Art: A Vision of the Future: Call for Papers

Author: Rasheed Araeen

DOI: 10.1080/09528820903184526

Publication Frequency: 6 issues per year

Published in: Third Text, Volume 23, Issue 5 September 2009 , pages 499 - 502

REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS

Third Text has reached its 100th issue. This marks twenty-two years of publishing history since our foundation in 1987. It also amounts to a considerable body of work achieved by the scholarly efforts of our collaborators on an international scale. Third Text has been fortunate in eliciting and encouraging responses from contributors across the world whose critical reflections might otherwise have been neglected or altogether excluded. Third Text's brief remains, as it always was, to provide an international platform for those artistic and critical practices, and in general for the production of knowledge beyond Eurocentric confines, that are constantly at risk of being marginalised. An archive of impressive benefit to anyone interested in the narratives of modern art history and visual culture has accumulated over this long and consistent process.

The point of this special centenary issue is not to rest on self-congratulation. On the contrary, and mindful of this new century's global troubles, it is incumbent on Third Text to take critical stock of itself, to review its shortcomings, and even, why not, to consider its failures - it may be that what it aimed at has not yet been achieved. There can be no success in advancing a critical examination of the world if one is not prepared to confront one's limitations or failures - and to try to go beyond them. Art historical knowledge and critical discourses are both fundamental to the understanding of art, but if this understanding cannot go beyond its academic or institutional frameworks and offer a way forward into the future and affirm life - of everything on this planet - what is the point in such an exercise?

Two questions need urgently to be addressed. What good is criticism? What knowledge does art have? These are the questions - simple in words but not simple in fact - posed for self-examination in this special issue for the twenty-first century. How best to approach them? These questions must be asked with even greater rigour than before, now as we face a legacy of failures in modern history that endangers the future prospects of humanity. Aspirations and hopes at the dawn of the twentieth century were dashed by the slaughter of the First 'Great' War. Bourgeois ideology was revealed as bankrupt and art had no choice but to turn to anti-art in a bid to liberate itself from the emptiness of bourgeois aesthetics and integrate with everyday life. But did it succeed? Was there not a failure of the avant-garde due to a persistent delusion that art can still reflect the world and change it merely by the self-centred enterprise of exceptional individuals? Has art now not become part of the bankruptcy it sought to confront by adopting complicit sensationalism and mass media celebrity tactics in its efforts to thrive in the global market? Its failure of affirmative vision is the dark lens in which we see trapped the aspirations of working people, of formerly colonised peoples and women across the globe. Art has now debased itself and become no more than the desire to take part in the very system that it once struggled against.

The failure of art is not an absolute closure. The merits and deficits of the historical avant-garde are in need of reconsideration if we are to understand the present and plan for a better future. Art must again take its place, as it once hoped to do, in and not against the interests of the collective. The avant-garde's radical ideas failed, inasmuch as these were contained within aesthetic individualism and legitimised within art institutions, and inasmuch as they were appropriated and their true significance aborted by turning them into institutionally manageable objects frozen in their temporalities. But the ideas themselves are still there to be recuperated from their institutional closures. Ideas in the course of productions of knowledge can never be permanently frozen or trapped, as the absolute property of either any individual or any institution. They can always be salvaged and given impetus in keeping with the dynamic of new times and spaces. They can indeed be made to perform a radically transformative function in dealing with the problems of humanity in the twenty-first century.

In order to perform this function, the very concept of art will have to liberate itself from the two historical limits of containment and legitimisation. One is containment in the artist's own narcissist ego; the other is art's dependence for its legitimisation as art on the institutions that facilitate and promote art only as reified commodities placed in museum and marketplace showcases.

The question is: can art liberate itself from this containment and become part of the collective everyday struggle of humanity for a better future? How? It is not humanity alone that faces a dire future but the whole life of the planet, as a result of the kind of life that humanity has been pursuing. Climate change and all other catastrophic effects now emerging from it are only the symptoms of this ill pursuit. Can art or artistic imagination intervene in this situation and offer a way out? It can, and should.

This special centenary issue of Third Text invites its contributors to ponder these questions and offer their views. The past offers us enough knowledge of art, particularly of its failed or uncompleted projects that affirm life, and the critical understanding of this knowledge, beyond its prevailing containment, can help us with new ideas that might lay a foundation for an entirely new conceptual framework for art in the twenty-first century. What we need is not just a critical understanding of the past and the present, but a profound shift of understanding that must lead us to the VISION for a better future. Is art up to that task?

Richard Appignanesi

Rasheed Araeen

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Some of you have by now received our Call for Papers for our Special Centenary Issue, and I hope you have already been thinking about it - if not started writing. I attach here a slightly revised Call for Papers.

I would like to emphasise the importance of this Special Issue. Whatever we have so far done or achieved, it is important that we do not go on repeating the same thing with the same agenda. We must move on in the light of the changed and changing conditions of the world. It is now becoming clear that what humanity has been pursuing, with a particular world-view and specific strategies, particular aspirations and enhanced desires, has not resulted in improved conditions of life on earth. On the contrary, things are now out of control, with increased competition for scarce world resources and escalating human violence. We can blame the present economic and political system on what Guy Debord called 'The Society of the Spectacle', but is this enough? Is art today not complicit with what has now become a grand spectacle of globalisation?

Globalisation, in my view, is not what it is said to be. It does not represent a space in which humanity asserts its universalism, but a conglomeration of nation-states, with their own specific particularities, ethnicities and agendas, under the patronisingly dominant umbrella of the West. What we now need is a true universalism, humanity's common aspiration in our march towards an egalitarian future.

People in the artworld would argue that my understanding and assertion of the role of art is either naive or too simplistic; that I ignore the complexity of this relationship that involves critical reflections, ironies and paradoxes, and that art has no other choice. I do recognise the importance of all these, but is this not what we have been doing for the last hundred or so years? Even when art tried to escape from the brutality and violence of the bourgeois system (what happened during the periods of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Mao's China was merely a reaction to this system), it was constantly sucked back into it.

As pointed out in the revised Call for Papers, art did begin with a positive vision at the beginning of the twentieth century. But what vision do we now have for the twenty-first century? Do we want to repeat what happened in the last century or move on with a new vision? What should this VISION be? Third Text alone cannot offer this vision. It can only be developed collectively. Third Text itself was conceived as a collective work and must continue to move forward collectively.

Not all of you are going to agree with me, with the aspirations outlined here, but you do not have to. What I expect from you is not an endorsement but a critical engagement. You can even dismiss the whole thing as an unrealisable vision, so long as your position is well argued and rationalised historically, aesthetically and within the conditions we face today, not only sociopolitically but also artistically. Why should we continue producing ugly works of art which negate life?

With kind regards to all of those writers and readers without whose support and participation Third Text would have not travelled this so far; and with a hope that we will march together into the future with a new vision.

Rasheed Araeen