches as one of the quietest visual moments in the Under_Ursus work but perhaps the loudest visceral moments. Could you speak about this scratched aspect of the OraKle Paintings in the Under_Ursus installation?

KAYA - During the Bärenzwinger performance in Berlin the bear had a manuscript/notebook at the ritual, filled with bear-runes and signs. These were the healing notes of the bear to be placed onto the sick patients’ “Painting body” via stick and poke tattoo. They consisted of Stenographic astrological signs and scribbles, graffiti-like characters on a body-ruin, and a universal lost language of shapes. The patient (Debo) understood these marks by coming into deep contact with these symbols (the bear coming into a form of communication with the patient through the skin); the traces on his body lasting for a lifetime.

The scenes at times appeared ritualistic, an air of gravity and reverence infused in the actions, and at other times almost cartoonish in its composition, all the actors (the bear, the nurse and the patient) cosplaying an exaggerated role to an almost kitschy effect. The nurse was being represented by our friend Kirsten Kilponen. These two moments and atmospheres were merging and oscillating back and forth into each other, confusing the viewer by provoking ambivalent reactions to the activity happening before them.

The scratch marks on the OraKle Paintings are not only a reference to contemporary graffiti in public spaces, but they also refer back to the many marks made over time in the ancient caves and catacombs mentioned above, where the scratch represents a mark of existence. We like the idea that it could refer to this, but also to a mark of a bear, an animalistic gesture, and a set-up for an animistic ritual using a type of bear language. The words listed on the catacomb mirrors at SCAD appear through this history and specifically list the names of medieval beasts, whereas the painted lines are a reference to the former iterations of the catacomb mirrors/OraKle paintings from KAYA.

It is also worth mentioning that KAYA actually has a history of collaborating with the German graffiti artist N.O.Madski. In many KAYA works, N.O.Madski’s writings are used to frame certain KAYA artworks, operating as diagrams or contemporary runes. This lends the work an anachronistic aesthetic, at once appearing from the distant past and also the far off future.

KAYA with Nicholas An Xedro, Catacomb Mirror, 2018, Plexiglass, glasspaint, epoxy, amplifier, speaker wire, transducers, sound by Nicolas An Xedro, 81” x 120.” Photo: Daniele Molajoli.

T.S. - Why did you specifically choose to revisit the OraKle Paintings for the SCADMOA? Is there anything about the initial context vs. the new context at SCADMOA? Or anything else?

KAYA - KAYA is a container for a kind of intersubjectivity that both retains and sublimates our individual hands, offering an organic history of our own making. We are in a constant process of preserving, fermenting, and pulverizing former KAYA performance objects and ephemera into new works, re-using KAYA’s past to create a multiple, ever-becoming body. We are interested in a delay in time, or a dragging of former aspects, works, and performance tools into an unknown KAYA future. The works we create usually have many lifecycles, they travel through many stages and iterations until they find rest in their ultimate existence.

T.S. - In looking at your work, the work at the SCADMOA, and prior work as well (I saw the Processione work installed at the Whitney Biennial in 2017 as well), I was reminded of a recent interview that I heard with the musician Damo Suzuki. The interviewer was talking to him about improvisation and he said he didn’t like the word improvisation due to all of the associations (bebop and free jazz) and connotations (the idea that one improvises to “make do”); he preferred the term instant composing. In the interview, he related that for years, as a part of his Never Ending Tour, he has been playing shows with musicians in different cities that he has never played with, met, or heard their music prior to the live event. Local promoters choose the musicians. The less he knows, he says, the happier he is. Do you feel that you are engaged in a type of instant composing?

KAYA - We work within a very slow and syrupy process that gradually accelerates to a hurrying pace. A lot of what we do is made separately in our own studios until we bring the elements together, relying heavily on an unspoken energy that radiates between us. However, we actually share our solo studios in a bigger studio space, so the conversation never stops. The intuition we have developed has given our work strength and it has continued along an unpredictable path, keeping us challenged and excited to go on. But the unspoken has definitely developed into a language on its own and built on a deep mutual trust with each other’s decision making.

“Under_Ursus” at SCAD Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Because we like to respond to the situation or context that is presented to us for each exhibition, we will often incorporate the creative energies of the community that we build around the project for each of its iterations. Often times this includes fellow artists, as well as students, curators, academics, and the institution that plays host to the many KAYA projects. This could mean performing alongside the work or asking the institution to interact with an artwork in a way they aren’t accustomed to. Maybe one could consider our practice itself as some form of sluggish happening…

T.S. - How did you arrive at the title “Under_Ursus” for the exhibition? Does that relate to the structure of the work in some fashion?

KAYA - Under Ursus = Under the bear.

Underground cave / under the street lies many lives.

The Bear is not physically present but the installation (Jewel Boxes) is under its influence.

Wordplay - The bear is buried underground. The bear is present - Under influence.

The bear is both dead and present.

“Under_Ursus” at SCAD Museum of Art, detail. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

T.S. - Through your work, the idea of slippage comes to mind as a theme or subtheme. A between-ness. Between painting, sculpture, and theatrical set design (more Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysterical Theater than Broadway of course). And slippage regarding authorship and resolution. It seems that KAYA is offering an openness that is counter to commodification. Can you speak to any/all of that?

KAYA - KAYA is an untamable beast, which shows its teeth the moment the animal is turned into a pet.

Our practice revolves around a constant transitioning, a liminal space which slips away the moment it starts to become defined (even by and from ourselves). Maybe this is its actual strength. The trust we mentioned before is a trust in making mistakes, which guides the project towards new unexpected/unforeseen outcomes. This collaboration pushes us into territory we might not enter on our own. It definitely touches aspects of historical references whether it’s slipping between painting, sculpture, and performativity. Since works are continuously retooled or restaged for different situations, the works might be made for the given environment, but not fully activated till a later date. So, some shows might display a “becoming work”, the viewer potentially witnessing various stages of a work. In this sense, a play on time and memory takes a shape of its own. We like this reference to theatrical design as it makes us see the Jewel-Boxes as empty stages populated by tools to be used by the bear in the not-so-distant future.

“Under_Ursus” at SCAD Museum of Art, detail. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

T.S. - How does KAYA fit into your personal practice? Do you see the influence of the collaboration and the fluidity of its nature leaching into your own practice?

KAYA - It’s been 10 years so the lines can definitely get blurred.

* “KAYA: Under_Ursus” was on view at SCAD Museum of Art from September 29^th, 2020 to January 3^rd, 2021.

Todd Schroederis an artist, educator, and writer based in Savannah, GA. He has exhibited internationally including solo shows at White Columns, New York, and the Jepson Center - Telfair Museum of Art. Schroeder’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Out/ New York, ARTPULSE, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, among other publications.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/transition-as-constant-an-interview-with-kaya/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/between-scylla-and-charybdis-art-vs-craft http://artpulsemagazine.com/between-scylla-and-charybdis-art-vs-craft#comments Sat, 22 May 2021 01:39:21 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12957 By John Valentine

The following article presents a debate about the distinction, if any, between art and craft. I have chosen the lead-in reference to the twin monsters that threatened Odysseus in Homer’s classic work The Odyssey, even though the philosophical debate about art and craft contains nothing threatening and is certainly not a matter of ‘choosing between the lesser of two evils.’ The intended effect is merely rhetorical, but there are indeed many partisans who believe that there is in fact a clear distinction between art and craft. The debate questions that belief.

What I shall argue is that all instances of craft-items are semantically and philosophically collapsible into instances of art-items. In what follows, the fictional character of Jones will defend collapsibility and that of Smith will criticize it.

Smith: Let me be clear about this. You want to argue that there is no difference between fine art and craft?

Jones: No. I shall explicate a basal theory of art simpliciterin the classification sense of art vs. non-art. I have no exact idea of what fine art is or how to define it. It seems to me that it is a high-end critical term that might have any number of necessary and sufficient conditions for definition, depending on the context and who is doing the defining. Also, many postmodernists have rejected the notion of fine art (or high art) in favor of a more democratic view of equality among artforms.

John Valentine, Beginning Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. McGraw-Hill Primis Custom Publishing; 2nd edition (March 30, 2006).

Smith: So, to be more exact, you are claiming that there is no difference between art and craft?

Jones: Yes, in the sense that all putative craft-items are semantically and philosophically art-items.

Smith: First of all, what do you mean by the terms art and craft? Clear definitions are in order here.

Jones: When I’m discussing the term craft, I am not referencing anything akin to the ancient Greek term technê or the Latin term ars. Both of these had primary connotations of ‘applied skill’ in the making of various kinds of objects. This is how they were understood by Plato and Aristotle, and also in the Roman world. Of course, this is tricky because the two terms were often used to designate art-items that showed skill, so even at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition there was ambiguity about art and craft. We can also find this situation in the Renaissance and thereafter.

Smith: Fair enough, so the word craft still has the separate meaning of applied skill in making. But what does it mean beyond that? Let me venture a possibility. A craft-item might be an artifact (= a humanly created item) that is either handmade or mass-produced for the subsequent purpose of some kind of utilitarian application or use. A paradigm example historically would be a quilt. Whether handmade or mass-produced, quilts have generally been regarded as craft-items that are used to keep people warm. They were rarely, if ever, thought of as art-items prior to the 20^th century and the imprimatur of artists such as Mark Rothko and their gradual appearance in art galleries and museums. (It is important to note in passing that in earlier centuries craft-items were thought to be the domain of women, while art-items were thought to be the domain of men. This has come under justifiable feminist criticism.) The upshot of this is that today there is a cultural blending of arts and crafts, but that does not entail that craft is the same thing as art. It’s still important and possible to distinguish between them. That said, what is your definition of art?

Jones: First, a word about your definition of craft. It’s true that putative craft-items could be handmade or mass-produced (so can art-items), but it is not clear that they are inevitably made for the subsequent purpose of utilitarian application or use. In your own example, you concede that quilts have found their way into art museums and galleries, and that probably entails that they are being noticed for something other than use per se—perhaps their aesthetic properties as such. Are you familiar with Jastrow’s duck/rabbit image?

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Urinal "readymade" signed R. Mutt; early example of "Dada" art. A paradigmatic example of found-art. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

Smith: I am but how is it relevant here?

Jones: Just in the sense that whether one sees a duck or a rabbit in the pattern is a matter of ‘perceptual sets,’ or what the philosopher Wittgenstein regarded as dispositions to see one way rather than another based on context and previous conditioning. We might extend the notion of perceptual sets to include ways of aesthetic vs. non-aesthetic seeing. A quilt may be observed strictly in terms of its low-end aesthetic qualities such as line, shape, and color—or the gestalts of these phenomena—or it may be perceptually shifted so that we only observe a non-aesthetic quality. But what indeed is the latter? In some cases, yes, it could be utilitarian function as intentionally ‘put into’ the putative craft-item (warmth), but as already noted, not every craft-item has or is intended to have such a function. Take the example of an ordinary hammer. If we shift away from any aesthetic qualities it might have, we seem only to be left with the hammer’s utilitarian use. Fair enough, but wouldn’t it be odd to say that an ordinary hammer is a craft-item, akin to a quilt? No doubt some degree of applied skill went into making the hammer (technê) and we are likely to use it in various construction modalities, but beyond that there seems to be nothing extra that makes it, like a quilt, into a putative craft-item. Perhaps as a function of our enculturation, we tend to think that something extra is going on with a quilt that makes it craft, but what is that?

Smith: It’s likely that there are many kinds of uses for putative craft-items other than utilitarian use. A short list would include religious use (for example, totems and amulets), nostalgic use (for example, an item owned or made by a deceased friend or family member), commemorative or celebratory use (such as wreaths), and decorative use (such as many blown glass or ceramic items found at local ‘flea markets’). Thus, traditional quilts, of course, had the function of providing warmth but they also were decorative and often told family stories by way of patches of family clothing. We could also imagine, say, glass hammers that are not designed for utilitarian use but for decorative use. Many similar examples and uses of craft-items are possible.

Jones: Your mention of decorative use, because of its usual aesthetic connotations, leads to my own definition of art, which I’ll attempt to employ to collapse all craft-items into art-items. Briefly, I shall define art in the classificatory sense (that is, vs. non-art) as follows: Art is any artifact that is intentionally created as a candidate for aesthetic notice by way of a perceptual shift.(1) All putative craft-items are presumably artifacts in the very general sense of being made by humans. Also, I presume they are intentionally made. Thirdly, they all have some kind of low-end aesthetic properties such as line, shape, sound, texture, color, even smell and taste, that can be noticed either singly or as sensory gestalts. Low-end aesthetic properties are phenomenologically basal and should be distinguished from high-end aesthetic properties such as beauty, dynamism, mystery, expressivity, and so on. The latter properties are used by critics to evaluate and/or interpret art-items; the former I use to identify art-items simpliciter. Lastly, the idea of a perceptual shift, as discussed earlier, allows us to move the focal point of lines, shapes, colors, etc.,—noticed for their own sake—to the foreground of perception and to ignore or place in the background of perception any non-aesthetic aspects or uses of the items under observation. This is obviously similar to the shift in perception found in the duck/rabbit image, but is being used now in a more general ideational manner. My theory of art has much in common with the old Greek word aisthētikos, which referred to noticing aspects of sensory perception for their own sake.

Smith: But what about counter-examples to your definition: a) Conceptual art may indeed have material aesthetic properties but they are usually not the point; rather, the idea is crucial. How could works like John Cage’s 4′33″ or Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me ever count as art if we only consider formalistic aspects of them?  b) What about unintentional works of art? Are they not possible? c) Why do you say ‘candidate for aesthetic notice’ rather than ‘candidate for aesthetic appreciation’? d) Lastly, are you saying that art is in the eye of the beholder? Isn’t that too subjective?

Jones: I shall briefly attempt to address your concerns.(2) a) With conceptual pieces, formal low-end aesthetic properties function in a material way to maintain the basic artness of the item. They ‘anchor’ it. Beyond that, as the philosopher George Dickie has suggested, ideas themselves could be artifacts that have formal aesthetic properties of a mental kind that can be noticed introspectively. In the case of 4′33″ the whole setting of the piano, the blank musical sheets, the timer, the pianist turning empty sheets from time to time, and so on, was undoubtedly keenly noticed by the audience for its own sake. The very idea of such a ‘performance’ must have been at the center of their aesthetic attention as they then turned to what the piece meant or what Cage was ‘trying to say.’ Thus, as unusual as they may be, conceptual pieces are still susceptible to a perceptual shift from the non-aesthetic to the aesthetic. (Interestingly, in this same context, what if Duchamp in 1917 had ‘submitted’ Fountain as utterly ideational and not as an altered urinal?) b) I would like to claim that all artworks are intentional. If we know beyond any doubt that the original maker of an item had absolutely no aesthetic intention for it, in order to convert the item to an art-item, we would have to, as it were, ‘Duchampify’ it. That is, we would have to re-make the item in roughly the same way Duchamp re-made the famous urinal; we could title it, sign it, and alter its mode of display to a greater or lesser extent so as to bring to the fore its low-end aesthetic properties. This could all be done intentionally with the result that, even though we literally did not make the item, we converted it to an art-item. We are then the artists of the art-item, just as Duchamp did not create the urinal but he did create Fountainas an art-item. (I also want to add that many of the Dada provocations were not entirely random; they were pre-planned in certain ways, and then anyone finding the results to be artistic was intentionally using a theory of art to do so.) c) I use the terminology ‘candidate for aesthetic notice’ because it seems neutral, whereas ‘candidate for aesthetic evaluation’ seems to imply some kind of value issues-for example, good art vs. bad art-that are not germane to defining art per se. There is an obvious difference between art per se and good vs. bad art. And lastly, d) My theory of art is not Idealistic (in the philosophical sense) or subjective. The artifact must be real and it must have low-end aesthetic properties that can be noticed for their own sake. Of course, in order to finalize and make my theory work, one must know what a perceptual shift is and how to do it, but although this is a sort of mental shift, it is not entirely or even predominantly subjective in nature.

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de La Méduse), 1819, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre.

Smith: For the moment, I shall let your rejoinders pass. What is the upshot of your theory of art-items?

Jones: Just this: if my theory is correct, it would follow that all putative craft-items are really art-items if they satisfy the criteria of my theory. The word craft would still retain its old meaning of applied skill in making, but beyond that it would be something of a linguistic or ontological ‘dangler’; that is, it would have no important conceptual content. Perhaps surprisingly, I would like to conclude by saying, for example, that a Hummel figurine or a traditional quilt are just as much art-items as Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa. There are no evaluative assumptions presupposed in this claim, just a consistent application of my definition of art-items to all three of these objects.

Notes

1. For a fuller analysis of my theory of art, please refer to Chapter 1 in my book Beginning Aesthetics, which is freely available for downloading at Academia.edu. In that chapter, I introduce the term sentifactas a way of extending the possibility of art-making to non-human animals.

2. Again, these types of putative counter-examples to my theory are dealt with more fully in Beginning Aesthetics.

John Valentine teaches philosophy courses at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His scholarly articles have appeared in The Philosopher, The Southwest Philosophy Review, The Florida Philosophical Review, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Journal of Philosophical Research, and ARTPULSEmagazine. His textbook Beginning Aestheticswas published by McGraw-Hill in 2007.

“Art history hasn’t shown much interest in the social and economic conditions of art and its relation to the history of the art market.”

In his latest book From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the “Biennialization” of Art Fairs and the “Fairization” of Biennials, curator and writer Paco Barragán challenges the dominant narrative about the genealogy of art fairs and biennials. Read on and you will discover that Latin America had at some point the highest concentration of biennial exhibitions, what went wrong with ART COLOGNE, and why a truly comprehensive and balanced study on the phenomenon of fairs and biennials has yet to be made.

By Michele Robecchi

Michele Robecchi - Ever since I met you, when you were working at the Valencia Biennale in 2002, I was struck by your interest both in art and in the mechanisms that define the art system in equal measure. Where do you think this fascination for the most political and structural aspects of art and its market ultimately comes from?

Paco Barragán - Yes, you’re totally right! And actually, this interest crystallized in November 2020 in the consecution of my International PhD at the University of Salamanca (USAL) titled “Narrativity as Discourse, Credibility as Condition: Art, Politics and Media Now.” In my thesis I analyze the complex, contradictory and controversial relationships between that which is artistic and that which is political. We all accept eagerly that the sphere of the political (understood from Hannah Arendt’s perspective) determines the artistic. Let’s recall how monarchs, kings and aristocrats “manufactured” reality through history painting. But the opposite is even more the case: how the artistic prefigures and configures the political. Yet the way from art to politics is poorly acknowledged. Both politicians and audiences receive images that stem from painting, films, theater, novels, and so on. Seeing is a constructed process and although some people may not experience these works of art directly, they do indirectly via television, Internet and social media. Many of the virtues and vices displayed in the political arena like ambition, power, generosity, authority, philanthropy and leadership derive directly and indirectly from art. They are based on social, political and psychological myths and values from the artistic field, as Murray Edelman so elegantly argued in his wonderful book From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions. In other words: art manufactures the images that define our world. As a catalyst, it provides images and creates situations that are strange, provocative, utopian, engaging or radical, and by doing so it ends up configuring the political regime. According to Edelman “art simply serves as a floating signifier into which political groups read whatever serves their interests and ideologies.”(1) Art is, as Ernst van Alphen rightly states in Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought, not only a “historical product” but also a “historical agent” with a “performative” function in whose realm “ideas and functions, the building stones of culture, are actively created, constituted, and mobilized.”(2) Of course, not all that the art world produces has an equally educational or aesthetical feedback. Sometimes the artifacts, images and processes generated by the artistic realm cause great havoc and alarm in society. The Dana Schutz affair is a perfect example of how artistic freedom can offend certain groups. The idea of l’art-pour-l’art is fascinating but also very naive: art never exists in a vacuum, it acts against, reacts to and re-enacts the political, ideological, social, economic and psychological conditions of society. And as such, for me understanding the overall framework that conforms the art system is mandatory for understanding art itself!

Paco Barragán, “From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials.” Artoons by Pablo Helguera. Published by Artium Media, ARTPULSE Editions, 2020.

M.R. - Your first book, The Art Fair Age (2008), explored the phenomenon of art fairs. Your second book titled From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the “Biennialization” of Art Fairs and the “Fairization” of Biennials investigates fairs and biennials, and how these two formats have dominated the way art has been presented over the past two decades. In it you note how literature about some fringes of these pivotal platforms has been scarce. Why do you think that is?

P.B. - I think we have two issues here at play of an art historical and a philosophical nature. Art History with capital letters is basically the history of the artist as genius, artistic movements, genres and the aesthetical appreciation of beauty. Let’s recall that most studies and research about art and its relation to the market stem from the sphere of economics (think of cultural economics like John Michael Montias, Peter Spufford and Clare McAndrew) or sociology (Raymonde Moulin, Olav Velthuis, Filip Vermeylen and Alan Quemin). Still today art history hasn’t shown much interest in the social and economic conditions of art and its relation to the history of the art market. A second element that explains this lack has a philosophical background: The very idea of the art market, that is art as a commodity, has always created a kind of uneasy tension in the artworld in general and academia in particular. Let’s recall Winckelmann, Schiller, Kant, and even Marx and their distinction between play and work, contemplation and art production and the capital idea in art and art history of “disinterestedness.” If you combine these two aspects you understand why there are hardly books about art fairs (market, commodification), but not why there are still relatively little books about biennials (art history, disinterestedness). And while the art fair represents the wrong side of art history, it’s incomprehensible that the biennial that stands for the right side of art history—if we think with Pablo Helguera’s cartoons—has so little bibliography. Just think that the classic book of the Venice Biennale is still Lawrence Alloway’s The Venice Biennale 1895-1968: from salon to goldfish bowl written back in 1969! And what about documenta? There are six books about documenta, but most of them in German and only one is bilingual German-English, edited by Michael Glasmeier and Karin Stengel, titled 50 Jahre/Years documenta (Archive in Motion) published in 2005. This is weird. Only between 1955 and 2005 there were some 35,000 articles according to Karin Stengel and Friedhelm Scharf in their essay “Press Poliphony: A History of Documenta-Criticism.” By now this could easily amount to 100,000! Closer in time we have The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art edited byElena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø in 2010, but it consists of a series of essays and articles, it’s not a book that provides a historical perspective of the biennial. And if we add to it that most of the biennial literature is Eurocentric and hardly contemplates, for example, the rich history of biennials in Latin America, then there is a lot of research to be done.

Paco Barragán. Courtesy Maribel Castro, Madrid.

I wrote a book about the history of art fairs and biennials for another important reason. I’m aware that theorists that are interested in art fairs don’t write about biennials and those interested in biennials don’t consider art fairs, as they understand these as separate spheres. But these are, as I say, “the old ways”: we need a less biased approach to counteract the “experience economy” and “culture industries” that have pervaded all spaces of contemporary life and also the artworld and its structures. This black and white approach (art fairs-bad versus biennials-good) is no longer valid as it’s unable to apprehend the large scale of greys: how art fairs and biennials have morphed throughout history, producing the so-called “biennialization” of art fairs and the “fairization” of biennials. In this sense, my book is not only about the history of art fairs and biennials but also about their heterogenous status in today’s neo-liberal system.

M.R. - It is common practice for fairs and commercial galleries to hire curators and art historians. Fairs also have significantly incremented exhibition projects-I’m thinking of Frieze Masters and Parcours. Do you think this distinction between “good vs bad” as you said, still stands?

P.B. - As you can see it’s very interesting what has been happening historically with the art fair. The modern art fair or artist-frame-to-frame-model was organized by artists; the contemporary art fair or dealer-booth-and-alley-model at the end of the 1960s was organized by dealers; and the global art fair or curator-open-space-model has been organized by corporations like Merchandise Mart, Art Basel’s MCH Group and so on.

And with it came also the shift in the profile of the art fair director: no longer dealers but art critics (Amanda Coulson and Marc Spiegler), curators (Omar López-Chahoud, Neville Wakefield, Andrea Bellini, Francesco Manacorda) and even art historians (Noah Horowitz). In short: art fairs have recruited profiles from other sectors of the art world that were not specifically connected to sales and the art market. Besides all those curated sections and panels and seminars—what I have called the “biennialization” strategy of the art fair—art fairs also attracted a new profile of manager with art historical knowledge, who is not afraid of the art market and promoting business. It’s fascinating in a way. But biennials are also de facto sophisticated sales platforms.

So, you can’t easily say which side is on the right side of art history. And in the end, it only reflects the complexities and contradictions proper of today’s neo-liberal society.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

M.R. - In your book you pinpoint the 1990s as a pivotal moment in the proliferation of biennials. This was a time where many institutions worldwide figured it was more effective to concentrate financial and logistical efforts on one periodical big event rather than investing in the program of an institution few people would visit. Cut to two decades later, many of these biennials no longer exist. What, in your opinion, went wrong?

P.B. - Yes, the 1990s was neo-liberalism in full swing with the advent of low budget air companies, cheaper transports, tourism, the naissance of city branding and so on. In short: the so-called “experience economy.” And within this whole “experience economy” biennials and art fairs have become the perfect tools of soft power, as Joseph S. Nye keenly would have argued, in the tough competition for attention.(3)

As you know, founding a biennial can respond to the want for “being modern” and attract tourism, but it can also respond to a political decision, which is very often the case. And since a biennial—unlike a museum—is a perennial event that happens every two years, it is a much more eagerly awaited affair that has achieved, as you know very well, cultural event status. Due to its periodicity, events like the Venice Biennale or documenta (or even Art Basel) have this aura that a museum lacks because it’s always there!

Yes, you’re right, many biennials have disappeared or are simply in bad shape. One of the best examples I know is the Valencia Biennial: it lasted four editions! It was a political decision by the Secretary of Culture Consuelo Ciscar from the Partido Popular, Spain’s right-wing party, to hold a biennial and put Valencia on the international map, and it was equally a political decision by her successor Esteban González Pons, member of the same political party, to get rid of it. Valencia had a €5 million euro budget, but the local scene was against it as they considered the money should be invested in the local artistic infrastructures. If a biennial doesn’t have the support of the local art scene and addresses its necessities it simply ends up failing. We can quote artist and Third Text editor Rasheed Araeen here confidently: “The purpose of a biennale anywhere in the world is first to address the needs of its own local or national constituency, its own art community, and if this constituency is not taken into consideration whatever one does will fail.” This was precisely the reason why the Johannesburg Biennale disappeared after its second edition, and this was also the reason why the local art scene in Gwangju created the Anti-Gwangju Biennale because-as Korean curator Jiyoon Lee recalled-they didn’t feel represented by the “junk from the West.” Very often it’s a political decision that underlies the foundation of a biennial and very often it’s equally a political decision that forces the termination. And, of course, these political motivations can respond in full or in part to a general economic recession and budget cuts in education and arts.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

M.R. - You mentioned the Valencia Biennale, an event you obviously have a great degree of insight on. I remember visiting the first edition and being perplexed at what felt like a very enjoyable cultural event but with little connection to the context in which it took place. Why do you think that was? Laziness? Parochialism? Both?

P.B. - I think it was a mix of parochialism, the desire for “being modern” in the sense of up-to-datedness, newness, progress and coolness and of course the firm idea of competing for international high-end tourism. In short: the biennale was another tool in the strategy of global city branding. And although the biennale only lasted four editions, it really put Valencia on the global map. Time Outdid a special magazine on Valencia and also architect David Adjaye did a special program on the BBC. And today everyone knows about Valencia. But is it very different with Istanbul, Gwangju, Sydney or Shanghai? Most of those biennales have reproduced the Eurocentric model and brought in high-end Western curators in order to attract international art audiences and press coverage.

M.R. - This brings me to another point you make in your book—the tendency of biennials of invariably picking up from the same pool of curators, resulting in the replication of the same model over and over again. Whilst I understand the reasoning—international experience and reputation are evident assets-ultimately you seem to imply that the blame for this lack of imagination lies mostly at the curators’ door rather than the organizers.

P.B. - Well, basically it’s a mix of factors here at play. On the one hand, we have local politicians and local elites that use the biennial to brand their city and their own agendas and recur to established curators that have been doing the rounds: first Harald Szeemann, Jan Hoet, Rudi Fuchs and the like, and more recent people like the late Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Massimiliano Gioni, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hou Hanru and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In this sense, you see there is a pool of curators with international status that for a local politician or local corporation can guarantee international visibility and international press coverage for their city with their sole presence. Deep down it’s a very parochial attitude that reveals an enormous inferiority complex among local politicians and elites, wanting to be accepted by the mainstream. And this is what has brought with it the kind of sameness and uniformity that is proper of most biennials in terms of curatorial proposals and the repetition of a same group of artists.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Furthermore, those curators are brought in because with them on board it’s much easier to have certain high-end artists participating and certain branded galleries, collectors and foundations paying production costs, transport, installation of the artwork and guarantee the presence of the artist.

Finally, as you can see from most biennales, all the topics are revolving around the same fashionable issues related to post-colonialism, multi-culturalism, globalization and a kind of bland institutional critique that ended up being institutionalized critique. All the World’s Futures, Viva Arte Viva, How to (…) things that don’t exist, May You Live in Interesting Times, Beyond the Future, Between Idea and Experience, Fever, A Grain of Dust a Drop of Water…. The titles are clear examples of this kind of curatorial art speak.

M.R. - The Venice Biennale stopped selling art in 1968. Art Basel was born in 1970. Do you think there is a correlation between these two events? Or do you have the feeling that fairs, regardless of the evolution of biennials, were bound to boom anyway?

P.B. - We consider the past with the eyes of the present, id est, anachronistically. We think grosso modo that art fairs are sales platforms while biennials and museums are not. But that has never been the case. Most of the exhibitions, starting with the Roman Old Masters blockbusters in the 1600s that later were replicated in Paris, London, Amsterdam and Berlin were sales exhibitions. The exhibitions organized by the national Royal Academies or salons were also sales exhibitions. Most museum exhibitions at the end of the 19^th and deep into the 20^th century were sales exhibitions.

In this sense, the fact that the Venice Biennale between 1942 and 1968 functioned like an art fair with an official trader, Ettore Gian Ferrari, who charged 15% for the Biennale and 2% for himself for any artwork exhibited at the show that he was commissioned to sell, was not new, it simply continued anterior sales models. We have to bear in mind that the art fair had already earlier sales precursors like the Renaissance pand (1470), the Baroque kermis (1630), the salons organized by the French Academy (1667), the Paris World Fair (1855), the Salon des Independents (1884), the Impressionist exhibitions (1784), the Munich Glaspalast Austellungen (1886) and especially The Armory Show (1913).

But yes, there is an interesting coincidence between the discontinuation of sales at the Venice Biennale in 1968 and the advent of the contemporary art fair at the end of the 1960s. Sales were an important part of the funding of the Venice exhibition, which was chronically underfinanced. The advent of the May 1968 protests also affected the Biennale and the Giardini. “Venice,” writes Vittoria Martini, “was invaded by thousands of students who believed the Biennale and the city itself represented all they were fighting against at the time: institutions overrun by rampant capitalism encouraging the commercialization of art.”(4) The protests also put an end to the awarding of prizes, and these were not reinstated until 1986.The prizes had always been surrounded by intrigue and corruption according to Alloway. Especially notorious was art dealer Leo Castelli, who campaigned incessantly with the international committee members to obtain the painting award for the artists he represented, like Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein. Dealers’ influence was felt strongly at the Biennale during these years, and the changing political and sociological climate crystallized around that time in the advent of the contemporary art fair organized by dealers: ART COLOGNE in 1967 and Art Basel in 1970. The student struggle against capitalism and bourgeois society paradoxically contributed to the advent of the art fair!

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Did sales end at the Venice Biennale? It’s obvious that sales have mutated into more sophisticated forms, but Venice is still one of the major platforms for consolidating artistic careers. Art dealing, concluded Alloway, is symbiotic of the modern Biennale. And let’s recall the words of former Art Basel director Lorenzo Rudolf when he decided to launch Art Unlimited in 1999: “Our biggest competitors were suddenly not the other art fairs but the biennials. We had surpassed the other art fairs, but suddenly we saw this phenomenon of the biennial turned into a market event; and even if it wasn’t official, next to each art work you would find the dealer and he was selling it.”

M.R. - You mentioned The Armory Show—arguably the oldest event of this kind. It managed to successfully survive different decades but lately it seemed to have suffered from the competition of global art fairs “invading” its turf. What do you think will happen in the long run? History alone doesn’t seem to help if you fail to adapt to an evolving landscape.

P.B. - The Armory Show in 1913 is a fascinating case whose feats and merits haven’t been properly acknowledged. There are of course sectorial studies, but when we put it in a larger context, we can’t but be surprised how it presaged the “contemporary art fair” model of the 1970s like ART COLOGNE and Art Basel and even the “global art fair” of the 1990s like ARCOmadrid, Frieze or Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK).

Organized in 1913 at the premises of the Armory of the National Guard’s 69^th Regiment on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, under the directorship of Arthur B. Davies, it introduced most European artistic movements to the American audience, from Romanticism to Impressionism to Cubism. It was a comprehensive survey show that wanted to present the history of modern art. Let’s recall that The Armory Show was a sales event organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS) in the manner of a huge exhibition, with around 1300 works by 300 American and foreign artists, tightly hanged on the walls in 18 partitioned spaces, held between February 19 and March 15. The driving force behind The Armory Show was formed by a small group of people consisting of Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, Elmer Livingston MacRae, Walter Pach and John Quinn. Artist Walter Pach, the trans-Atlantic liaison who had lived in Paris since 1907, acted as the exhibition’s sales broker.

The Armory Show is what I call the “modern art fair,” characterized by the artist-frame-to-frame model. On a less grand scale than the Salon des Indépendants, it was much more international and presented for the first time a massive show of European and North American art. This is what contemporary art fairs, like ART COLOGNE and Art Basel, would set out to do in 1967 and 1970, respectively! The show travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago and to Boston’s Copley Hall: 271,326 visitors attended the show in total! It was a curated show: the American section was curated by Davies and the European avant-garde by Pach. The Armory Show became a perfect example of how the modern techniques of marketing and publicity would help promote the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69^th Regiment Armory. Kuhn, Pach and Davies hired the services of journalist Frederick James Gregg as public relations representative, paying him the incredible amount of $1,200, subscribed to the Henry Romeike press service, printed 50,000 catalogues, four pamphlets of 5,000 copies each, a color poster, made lapel buttons, a set of post cards to advertise the show, and even made photographs of the show both for sale and for free distribution to the press. This is something not even ART COLOGNE and Art Basel were able to perform in the 1960s and 1970s on such a scale and with such sophistication! Even from a tax perspective it was absolutely modern: we should not forget that artworks that were less than a hundred years old had to pay a sales tax in America and The Armory Show took up the “duty-free” fight for living art to the Congress, completed successfully by John Quinn, who acted as legal adviser and won its revocation. More than forty years later Katherine S. Dreier asked herself: “What happened that this exhibition [The Armory Show] should have made such a lasting impression?” It brought avant-garde art to provincial America and it created slowly but steadily the major and most important market for art: first for Old Masters, later for the “New Old Masters,” the Impressionists, and much later for Cubism. And the shock waves of The Armory Show paved the way after the Second World War for New York as capital of the art world. It was discontinued for a series of complex reasons, but the most relevant was the rude repudiation from the camp of the artists, and not only those that were angry because they hadn’t been invited to exhibit their work, but also from factions within the AAPS. The radicalism of the European avant-garde caused a double shock: It crudely showed American artists their provinciality and it opened up the American market to foreign artists. This, the American artists considered a kind of betrayal by Arthur B. Davies, Walter Pach and Walt Kuhn. The Association had been brought to life to foster and defend the interests of its members, but the “American” acronym had been neglected in favor of foreign artists.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

Today’s The Armory Show was originated in 1994 as the Gramercy International Art Fair at the Gramercy Park Hotel. When it moved in 1999 to the 69^th Regiment Armory, the fair was renamed “The Armory Show” in homage to the legendary 1913 fair. Obviously, the situation is totally different now. I think it’s a mix of factors that we’re dealing with. The Armory Show never got really off the ground and I’m sure you recall that some of the most important galleries in New York never participated. I think that the mighty gallery structure in New York has become a kind of “permanent art fair” that worked for many years against the foundation of an art fair. Additionally, there hasn’t been a really first-rate art fair in the whole of the United States, not even Art Chicago in the 1980s when it was booming. It’s only when Art Basel decides to open a branch in Miami that the major American galleries decide to participate. And the same happens later when Frieze opens in New York. For some reason American art fairs failed where Art Basel and Frieze succeeded. And I think that The Armory Show will have difficulties competing with its European counterparts (especially now that there are many global art fairs like FIAC, ARCOmadrid, Art Basel Hong Kong) and, secondly, because the whole art fair business has been put into question. So, no, history alone is not enough to guarantee success! But for me The Armory Show of 1913 is an extraordinary and really outstanding event that revolutionized the art world and turned the tables in favor of America.

M.R. - In the book you also discuss extensively the role of ART COLOGNE. When it was conceived in 1967, Germany was still split in two. You would think that the reunification in the 1990s would pave the way for the fair to become even more central but the exact opposite happened.

P.B. - The case of ART COLOGNE, which I analyze in depth, is a really fascinating case of what not to do. ART COLOGNE had all the ingredients to become successful: official support and the collector’s base. And yet it didn’t succeed because of artistic, structural, organizational and psychological reasons that are outlined in the book and are too long to explain here.

But one of the main reasons was that it was not really internationally oriented. Important foreign galleries such as Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis and Ileana Sonnabend were not admitted to the fair. Rudolf Zwirner’s philosophy was: why let them participate if we can buy the works from them and sell them directly to our clients? That was a very bad decision that together with the fact that only the members of the Verein progressiver deutscher Kunsthändler (Association of Progressive German Art Dealers) could participate at the fair would favor Art Basel in the long run. Since Daniel Hug stepped in as new director in 2008, ART COLOGNE has become a much better fair. But it’s not at the same level as Art Basel or Frieze.

I sincerely think that what happens to ART COLOGNE is very symptomatic of the German art scene: it’s too much inward-looking. There are no key museums like MoMA or Tate Modern, there are no German curators in charge of international biennials or curating relevant international exhibitions. And while Berlin is a very important city in terms of the international presence of artists, the gallery scene is fragile. On top of that, if you look at German museums, unlike what happens in the US or UK, there are hardly any foreign directors working in Germany, which is very, very strange. It’s a fact that the artworld only travels to Germany every five years on the occasion of documenta!

M.R. - I remember ARCOmadrid at the turn of the century being possibly the only fair where Latin American art was solidly represented. Do you think the birth of Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) in the mid-2000s contributed to erode this position?

P.B. - Yes, absolutely! Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) stole in 2001 ARCOmadrid’s crown as the platform par excellence for Latin American art. Until then ARCOmadrid was the sole destination for Latin American art galleries. Lorenzo Rudolf, who was Art Basel’s director between 1990 and 2000, was the mastermind behind Basel Miami. Many art professionals think it was Sam Keller, but it was not his idea. Rudolf left in 2000 and Keller was at the helm of Basel Miami from the very first edition in 2001. And he really did a good job, but it’s important to respect the facts.

Now, what is even more interesting and less known is that ARCOmadrid’s director, Rosina Gómez-Baeza, had already by the beginning of the 1990s the idea of launching a sister fair in Miami. We should recall that at the beginning of the 1990s many important American galleries like Max Protetch, Robert Miller, John Weber and Donald Young were attending ARCOmadrid and not ART COLOGNE or Art Basel (Basel was facing serious problems by then) and they had suggested, according to Gómez-Baeza, to open a fair in USA “somewhere nice and warm” away from cold New York. Additionally, in 1992 when Rosina did a presentation of ARCOmadrid in Los Angeles, various Latin American galleries harked on the same idea. As such, in the beginning of the 1990s Gómez-Baeza proposed to IFEMA, ARCOmadrid’s governing body, the opening of a fair in Miami. But the answer by IFEMA was that her job was to bring people to Madrid, not to Miami! Of course, this was a very shortsighted decision that has had very negative consequences for ARCOmadrid. The major Latin American art galleries and also major USA galleries prefer Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) to ARCOmadrid. Madrid has become a second option. And this is the story of how ARCOmadrid lost its positioning of thefair for Latin American art!

M.R. - Art Basel Miami has taken the idea of collateral events to a new level. The first time I visited it in the mid-2000s I remember counting 18 fairs around town. (And you were involved with one—PhotoMiami). Why do you think Miami proved to be such fertile soil for this proliferation?

P.B. - Well, as you know, ARCOmadrid’s “experiential model” was functioning amazingly well and I’m sure you recall that the-who-is-who of the artworld in the end of the 1990s was in Madrid: from Glenn Lowry to Alanna Heiss to Barry Schwabsky, Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. The mix of panels, curated sections, performances, international collectors, art curators and other art professionals combined with the numerous openings and parties in Madrid made ARCOmadrid clearly different and more festive than any other fair at the time. This is what cultural critic Miguel Mora had to say about it on Sunday 16, 1997 in the Sunday edition of El País: “They are all well-dressed; the gentlemen with expensive shoes and the ladies in high fashion clothes; but the shadows under their eyes give away the exhaustion caused by an overloaded program: performances, parties, museum, art fairs, conferences and after-hours, then they begin all over again.”

This is what Sam Keller later implemented in Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB). Keller had visited ARCOmadrid many times and so he had a first-hand experience. Additionally, Rosina Gómez-Baeza told me that Keller visited her in Madrid with his entire team learning what she had been doing that made the fair so attractive.

Then of course, Miami had a mix of elements to offer that made the city irresistible. In the first place, the timing in December was perfect with no other big fair competing. This is very important (this has been for example one of the major failures for many years of ART COLOGNE). Secondly, the amazing weather made a trip to Miami enormously attractive, while New York, London and Berlin were freezing. Many people took the trip to the fair as a small holiday! Thirdly, the whole hotel and club scene in Miami also added glamour to turn the city in a preferred place for swinging (after) parties. Fourth, the private collectors like the Rubells, the Margoulis and the De la Cruz among others who opened their private houses and held shows at their exhibition spaces. Fifth, Miami is traditionally the city where many Latin American millionaires and collectors have a second residence and spend their holidays in December. So, the city was ripe for a fair that could have a strong Latin American flavor and become the first fair for Latin American art outplaying ARCOmadrid. And sixth, the fact that Miami is also a kind of tax haven adds an additional layer to its success.

Now, if you take all these elements together combined with the fact that in the meantime The Perez Art Museum and the ICA Miami have joined the scene, the result can’t be more spectacular. I remember to have visited Miami in 1997. From an artistic perspective it was a desert. People went, but to visit Gianni Versace’s mansion on Ocean Drive! The change Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) has brought to the city has been simply spectacular. And ABMB has pushed ARCOmadrid’s “experiential fair” model to stratospheric limits. I remember that at some point around 2008 or 2009 I counted 30 parallel art fairs to Basel Miami! Never in the world, and not even in Basel or in New York, has a fair created so many parallel events. It’s madness! What I always say to people that haven’t seen it with their own eyes is that they need to travel to Miami at least once. You can’t really imagine it if you haven’t experienced in the flesh!

M.R. - Should you be the director of an art fair, what would you do to make it stand out?

P.B. - Besides PhotoMiami I also worked for CIRCA Puerto Rico, as you know. But these were small fairs and one can “curate” the fair and talk to the participating dealers about what kind of art to bring. This is impossible with big fairs like Basel or Frieze. The “experiential model” that was invented by Rosina Gómez-Baeza at the beginning of the 1990s and that brought about the Global Art Fair (GAP) with curated sections, panels, parties, parallel museum exhibitions, focus countries, after-hours and so on (and that later Art Basel, FIAC, Frieze, The Armory Show and the rest of the fairs have copied) has worked very well for more than twenty years. But in times of economic crisis like now, it doesn’t seem to work. Art fairs are expensive because their fixed costs are very high. This “experiential model” went hand in hand with the strong presence of the curator with curated sections and even public projects especially conceived for the fair, like Frieze Projects. But today art dealers want more sales and less background noise. And I think that art fair directors for some reason have failed in building a larger collector’s base and finding new collectors. Many dealers are complaining that they meet hardly any new collectors at fairs.

So, if we take this into consideration, this is the art fair’s biggest challenge, and not conceiving new panels or flashy curated sections. The clients of the art fair are the galleries, and it needs to find collectors for them. In other words: back to basics!

There will always be big fairs like Art Basel and Frieze, but I think that smaller fairs should cater more to their local and national galleries and audiences. With COVID-19 art fair directors, like museum and biennial directors, have seen themselves overwhelmed. And in this case, they have been overreacting and organizing tons of OVR activities that have caused “OVR-fatigue.” In times of crisis, you have to offer your clients knowledge, but all these activities have caused too much noise and too little knowledge. In short: for me it’s not about doing something that makes you stand out as an art fair, but more about enlarging the art fair’s collector’s base and help dealers sell art and meet new potential clients.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

M.R. -You just mentioned the viral emergency. Years ago an attempt was made to launch the first digital art fair. It didn’t work out, mostly because technology wasn’t there yet. (I believe it was called “Exhibition Art Fair” and only lasted for two editions). Within the current climate, do you think that experience would have made more sense or fairs, like biennials, are at their best only when visitors have the opportunity to interact with each other and see art for real?

P.B. - Yes, you’re right. Art Basel America’s director Noah Horowitz was in charge, if you recall. It didn’t work out then and it wouldn’t work out today. The viewing experience is very poor and lacks imagination. It’s practically no more than a website with the price tag!

But let’s be honest: The artworld never made the shift from 1.0 to 2.0. It’s all very basic. If you take a good look most art magazines and websites work in the traditional paper-mode manner, id est, a text with an accompanying image uploaded on their website. There is hardly any intertextuality: It’s either a video or it’s a written text with photographs.

Are you asking me whether the digital is taking over the real experience? On the contrary, we will see two kinds of spectators from now on: 1) the OVR users who will have to content themselves with the digital experience (complementing it with visits to local and national exhibitions) and 2) the “realists” that will want to experience the real artwork. In other words: the art world will become more elitist, like it was before the 1990s, and international travelling will become more exceptional (unless there is a vaccine soon). Can you imagine going to see the Sydney Biennale and having to stay forcibly quarantined during two weeks in a hotel paid by you for finally visiting the biennale for a week? Not too many people will accept that!

It will also mean that real experience will have even more “aura” than before! As of today, online viewing experiences as the Art Basel one are extremely deficient. No wonder people ended being fed-up with the excess of OVR-activities. Comparing the digital experience with the real experience of an artwork is like comparing virtual sex to real sex: while virtual sex is good for an emergency it will never replace real sex!

M.R. - Your book casts important lights on a time when cities until then considered peripheral in an admittedly West-centric art discourse, like Istanbul, Havana, Tirana and Johannesburg, made an attempt to take center stage. Why do you think Istanbul seemed to have fared better than most?

P.B. - Istanbul is the perfect example of the neo-liberal biennial model: it has since its inception in 1987 applied the same recipe of international curators: Hou Hanru, Jens Hoffmann, Adriano Pedrosa, Charles Esche, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Nicolas Bourriaud, just to mention a few-and artists with an international reputation, the corresponding local quota and the vague themes that are normative in this kind of large-scale international event. And, last but not least, the biennale is organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), a non-profit and non-governmental organization established in 1973 by Dr. Nejat Eczacibasi, owner of the Eczacibasi Pharmaceutical and Investment Holding.

As Dany Louise rightly explained, “The IKVS foundation can therefore reasonably say to be aligned from inception with the economic interests of the parent company, international destination marketing, the globalizing economy and the desire to be associated with Western development concepts.” So, matters of education, developing a local art scene or attending its needs are not on the agenda.

Despite the complex political moments that Turkey is traversing (with the migration crisis, the role in the civil war in Syria, the rampant authoritarianism and religious conservatism, and the repression of women) in both the 2015 edition by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and the 2017 edition by Elmgreen and Dragset, political art was absent.In other words: the biennale functions as a de facto high-end marketing event for specialized art audiences.

M.R. - Do these shows necessarily have to display a political angle in order to work? In 1976 Carlo Ripa di Meana organized the Biennial of Dissent. It was the first time Venice was going for a thematic approach. It was criticized precisely because it was felt the political angle was too facile. Most importantly, it was dismissed as a weird approach. Interestingly, from the 1900s onwards devising biennials with a theme, even better if political, became the norm.

P.B. - Yes, the years between 1968 and 1976 are fascinating years in the life of La Biennale, but probably underrated among international art audiences and still “strange.”

To me perennial events like the Venice Biennale or documenta are important because they represent the Zeitgeist of our time: they should convey what is good, utopian or radical art and give us as citizens an idea of the challenges of society. But most biennials are imbued with the vague, ambiguous, “new institutionalist” and “soft” curatorial themes that became customary in biennials since Okwui Enwezor’s Johannesburg Biennale of 1997. As I said before, they all basically revolve around easy, marketable topics or, straightaway, non-concepts. These are the typical biennale themes of which Julian Stallabrass would have said: “They can be stretched to include just about everything and thus mean very nearly nothing.”

M.R. - 1972 is generally acknowledged as the year when documenta changed forever. However, you pin down the 1990s/early 2000s as a further moment of reconfiguration of the show.

P.B. - If Harald Kimpel talked about the exhibiting versus commissioning phase, I see three clear periods: 1) the modernist art phase (1955-1968), 2) the star curator phase (1972-1997) and 3) the global art phase (2002-today).

The first phase was under the helm of Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann and focused on exhibiting modern Western art. It was characterized, on the one hand, by Arnold Bode’s Inszenierung, which were innovative but not in the appropriate way. As a graphic artist and trade fair designer, his displays overplayed the artwork, relegating it to almost an irrelevant function. And as such, all the four documentas had an irretrievable art trade fair air. On the other hand, Werner Haftmann continued with Alfred Barr’s formalist reading of art history and abstraction as lingua franca. For this reason, even Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), which had been selected by MoMA’s Porter A. McCray and shipped to Kassel for the documenta2(to be held in 1959), was squarely rejected because it went against Haftmann’s narrative that “art had become abstract.”

The second phase starts with Harald Szeemann, who inaugurates the “star curator” era with well-known art professionals like Jan Hoet, Rudi Fuchs and Catherine David, and exhibits exclusively Western contemporary art. From a philosophical and geo-political perspective, and contrary to what the title of the exhibition enunciated, documenta was an exclusive Eurocentric and later Euro-Americancentric event. Walter Grasskamp defined it as “selective Eurocentrism.”Germany, Italy, France and, from the second documenta on, the United States provided the bulk of the artists. Other West European countries were totally ignored, as well as other parts of the world like East Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The third phase begins with the appointment of Nigerian-born Owkui Enwezor (the first non-European curator) and his global art documenta in 2002. And this will become the model ever since for today’s neo-liberal biennial that we see reproduced urbi et orbi.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

M.R. - Manifesta, the touring biennial who reached its finest moment in 2000 when it emerged as the first pan-European Biennial, is not discussed in depth. Yet it is an interesting subject, especially considering its current reputation as a “Biennial for Rent.” Is there any particular reason why you chose to stay away from it?

P.B. - While Manifesta is internationally the best-known touring biennial, it was not the first. So, a small clarification about the roving biennial and its genealogy is mandatory here. When we think of roving or itinerant biennials, we automatically think of Manifesta. But Manifesta is not the oldest, although maybe it is the loudest. We now know that the I Bienal Hispano-americana was held in Madrid in 1951 and travelled to Barcelona; the II Bienal Hispano-americana was held in 1954 in Santiago de Cuba and travelled to Caracas and Santo Domingo, among others; and the III Bienal Hispano-americana was held in 1956 in Barcelona and travelled to Geneva. It prefigured Manifesta by 45 years! Then we have, according to Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, “the Biennial of Arab Art that began in Baghdad in 1974 and continued in Rabat, Morocco and to Jordan.”And just two years after Manifesta, we have the roaming and ongoing BAVIC in Central America, held for the first time in Guatemala in 1998. And there are other smaller and lesser known “walking” biennials, like Meeting Points, the Emergence Biennale and Land Art Mongolia, just to mention a few.

I find Manifesta or “Moneyfesta,” as Dutch critic Sandra Smallenburg finely renamed it, interesting as the perfect example of the neo-liberal biennial modeland how it changed its discourse according to the blowing of the “money wind.” First it was supposed to enhance relations between East and West, but it only happened once in Ljubljana. Then from 2010 the focus changed towards the relationship Europe-North Africa. But in hardly 20 years it will be held three times in Spain: 2004 in San Sebastian, 2010 in Murcia and in 2024 in Barcelona again! I only see, as you rightly say, a “Biennial for Rent.” The city that pays the staggering hiring price of the Manifesta brand which started, let’s recall, in Frankfurt (2002) with €1,3M and amounted to proximately €8M in Marseille (2020), will ring the bell.

Now, was or is Manifesta a relevant biennial from a conceptual or a curatorial perspective? Not really! It is most of the time focused on young emerging art, and as such more cutting-edge and chaotic, but it doesn’t add much to the curatorial discourse. From all the biennials held, I think the Manifesta 6 Nicosia School project by Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel was a daring proposal but, as you well know, it wasn’t finally carried out. Maybe the engagement of Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities was too utopian, and precisely that was what made it particularly interesting. And I just haven’t found that kind of interest in most of the Manifesta editions.

M.R. - There were other reasons why Manifesta 6 didn’t work out regardless of the rocky relationship between the curatorial team and the Cyprus authorities. The curators didn’t get along to the extent that each went on to organize their own separate segment; there were budget issues; the idea of turning the exhibition into a school was debatable; and the concept of trying to reunite an island that had twice rejected this notion via referendum was arrogant-not utopian. It was a lost opportunity on many levels.

P.B. - You are far better informed than I am on the topic. I guess this is what happens when utopia meets Realpolitik! But this is precisely in my opinion the role of the biennial: not only to frame the Zeitgeistbut to propose the curator’s Weltanschauungwith all its utopian, radical, alternative or uncanny propositions, as flawed as they may be. Art’s role for me is to annoy society, to cause discomfort, to provide society with new perspectives. The Dana Schutz affaire during the Whitney Biennial (2017) with her challenging painting of Emmett Till entitled Open Casket (2016)is a perfect example of how the art world can serve as agitator or platform for triggering larger discussions that are relevant to society, in this case the Black Live Matters (BLM) movement.

Artoon © Pablo Helguera, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

M.R. - Another event you only mention in passing is Dak’art—arguably the most successful biennial on African soil. Is it because you don’t think it would contribute anything to your general narrative? Or is it simply a geographical area that doesn’t interest you as others? I’m thinking about the Latin American Biennials—São Paulo, Havana and the Bienal Hispano-americana among others-another untold story that you focused on.

P.B. - It’s difficult to keep track of all biennales. And honestly, I don’t have much information about African biennales. And I have never traveled to Africa, unlike other continents where I have been able to visit many biennials. So, that’s above my pay grade and I leave that to African scholars or those interested in Africa. Dak’art would be aligned with the Havana Biennial and with the Asia-Pacific Triennial representing what I have framed as the resistance biennial model.

It’s more logical and more natural for me to address and focus on the rich history of Latin American biennials, a continent that I not only have visited very often and maintain fluid connections with, but where I also had the chance of living and also working as Head of Visual Arts of Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile between 2015 and 2017.

For me it’s surprising how little about Hispanic and Latin American biennials appears in Anglo-Saxon publications while this continent has, after Europe, the richest history in biennials, starting already in the 1950s and the 1960s. Think of the Hispanic American Biennial (1951) in Madrid; the São Paulo Biennale (1951); the II Hispanic American Biennial (1954) held in Cuba; the I Bienal Interamericana (1958) in Mexico City; the Bienal de Córdoba (1962) in Argentina; the Bienal de Coltejer (1968) in Medellin; I Bienal Latino-Americana de São Paulo (1978); La Bienal Paiz (1978) from Guatemala; La Bienal de La Habana (1984); La Bienal de Cuenca (1986) in Ecuador; the Panama Biennial (1992); the Curitiba Biennial (1993) in Brazil; the Mercosul Biennial (1996) in Porto Alegre; the touring biennial BAVIC (1998) in Central America; and a series of other biennials that have been created ever since. To my surprise, Asian biennials that came much later to the fore are more known among international audiences than Latin American biennials.

In conclusion: one of the goals of my book was to put the spotlight, on one hand, on the rich and fascinating tradition of biennials in Latin America that remains largely untold and, on the other, to counteract some of the readings done by Western scholars on the São Paulo Biennial and, especially, the Havana Biennial.

* A smaller version of this interview appeared in Universes-in-Universe on January 2021.

Notes

1. Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-5.

2. Ernst van Alphen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiii.

3. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, No. 80 (Autumn, 1990): 153-171.

4. Vittoria Martini, “A Brief History of I Giardini,” in Muntadas. On Translation: I Giardini, exhibition catalogue Spanish Pavilion 51^stVenice Biennale, Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (12 June - 6 November 2005), 213.

Michele Robecchi is a curator and writer based in London, where he is a Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press. Some of his recent publications include monographs on the work of Sharon Hayes, Yayoi Kusama, Adam Pendleton and Adrián Villar Rojas. He was one of the curators of the 1st and 2nd Tirana Biennale.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-biennialization-and-fairization-syndrome-interview-with-paco-barragan/feed http://artpulsemagazine.com/kettles-whistle-andy-did-you-hear-about-this-one http://artpulsemagazine.com/kettles-whistle-andy-did-you-hear-about-this-one#comments Sat, 22 May 2021 00:27:35 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=12935 By Michele Robecchi

About two years ago, an extraordinarily fortuitous circumstance occurred. Unbeknownst to one another, in the boardrooms of several art institutions scattered around the globe, staffers were having the same conversation at the same time. Whether initiated by people at the helm, team members or trustees interested enough to participate, it pretty much revolved around this basic question: Why don’t we make an exhibition in 2019 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing?

In what can only be too appropriately described as a cosmic convergence, the responses were equally synchronized. The concept’s selling points—that it would be time-sensitive, of broad interest and likely to reactivate the historical link between art and science—were reviewed with growing appreciation, and curatorial and publicity departments enthusiastically went to work on what had all the elements of being a safe box-office fest.

Cut to a few months later, and the party got started. Undoubtedly facilitated by the flexibility that characterize private organizations, the Aga Kahn Museum in Toronto hit the ground running with “The Moon: A Voyage through Time” (March 9). This was followed by the rather essentially titled “The Moon” at Grand Palais, Paris (April 3); “Moonlight” at the Hasselblad Foundation, Goteborg, Sweden (May 25); and “The Moon Museum 1969″ at the Vasarely Museum, Budapest, Hungary (May 27). The honor of ferrying the concept to the summer season was given to the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, which inaugurated—you guessed it—”Photographing the Moon” on June 28, shadowed by “Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (July 3); “Ticket to the Moon” at the Kunsthalle Krems, Germany (July 14); and “By the Light of Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (July 14).

View from the exhibition “The Moon,” Grand Palais. Scenography: bGc studio agency. © Rmn Grand Palais 2019. Photo: Didier Plowy.

July 20, however, was the exact date Neil Armstrong touched lunar soil, and as such when the highest concentration of events was planned. And so enter “Fly Me to the Moon” at the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art (Germany, July 19); “The Moon” at the Royal Greenwich Museum in London (July 19, no connection with the Paris show); and the Jules Verne-inspired “From the Earth to the Moon: Art traveling towards the Silver Asteroid” at Palazzo Madama in Turin, Italy, (July 19).

With the arrival of fall, doubts about the originality of the idea as well as suspicions that the exercise was becoming a bit tedious began to materialize. This partially accounts for “Milky Way Traffic Regulations (Space is the Place)” at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (Aug. 2)—a tangible curatorial effort to stray from the pack both in terms of presentation and content, cue the somewhat trite but infallible Sun Ra’s reference in the subtitle; or “Moving to Mars” at the Design Museum in London (Oct. 18), where organizers suggested the interesting notion of using moon celebrations as a subtext to address the new big event—the race to Mars. To restore the balance and bring everything back to more conventional lines, the Centre Pompidou in Malaga, Spain, closed the festivities with the environmentally-friendly “The Moon: An Imaginary Space to Defend” (Oct. 18). One of the biggest casualties in all this was the Hayward Gallery in London, which could only watch and bite their nails, having realized the golden opportunity they wasted by making their move way too soon. “Deceitful Moon” opened 10 years ago in the modest setting of the project room—a sign of how little the venerable British institution, which once claimed to aspire to be “the Ikea of Art”—regarded the idea at the time. Be forewarned though: 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, the 400th of the trip of the Mayflower, or, to stay true to the theme, Buzz Aldrin’s 90th birthday, in case you wish to gamble on what might be in store.

Far from being a critique of curatorial lack of imagination, it is quite fascinating to see how many permutations of the same concept the human brain can come up with. The exhibitions outlined above are just a small but significant representation of a much larger number, and all feature an incredible number of artists and works. It is just a pity that none of them thought of including Nanni Valentini’s seminal piece 28 Days of the Moon (1980). This is a very poetic and powerful sculpture, at onceemphasizing the intimate yet mysterious relationship our planet entertains with its only satellite. It is also made of clay—a primary and very untechnological material that stresses how the existence of some phenomena goes way further back than the modern understanding of them.

Michele Robecchi is a curator and writer based in London, where he is a Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press. Some of his recent publications include monographs on the work of Sharon Hayes, Yayoi Kusama, Adam Pendleton and Adrián Villar Rojas. He was one of the curators of the 1st and 2nd Tirana Biennale.