31 December 2007 2 Comments

By Nicholas Bourriaud

Undoubtedly, one of the most enigmatic statements made by Marcel Duchamp occurred during a talk in Philadelphia in 1961 entitled ‘Where do we go from here?’ During it, he denounced the ‘enormous dilution’ of art and the ‘levelling down of present taste’, of which the ‘immediate result will be to shroud the near future in mediocrity’.

’In conclusion’, he continued, ’I hope that this mediocrity, conditioned by too many factors foreign to art per se, will this time bring a revolution on the ascetic level, of which the general public will not even be aware and which only a few initiates will develop on the fringe of a world blinded by economic fireworks. The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.’ Currently, nothing sounds stranger than such notions of the avant-garde or underground: today everything comes immediately to the surface, in real time. And yet as with an exercise book, it is still the margin that defines the page. I returned to this question of art’s ’difference’ at this year’s Venice Biennale, which made art into something right-thinking, full of ’good works’, like a grand charity gala with a moral aim. Amid this shrouded demagogy the work of two artists stood out, that of Richard Hamilton and Gerard Byrne. Although they have different motives and use different means, both negotiate this problem of temporality. It’s quite possible that the first task of art today should be related to temporal writing: a ’time specific’ art, in the same way that the art of the 1960s privileged the notion of the ’site specific’.

Of course while art has always answered to the same purposes each era states them differently. For Duchamp, the idea of the underground was the idea of a space in which artists could re-state our need for transcendence, an escape from the material world. There is nothing religious about this, the functions of art (and of the sacred) are no longer expressed in terms of a world still to come. While for a dog, a canary or an anthill, the world is continuous, our good fortune as humans is to live in an infinite world, which is to say, a secular world of unlimited possibilities. Art is the best tool we have when it comes to shattering our environment into an infinite number of imaginary tales, forms and space–times. For example, each human society drafts its own masterscript: most of the time, we blindly play out its scenarios, which proscribe our behaviour, define our work and play, and provide our institutions and imaginary models: nine-to-five jobs, marriage, mortgage, retirement… The way art acts on these scenarios, or scraps of code, is to reorganise them, by treating them as if they were not givens; art is the alternative editing board, the post-production, of the huge film we call ’reality’.

But before acting in this way, it is necessary to know how to look and read between the lines; as such, art is also a reading aid. It provides the instruments and optical equipment that allow us to interpret the world. To take a simple example, it could be said that our relationship with reality is like that of a Cabbalist trying to decipher sacred texts by inventing multiple ways of reading. I shall not list all of the functions of art here; suffice it to say that an artist seems to me to be more useful socially than a financial trader. But what does seem clear is that art occupies a specific position in the city, and that this position is thus political: it incites its subjects to become active, to refuse the passive position the world of entertainment tries to foist on them. Entertainment places us in front of images to be looked at, while social formatting provides us with frameworks in which we must live. If artistic activity consists of putting these instruments and products back into play, then the observer’s task is, as in tennis, to knock the ball back into the other court.