The Future of Art
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear Hanru
Daniel Birnbaum, a close colleague and friend of mine, and one of the sharpest of our present generation of art writers, had this to say of the future: “If the future existed in a concrete sense that could be discerned by a ‘better brain’, we wouldn’t be so seduced by the past. But the future,” he observes via Nabokov, “has no such reality. It is but a ‘spectre of thought’.”
The market-driven future
European Cultural Policies 2015, a 2005 book of scenarios on the future of art making and art funding edited by Maria Lind, an influential curator and currently director of IASPIS (International Artists Studio Program in Sweden), shares a vision of art subservient to profiteering. Lind commences with one such scenario: “It is 2015. Art is almost completely instrumentalised – regardless of whether its financing is private or public. Art services either national or European interests, where it is especially useful in the construction or reinforcement of specific identities. At the same time, art is a desirable commercial product. It is ideal for collecting and it contributes to creative employment opportunities. Visiting art museums and centres is a popular, easily digested leisure activity. In 2015 art is also used to stave off undesirable fascistic and nationalistic tendencies in society.”
One aspect of art’s future is premised, like many elements of our economy, on strategic trans-border partnerships and expansions. Its market-driven inflections have other embodiments as well: one is the contemporary art fair and the second is the upsurge in private museums and foundations. Neither of these attributes are new: art fairs have been in vogue since the grand salons of the mid-19th century and almost all of today’s great civic art collections derived from private interests. Even so, the post-2000 contemporary art calendar has become awash in art fairs like the Armory Show, Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, the Frieze Art Fair and the penetrating extension of ‘shadow’ fairs which now thrive in their wake; such fairs have eclipsed the biennial as salient presentation mechanisms of the moment. Cumulatively, these trends bear witness to the art world’s pragmatism, with contemporary fairs offering a comparatively innovative, adaptable and speedy way in which to exhibit, discuss and buy art for today’s ‘global’ consumer, and enterprising collectors filling a presentation void otherwise burdened by slow administrative processes and entrenched procedures at museums. The risk is that this all lapses into mere opportunistic shuffling and recedes the moment the market cools; the reality is that the art world is likely to be trending in this general direction for some time to come. After all, these are efficient ways of presenting work and bringing the leading art world actors together at the very historical moment that people and institutions within the field of contemporary art are more geographically diffuse than ever before.
Return to real engagement
Yet many, if not most, art futures have little to do with the marketplace. Daniel Birnbaum has written compellingly of Philippe Parreno and Doug Aitken as two artists evocative of the future direction of storytelling. For Birnbaum, these artists are interesting precisely because of their rejection of linear narratives, producing bodies of work in which time frames are unclear (Parreno) and events unfold through a multiplicity of perspectives (Aitken). Aitken’s multi-screen video installations, such as interiors (2002), are often theorized in this manner, showering viewers with different vantages of the same act all at once. Such art is concerned more with how we actually experience life as opposed to how we think, or are taught, we do: “Perhaps this art of the future,” writes Birnbaum, “no longer can be understood in terms of an organic brain but instead forces us to invoke a device at once mechanic and sentimental.” Parreno’s art may also constitute something of our present post-video moment: he and I organized an opera for the summer 2007 Manchester International Festival that was staged over the course of a few days in July and represented an experiment in time-coding, and a return to the real space of engagement with audiences – versus the virtual space of digital media.
In Futureways (2004), artist Rita McBride solicited pieces of short fiction from over a dozen fellow artists, curators, writers, et al. about the future of art. The contributions are telling: The majority mention biennials and triennials, though none discuss art fairs, a testament to the prolific growth of these events in the years since this publication; many dismiss the relevance of Western cultural epicenters in favor of those in China, Japan and, in certain sci-fi variants, outer space – a vision consistent with today’s numerous cultural expansions into Russia, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America and beyond; and a couple raise perhaps the most interesting issue of art’s future as codified data. Laura Cottingham, in her essay set in 2199, had this to say: “Although today it is well known that the artistic contributions which are most likely to endure through time are those created without tangible form – words, dance and music – the 20th century was the last century to believe absolutely in the permanence of art objects.” She goes on to call it ‘The Century of Grasping’ and dismisses its ‘false hope for permanence’ and its retrograde fetishisation of objects over ideas.
Destination shared knowledge
Cottingham’s vision dovetails with the legacy of 1960s era conceptual art and the prioritisation of information, intellectual property and systems-based analyses. It also squares with the open-source movement famously set in train during the 1990s by computer programmers such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux. This is a future of viral P2P interfaces and user-led progress, gaining increasingly widespread appeal today through vehicles like Wikipedia and YouTube. The art world, predicated on an economic system of exclusivity and artificially erected boundaries to entry, has been slow to adapt, but, as with the music and film industries, adaptation is likely only a matter of time. So here we have a future of data-sharing and an art institutional system that will need to reposition, even reinvent, itself so as to remain a relevant cultural actor.
Doris Lessing has recently spoken of a future without museums. It’s not that she’s fundamentally opposed to these institutions, but worried that their prioritization of material objects from the past may not be enough to convey functional meaning to tomorrow’s generations. Her 1999 novel, Mara and Dann, is premised on the aftermath of an ice age thousands of years into the future that has eradicated the entirety of life in the northern hemisphere. Her protagonists, long since confined to the other side of the globe, embark upon a journey into this now desolate terrain but they are at a loss with the cultural remnants of former Europe; they have no grounding in its decayed artifacts and buried cities. This is pure fiction, but nevertheless warns that “our entire culture is extremely fragile” – that the more dependent it becomes on increasingly complex devices, the more susceptible it is to a sudden and terminal collapse. In light of point, Lessing urges us to take pause and to reconsider the capacity of our language and cultural systems to proffer knowledge to those outside of our immediate public. This is a path towards the future led by pragmatic modes of communication, like how in the 1970s NASA deposited an archive, a time-capsule of sorts, into outer space, including newspaper clippings, images, objects, etc: this becomes a potential vehicle through which extra-terrestrial life may potentially come to understand humankind.
Finally I would like to mention a recent project of my own: the formula list. The undertaking has the working title of “Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality”, and is inspired by Roger Penrose’s groundbreaking publication, Road to Reality: A complete guide to the laws of the universe (2004). It is both a calculated and chaotic look inside the minds of some of our great contemporary thinkers. Such a compilation can never make claims to predicting the future but in contradistinction to the dizzying levels of mediation that today cloud the creative process – what the media reports, what press releases state – it shines an unobstructed gaze into these figures’ thinking process and indicates what at least some micro-futures constitute.
I have become increasingly taken with visions of the future in my own work. Over the past year, I have surveyed artists, architects, designers, historians, philosophers about their own opinions of tomorrow: the results were published in a book by onestar press earlier this year, a selection of which I will share with you here.
The future will be
HURRICANE
Hans Ulrich
The future will be….
list compiled by Hans Ulrich Obrist
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-organized
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 ousss
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.
ITS 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
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Originally printed in ART iT No.17 Fall/Winter 2007