Antinomies of Art and Culture

by Smith, Terry

• ISBN13: 9780822342038
• ISBN10: 0822342030
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and post-modernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, post-modernity, globalization, and decolonization are still relevant or useful. Including twenty essays and seventy-seven images,Antinomies of Art and Cultureis a wide-ranging yet incisive inquiry into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment.In the volume's introduction the theorist Terry Smith argues that predictions that post-modernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated. Smith suggests that the various situations of decolonized Africa, post-Soviet Europe, contemporary China, the conflicted Middle East, and an uncertain United States might be better characterized in terms of their "contemporaneity," a concept which captures the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all currently competing universalisms. Essays range from Antonio Negri's analysis of contemporaneity in light of the concept of multitude to Okwui Enwezor argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss's defence of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay's characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume's centrepiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard'sAnalogueproject. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind.

Author Biography

Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and a visiting professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney. Okwui Enwezor is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at the San Francisco Art Institute. Nancy Condee is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Terry Smith: Introduction:
The Contemporaneity Question	p. 1
The Politics of Temporality
Antonio Negri: Contemporaneity between Modernity and Postmodernity	p. 23
Geeta Kapur: A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary	p. 30
Rosalind Krauss: Some Rotten Shoots from the Seeds of Time	p. 60
Boris Groys: The Topology of Contemporary Art	p. 71
Multiple Modernities
Monica Amor: On the Contingency of Modernity and the Persistence of Canons	p. 83
Suely Rolnik: Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event Work of Lygia Clark	p. 97
Jonathan Hay: Double Modernity, Para-Modernity	p. 113
Gao Minglu: "Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth": Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art	p. 133
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie: The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist Metaphors and the New Global Order	p. 165
Zoe Leonard: Analogue, 1998-2007	p. 187
Afterworlds
Okwui Enwezor: The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition	p. 207
Nancy Condee: From Emigration to E-migration: Contemporaneity and the Former Second World	p. 235
Colin Richards: Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art	p. 250
Wu Hung: A Case of Being "Contemporary": Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art	p. 290
Cotemporalities
Bruno Latour: Emancipation or Attachments? The Different Futures of Politics	p. 309
James Meyer: The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism	p. 324
Lev Manovich: Introduction to Info-Aesthetics	p. 333
Mckenzie Wark: The Giftshop at the End of History	p. 345
Nikos Papastergiadis: Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary	p. 363
References	p. 383
Contributors	p. 413
Index	p. 417
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