Of whom and of what are we contemporaries? What does it mean to be contemporary?
— Giorgio AgambenAccording to common-sense understanding, defining what we mean by the “contemporary” in art presents few problems: anything being produced in the present is always contemporary, and by the same token all art must necessarily have been contemporary at the time of its production and/or initial reception. This much is clear. It is also clear, however, that the phrase “contemporary art” has special currency today. If “contemporary art” has largely replaced “modern art” in the public consciousness, then it is no doubt due in part to the term’s apparent simplicity, its self-evidence. Trouble-free outside the art world, the “contemporary” is twice as useful on the inside. For one, it appears to be a purely temporal marker, simply denoting the “now”, purged of critical or ideological presupposition. It appears not to require any lengthy unravelling, of the kind that Baudelaire, for example, felt to be required of the “modern”, whose sense of “the ephemeral, the contingent” linked an orientation towards the future to a break with traditional values, and in particular to a break with a cyclical conception of time.

 

In January–December 1993, Alighiero e Boetti made a variation of his work Cieli ad alta quota. Six versions of the watercolour drawings were published in Austrian Airlines’ in-flight magazine Sky Lines. In addition, airline passengers could ask stewards for the same works in the form of jigsaw puzzles, which were the same size as the folding tables in the airplane. The six details of Cieli ad alta quota, which showed a certain number of airplanes flying within a specific area in various directions, always implies the potential for expansion, continuing beyond the frame at both high and low altitudes. Destinations connect and interweave to form networks of lines along which meaning is created though the variety of possibilities for the migration of forms.

 

The impossibility of capturing form in Boetti’s Cieli ad alta quota takes us to Giorgio Agamben’s What Is the Contemporary?, which shows the one who belongs to his or her own time to be the one who does not coincide perfectly with it—to capture one’s moment is to be able to perceive in the darkness of the present this light which tries to join us and cannot: “the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him.”

 

Defining contemporaneity as precisely “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism,” he goes on to describe this contemporary figure as the one who is not blinded by the lights of his or her time or century: “The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.” Agamben takes us to astrophysics to explain the darkness in the sky to be the light that travels to us at full speed, but which cannot reach us, as the galaxies from which it originates recede faster than the speed of light. To discern the potentialities that constantly escape the definition of the present is to understand the contemporary moment.

 

Jean Rouch often told me about the immense courage required in order to be contemporary, to engage in the difficult negotiation between the past and the future. Like Agamben, he spoke of a means of accessing the present moment through some form of archaeology. Both Rouch and Agamben agree that being contemporary means to return to a present we have never been to, to resist the homogenisation of time through ruptures and discontinuities. Agamben concludes:

 

This means that the contemporary is not only the one who, perceiving the darkness of the present, grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; he is also the one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. He is able to read history in unforeseen ways, to “cite it” according to a necessity that does not arise in any way from his will, but from an exigency to which he cannot not respond. It is as if this invisible light that is the darkness of the present cast its shadow on the past, so that the past, touched by this shadow, acquired the ability to respond to the darkness of the now.

 

The future will be….

 

The future will be chrome

Rirkrit Tiravanija

 

The future will be curved

Olafur Eliasson

 

The future will be “in the name of the future”

Anri Sala

 

The future will be so subjective

Tino Sehgal

 

The future will be bouclette

Douglas Gordon

 

The future will be curious

Nico Dockx

 

The future will be obsolete

Tacita Dean

 

The future will be asymmetric

Pedro Reyes

 

The future will be a slap in the face

Cao Fei

 

The future will be delayed

Loris Greaud

 

The future does not exist but in snapshots

Philippe Parreno

 

The future will be tropical

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

 

Future? …You must be mistaken

Trisha Donnelly

 

The future will be overgrown and decayed

Simryn Gill

 

The future will be tense

John Baldessari

 

Zukunft ist lecker

Hans-Peter Feldmann

 

Zukunft ist wichtiger als Freizeit

Helmut Kohl (proposed by Carsten Höller)

 

A future fuelled by human waste

Matthew Barney

 

The future is going nowhere without us

Paul Chan

 

The future is now – the future is it

Doug Aitken

 

The future is one night, just look up

Tomas Saraceno

 

The future will be a remake…

Didier Fiuza Faustino

 

The future is what we construct from what we remember of the past–the present is the time of instantaneous revelation

Lawrence Weiner

 

The future is this place at a different time

Bruce Sterling

 

The future will be widely reproduced and distributed

Cory Doctorow

 

The future will be whatever we make it

Jacque Fresco

 

The future will involve splendour and poverty

Arto Lindsay

 

The future is uncertain because it will be what we make it

Immanuel Wallerstein

 

The future is waiting–the future will be self-organised

Raqs Media Collective

 

Dum Spero/While I breathe, I hope

Nancy Spero

 

This is not the future

Jordan Wolfson

 

The future is a dog/l’avenir c’est la femme

Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron

 

On its way; it was here yesterday

Hreinn Friðfinnsson

 

The future will be an armchair strategist, the future will be like no snow on the broken bridge

Yang Fudong

The future always flies in under the radar

Martha Rosler

 

Suture that future

Peter Doig

 

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” (Shakespeare)

Richard Hamilton

 

The future is overrated

Cerith Wyn Evans

 

futuro = $B!g(B

Hector Zamorra

 

The future is a large pharmacy with a memory deficit

David Askevold

 

The future will be bamboo

Tay Kheng Soon

 

The future will be oursss

Koo Jeong-A

 

The future will be… grains, particles & bits.

The future will be… ripples, waves & flow.

The future will be… mix, swarms, multitudes.

The future will be… the future we deserve but with some surprises, if only some of us take notice

Vito Acconci

 

In the future… the earth as a weapon…

Allora & Calzadilla

 

The future is our excuse

Joseph Grigely and Amy Vogel

 

The future will be repeated

Marlene Dumas

 

OK, OK I’ll tell you about the future, but I am very busy right now; give me a couple of days more to finish some things and I’ll get back to you

Jimmie Durham

 

Future is instant

Yung Ho Chang

 

“The future is not”

Zaha Hadid

 

The future is private

Anton Vidokle

 

The future will be layered and inconsistent

Liam Gillick

 

The future is a piano wire in a pussy powering something important

Matthew Ronay

 

In the future perhaps there will be no past

Daniel Birnbaum

 

The future was

Julieta Aranda

 

The future is menace

Carolee Schneemann

 

The future is a forget-me-not

Molly Nesbit

 

The future is a knowing exchange of glances

Sarah Morris

 

The future: Scratching on things I could disavow

Walid Raad

 

The future is our own wishful thinking

Liu Ding

 

Le futur est un étoilement

Edouard Glissant

 

The future is now

Maurizio Cattelan

 

The future has a silver lining

Thomas Demand

 

The future is now and here

Yona Friedman

 

Is a fax best to use as facsimile G&G FAX is:

THE FUTURE?

SEE YOU THERE!

AS ARTISTS WE WANT TO HELP

TO FORM OUR TOMORROWS.

WE HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED IN

THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.

IT’S GOING TO BE MARVELLOUS.

LONG LIVE THE FUTURE

WITH LOTS OF LOVE

ALWAYS AND ALWAYS

Gilbert&George

 

The future is without you

Damien Hirst

 

The future is a season

Pierre Huyghe

 

The future is a poster

M/M

 

We have repeated the future out of existence

Tom McCarthy

 

The future has two large beautiful eyes

Jonas Mekas

 

Less, few tours in my future

Stefano Boeri

 

Future is what it is

Huang Yong Ping

 

The future is the very few years we have remaining before all time becomes one time

Grant Morrison

 

FUTURE MUST BE HERE TODAY

Jan Kaplicky

 

Future is more freedom

Jia Zhangke

 

My art is very free, I don’t know what to do in the future. But I am positive

Xu Zhen

 

The future is inside

Shumon Basar, Markus Miessen, Åbäke

 

NO FUTURE – PUNK IS NOT DEATH!

Thomas Hirschhorn

 

The future will be grim if we don’t do something about it

Morgan Fisher

 

The future is reflexive and coming together

Olafur Eliasson

 

The future is listening

Shilpa Gupta

 

The future lies in the unknown

Ann Lislegaard

 

Nothing stinks, only thinking made it so

Sissel Tolaas

 

What the future is, you only know next morning

Die Zukunft kann man nur ueber Nacht definieren

Peter Sloterdijk

 

The future is a disease

Peter Weibel

 

future >< past

Susan Hefuna

 

 

 

 

Giorgio Agamben, What Is the Contemporary, in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 53.

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. and ed. Johnathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 13.

Giorgio Agamben, What Is the Contemporary, in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 45.

Ibid., 41, 44

Ibid., 53