WHAT IS THE CONTEMPORARY I joined another reading group as this text seemed to be important to research ideas that I’m thinking about re Alain Badiou’s 15 thesis on contemporary art and Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of Altermodernism.
I was not disappointed. Giorgio Agamben from his book What is an apparatus? has made a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one’s own time.
He states that those who are truly contemporary, who truely belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. He explians though that this dys-chrony does not mean the contemporary is a person who lives in another time, a nostalgic.
‘Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch….are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.’
He goes on to talk about the contemorary as seeing the darkness, i.e things that others can’t see, I take this to be science yet undiscovered or inventions not yet thought of. However it is not possible to be self-consciously contemporary.
I like this, it means that I shouldn’t try too hard to be contemporary as I wont then be contemporary. It also absolves me from trying too hard to get art right. I will read the research I deem necessary for an artist today, then I will let instinct and intuition play its part.
