Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
the end of the 1930s – ‘modernism’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘decadence’ and ‘kitsch’ – despite the fact that the chapter on ‘The Idea of Modernity’ (written in the mid-1970s) still ended with the emphatic declaration that ‘the Querelle des anciens et des modernes has been replaced by a Quarrel between the moderns and the contemporaries.’3 By the mid-1980s, postmodernism had become the periodizing term of choice to mark the distance from a now-historical modernism, a distance that had previously been registered by the presentness of the contemporary. For some historicists, like Fredric Jameson, this seemed to imply that the postmodern was ‘post-contemporary’.4 Fortunately, the term did not stick. In fact it has only been in the last ten years, with the decisive discrediting of postmodernism as a coherent critical concept, that ‘contemporary’ has begun to emerge into the critical daylight from beneath its commonplace function as a label denoting what is current or up to date. Hence the recent rush of writing trying to make some minimal theoretical sense of the concept.5
This writing reflects the fact that having emerged as a self-designating periodizing term after 1945, of a quasi-epochal kind (much like ‘Renaissance’ self-designated its present as a new beginning), thereby gradually condemning the established referents of ‘modern’ to the past, the structure of contemporaneity is itself changing. Indeed, the very idea of contemporaneity as a condition is new. At the same time, the widespread diffusion of the term has placed it in danger of being emptied out of its increasingly complex temporal-existential, social and political meanings, by being treated as a simple label or periodizing category. This is of particular concern because what seems distinctive and important about the changing temporal quality of the historical present over the last few decades is best expressed through the distinctive conceptual grammar of con-temporaneity, a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries – as if time itself is indifferent to this existing together – but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times’, a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times.6 This problematically disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward, historicist use of ‘contemporary’ as a periodizing term, in the manner in which it is encountered in mainstream art history – for example, in its stabilization of the distinction between modern and contemporary art. Although, within this discourse, as a register of the continual historical movement of the present, we nonetheless find at least three competing periodizations of contemporary art, three overlapping genealogies or historical strata, three differently extended senses of the present, within the wider time-span of a Western modern art. Each is constructed from the standpoint of the rupture of a particular historical event, and each privileges a particular geopolitical terrain.
Three periodizations of contemporary art
The distinction between modern and contemporary was first stabilized after 1945 not in Western art history, but in Eastern Europe, as part of the Soviet reaction against the categories of modernity and modernism.7 For Georg Lukács, for example, in the 1950s, socialist realism was ‘contemporary realism’, since the actuality of socialism defined the historical present.8 The City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, founded in 1954, was one of the very few art institutions to use the term before the 1960s (it became the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, in 1998). In Eastern Europe, ‘modernity’ was considered an ideological misrepresentation of the historical time of capitalism, covering over its internally antagonistic class forms of historical temporality and representation. Later, in the West, as the distinction between modern and contemporary gradually took hold, it was less of a polemically political one, and more of a straightforward historicist partitioning of chronological time – which is not to say that it was thereby any less ideological in its implicit theoretical structure and its effects. It was not until the 1980s, in fact, that ‘art after 1945’ was recoded by art institutions and art publishers as ‘contemporary art’, joining the end of a queue of major historical movements running from the Renaissance through Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, up to its predecessor, Modern Art.9 This was an acknowledgement not only that a particular canon of modern art increasingly belonged to the past, but also that the art of the present was no longer to be identified with modernism, in its formalist, medium-specific sense. A wider range of ‘art since 1945’ could thus be embraced within an extended present, which engulfed and recoded the postwar canon of modernist formalism itself. ‘Contemporary’ thereby became the art-institutional successor to ‘modern’ at precisely the same time that, in critical writing, a variety of what had initially been grasped as ‘post-formalist’ practices were being reconceptualized as ‘postmodern’.
1945 represents the beginning of the international hegemony of US art institutions, and thereby of US art itself, of the incorporation of the waste products of pre-war avant-garde practices into the museums, and of the institutional advance of the so-called neo-avant-gardes. Chronologically, this is the broadest periodization of contemporary art currently in use. It is in various respects too broad, while at the same time being, in others, too narrow. Do we really still inhabit the same present, art-historically and art-critically, as Abstract Expressionism, for example? Alternatively, is the Duchamp of the years of the First World War really so distant from us as to fall outside the category of ‘contemporary art’ altogether, as this chronological periodization is forced to insist? Such problems draw attention to the inadequacy of any merely chronological conception of the time of art history. Nonetheless, even within such crude periodizations, there is always a suppressed qualitative aspect: the moment of the break, in this case, the beginning of the period at issue, the beginning of the postwar. Reflecting on this moment from the standpoint of the present raises a question that is familiar from Japanese debates but is rarely asked in Europe or the US: namely, when will the postwar end? Has it not, in fact, already ended?10 It is those offering an explicitly affirmative answer to this latter question who have the sharpest, most critically delineated sense of the contemporary, represented by the third periodization (below). On the broad definition, however, we are still essentially living, art-critically, in an extended postwar.
The geographical terrain of this periodization is formally worldwide – marked as it is by the end of a ‘world’ war. Yet it is effectively an art world seen and selected from the standpoint of the USA – that is, one side of the Cold War inaugurated by the postwar. The postwar definition of the contemporary, until very recently, effectively excluded the ‘actually existing socialist’ states (1945–90) from historical time, recognizing only an externally intelligible artistic ‘dissidence’ based on the continuation of past modernist legacies or the importation of then-current Western forms. Art-historically, this was made possible by the Museum of Modern Art’s institutional appropriation of the work of the pre-war European avant-gardes during the 1930s, which allowed for the subsequent narration of postwar US abstract art as the authentic continuation of this project, and thereby of the ‘Western’ artistic tradition as a whole. In artistic terms, the dominant version of this periodization thus privileges the heritage of abstraction.11 It has tended to read later work in these terms, to the detriment of the conceptual and political heritage of Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism – although the canon is now gradually expanding. (Dadaism and Surrealism appear on Alfred H. Barr’s famous flowchart only in so far as they feed into ‘non-geometrical abstraction’ – that is, as essentially painterly traditions.)
If the first periodization is geopolitically epochal in character – registering the weight within Western art history of the broadest political determinations – yet also parochial in both its backward-lookingness and restricted geographical focus, the second periodization focuses more tightly, in its framing terms, on developments immanent to artistic practices and their art-institutional recognition. This is a periodization that conceives contemporary art as beginning some time in the early 1960s, in that ontological break with prevailing object-based and medium-specific neo-avant-garde practices carried out by a range of new types of work, of which performance, minimalism and conceptual art appear, retrospectively, as the most decisive.12 From this point of view, contemporary art is post-conceptual art.13 The ‘event’ marking this rupture is not