The Territories of Art

The following essay is excerpted from the 2007 exhibition catalogue Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art.

In the past few decades the beauty in art has not been immediately apparent to us; we have had to look for it and to find it for ourselves. Art has been unquestionably linked to the Western world's changing political, social, and cultural circumstances and, in the challenge of creating art that is meaningful in this new context, artists have tried to find new explanations and answers. Artists have become researchers in different disciplines and areas of knowledge. Thus, we find ourselves facing artistic practices that are much more oriented toward concepts than toward visual gratification, an art more steeped in thought than in pleasure or comfort. The artwork has acquired a process-oriented and fragmentary sense. Its conceptual reflection overshadows its visual appearance. 

Never before has art been so demanding not only in its reading and interpretation but also in the very roots of its existence. Because today's artistic discourse is neither closed nor finished, different artistic practices have made huge changes in the relations between an artwork and how it is received by the viewer. In order for art to take on its full meaning, it must be understood as the practice—both aesthetic and ethical—of making and remaking reality, a process that must be carried out by both the artists and the viewer. At this time of apparent globalizing uniformity, what current artists share is not a style but rather their efforts to build personal aesthetic universes and to defend their spaces and their worldviews, to put forth their own formal necessities and to build themselves a new reality. 

The 1990s offer a marked contrast to the panorama of expressive individualities that was characteristic of the 1980s and reflect the breakdown of the certainties in which modernity developed. We find ourselves facing the end of the grand stories, the end of an unshakeable faith in reason, and of the conviction that the development of knowledge and technological progress will make the world more equable and fair. It is the end of the belief that history is a progression and its achievements are invariably directed toward freeing society and the individual. In this now-disquieting place, artists find themselves needing to rethink subject, body, identity, and so on, to undertake a new reading of history, and to consider the discourse of diversity and the languages of other cultures.

In contemporary art's process of hybridizing languages, the notion of the image has played an essential role in the transformation of artistic expression. The proliferation of images in our culture has created an area of fiction, a floating universe of evanescent realities that have come to destabilize our beliefs about what is real. This situation has led to considerable questioning of the mechanisms of representation and their influence on the presentations prevalent in our modern and advanced society. But, at the same time, it has permitted new relations with what is visible, making it possible to shape the appropriation of reality in other ways. For example, Jim Hodges tests the meaning of reality by imagining fictitious scenarios, which he then sets down in drawing, sculpture, photography, and installations. In the case of Matthew Barney, each piece is ambivalent in its original composition and its nature. The works always belong to more than one category at a time: object and image, object and performance, body and machine. He often makes a world that is, itself, a complex and labyrinthine field. 

Photography, which was previously used as a vehicle for information and documentation, has become an important means of expression and experimentation. Since the 1980s, a select group of New York-based artists have concentrated their work, using photography, on the meaning of art in the era of media consumption and on the meaning of representation in this art. They include in their work symbols, images, slogans, and stereotypes that pose questions about the social context in which words and images function and manipulate us. Thus Cindy Sherman shows us the degree to which we are exposed to a life that obliges us to play the most varied roles—which we struggle to do without even realizing it—and how our personalities change or begin to disintegrate as a result of media and social pressure. Such artists explore the instability, the ambiguity, the fragility, and the falseness of the cultural structures of classic representations of contemporary subjects. These are artists who are aware of themselves more as a vehicle than as the end of a discourse. 

Others, such as Nic Nicosia, renounce the illusion of being objective witnesses and instead use their art as an instrument that allows them to reconcile the fictitious with a means of capturing what is real. In order to reconstruct a narrative, they establish various levels of representation, involving the viewer, too, in an ambivalent play of reality and fiction. The theatricality of their photographic images acquires a sense of credibility through their relation with a real scene created by photography itself. This extends to an approach to the sense, perception, and relations of time and space, as can be seen in the photos of James Casebere, in which the spiritual and emotional values of light in architecture are represented in pictorial style. 

European photographers provide us with an intimate and psychological medium for our communication. Starting from their individual vision and feeling, their work transforms reality and establishes a relationship between photography, psychology, and sociology. German photography has always had a coolness in the choice of motifs and in the manner of framing and capturing them. German artists are part of a long history and an intense relationship with the most existential, social, and even aesthetic aspects of photography. For artists like Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, photography is a current and universal medium in which form and content, mind and spirit, are inseparably mixed, constituting a new way of thinking about reality.

The works of Willie Doherty and Olafur Eliasson occasion the opportunity to rethink the relationship between landscape, perception, and culture. Doherty addresses the representation of violence in a subtle manner, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere in his works. More than simply landscapes, his photographs are a reflection of the political history of his native Northern Ireland. Olafur Eliasson suggests in his photographic work that perception must be studied and understood within the context of one's environment and as a construct of one's culture. The scenario chosen for his work is always Iceland, with its majestic landscapes that are a living manifestation of nature, almost uncontaminated by progress.

It is only recently that painting has been readmitted as a language, accepted as a reasonable art form through which to express the complexity of our time. Painters of the new generation do not conceive art in a militant way, nor do they try to create an all-encompassing pictorial paradigm to replace or even be the equivalent of the natural order. They use modern art styles as means rather than as ends, ignoring norms and prejudices in order to relate forms and theories that would previously have been opposed to one another. However, they all share one thing: they are not painting images of the world, they are painting images about the world. Painting has become an instrument that allows them to create an entirely personal art using the wealth of data, facts, and impressions produced by the multifaceted worlds of our daily life. 

Such an approach can be seen in the work of Guillermo Kuitca, which is rooted in a philosophical reflection on loneliness, a universal theme he has developed through biographical reference. This philosophical character goes beyond the dialogue between figuration and abstraction, between painting and architecture. In his paintings he uses a process that runs from the treatment of the surface as an abstract play of lines and objects to the representation of a possible space. This space can be real, but it is also abstract, isolated in time, with no links to enable us to recognize its origin or its destination. Matthew Ritchie has built an imaginary world, a synthetic visual language, a working model that uses signs parallel to the languages of religion, science, alchemy, and aesthetics. This vocabulary is used first to build a model, an artificial universe, and then, within the artwork, to describe a story. His paintings are made with a simplicity that reflects the now almost impossible goal of constructing a coherent world. 

In the case of Laura Owens, in  making her paintings she accepts any ideas that come into her imagination. In a language that mixes photos and copies, pieces of printed cloth, illustrations, and other paintings, she insists on the coexistence of abstraction and representation. The work of Luc Tuymans encourages fundamental questions about our understanding of pictures in general and of painting in particular. He addresses issues such as the relationship between document and fiction, the perception of history in pictorial terms, and the political side of painting.

It is clear that it is not possible today to offer an all-encompassing view of the achievements of contemporary art. Contemporary works reveal the drastic changes in the role that artists play in society and culture and demonstrates how many different forms of art have become fields of exchange, rather than of expression. In this future we are constructing, artists will probably not be dedicated exclusively to redefining art; they may well be an important part of the redefinition of our lives. 

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