When is art now? This lecture will focus on definitions of Contemporary Art that focus on the experience of 'time', comparing and contrasting them with theories of contemporary art that hold it to be a (sub)culture, a genre, a period, or a style. What does it mean to state that art is contemporary rather than to hold that it is modern, prescient, traditional, nostalgic, postmodern, ancient...? What concepts of time do people need to develop and share in order to understand the contemporary? Where and how is the temporality of the contemporary situated? This lecture will outline some of the key ways in which art theory has attempted to approach such questions by introducing a few key concepts such as: supercessionism, presentism, contemporaneity, anachrony, polychrony and chronopolitics. To illustrate how this works in practice, the lecture will examine the chronopolitics of the 2012 Documenta and 2013 Venice Biennale.

1. Shimabuku
Mobile Phone and
Stone Tool (2014)
iPhone, iPad, iPad mini
and ancient stone tools,
Dimensions variable
artworlds | defining the contemporary Professor Neil Mulholland
neilmulholland.co.uk
confraternityofneoflagellants.org.uk

2. Unfortunately Jake can’t be with us this week.
SEMINAR GROUP 2, 11.10 – 12.00, Teaching
Room 02, Old College will not take place.
Please follow the instructions he sent by email
to attend an alternative class.
If you are unsure, come to Emma’s group in
J05 at 11.10am or 12.10pm!
Seminar changes this week

3. What does it mean to state that art is (so) contemporary?
Tino Sehgal
This is So Contemporary
performance at the Venice Biennale 2005
www.kopenhagen.dk

4. ‘contemporary art’
a culture
a genre
a period
a style
???
Bloomberg New
Contemporaries
2019,
installation view at the
South London Gallery.
Photo: Andy Stagg

5. Hebdige, D., 1979. Subculture the meaning of style,
London; New York: Routledge.
‘contemporary art’
a culture
Proposition: Contemporary art is
a (sub)culture.

6. Sarah Thornton
Seven Days in the Art World
(New York: Norton, 2008)
‘contemporary art’
a (sub)culture
Contemporary art is a
‘branch’ of human culture.

7. Merlin Carpenter
Die Collector Scum
“The Raf Simons Celebration Paintings”
February 10th - March 15th, 2008,
Reena Spaulings New York
Image: http://billionjournal.com/time/54b_files/
Merlin%20Carpenter_Die%20Collector%20Scum_Rena%20Spaulings_2008.jpg
‘contemporary art’
a culture
Problem: Noise/Signal?
Which aspects of contemporary art as a culture
command our attention?
e.g. this performance-painting raises issue of scale
Micro: the cultural significance of the compositional
decision of using a black plastic bucket to hold black
paint (culture as embodied gesture)
Macro: gross equity capital invested in all contemporary
art (culture as a symbolic representation of wealth)

8. ‘contemporary art’
a genre
Proposition: Contemporary art is an
approach to cultural production that
has typified characteristics and
shared expectations.
e.g. this metacommunicative
painting….
© John Baldessari
Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell
1966-68
acrylic on canvas
173.36 x 143.51 x 3.81 cm
Source https://www.thebroad.org/art/john-baldessari/tips-artists-who-want-sell

9. ‘contemporary art’
a genre
Genre Theory:
“Recipes are a genre; but genres are not
recipes.” Freadman, A. (1987). Genre and
the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor and
Francis: 49.
e.g. Fluxus event scores and happenings
© Alison Knowles
Proposition #2: Make a Salad
1962
Happening, materials/dimensions/duration variable
Source https://www.wikiart.org/en/alison-knowles/make-a-salad-1962

10. Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art book series
‘contemporary art’
a genre
Problem: Sub-genres?
e.g. Pop, installation, post/net-art, ANTART,
performance, environmental art, bioart, neoism,
bad painting, accelerationism, studio art, etc.
Are there typified characteristics and shared
expectations that cut across all sub-genres of
contemporary art?

11. ‘contemporary art’
a genre: e.g. studio art
Ryan Gander
Felix provides a stage #8-(Eleven sketches
for ‘A sheet of paper on which I was about
to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell
to the floor’), 2008 Poster paper 300 x 450
cm.
featured in:
Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out
February 6 - May 30, 2010 at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Chicago

12. ‘contemporary art’
Proposition: Contemporary art is a period
What does it mean to state that art is
contemporary rather than to hold that it
is modern, prescient, traditional,
nostalgic, postmodern, ancient...?
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, V&A London 2011

13. Google Books ngram of
‘Contemporary ‘
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?
content=contemporary&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccon
temporary%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccontemporary%3B%2Cc0
‘contemporary art’
a period

14. Lot 153 ‘BARR, Alfred H (1902-1981), Jr. Cubism and Abstract Art. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1936. 4o. Original tan cloth; pictorial dust jacket (some soiling and toning, chips along
lower edge and at head of spine).
https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/barr-alfred-h-1902-1981-jr-cubism-and-5388669-details.aspx
‘contemporary art’
a period
Supercessionism - one time period follows on
from that which precedes it towards an
inevitable telos (endpoint)
Supercessionism is a chronologic related to
modernism’s ‘peculiar propensity for
understanding time that passes as if it were
really abolishing the past behind it.’ (Bruno
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,1993, 68)

15. 1960 Home Office
Better Homes & Gardens
https://www.flickr.com/photos/americanvintagehome/
4585250851/in/photostream/
‘contemporary’
a period style
‘Contemporary style’ =
late 1950s/early 1960s
interiors such as this:

16. John Lewis and Partners
west elm Mid-Century Desk, Acorn
2020
https://www.johnlewis.com/west-elm-mid-century-desk-acorn/p3254251?
sku=234663833&s_ppc=2dx92700046359354015&tmad=c&tmcampid=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChM
IjPichZ6S5wIVgbHtCh1j7QDqEAQYAyABEgJ20fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
1960 ‘contemporary style’
2020 mid-century modern

17. John Lewis and Partners
west elm Mid-Century Desk, Acorn
2020
https://www.johnlewis.com/west-elm-mid-century-desk-acorn/p3254251?
sku=234663833&s_ppc=2dx92700046359354015&tmad=c&tmcampid=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChM
IjPichZ6S5wIVgbHtCh1j7QDqEAQYAyABEgJ20fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
‘mid-century modern’
an anachronic
pseudomorphic style

18. Keith Farquhar
John Lewis Partnership
2000
Acrylic on Canvas
Courtesy of the artist
“Nowadays, the idea of returning to
‘the eternal and the immutable,’ or
of forging new forms of both,
appears anachronistic, quaint, and
feeble, or worse, infantile.”
Terry Smith in Smith, T., O. Enwezor
and N. Condee (2008). Antinomies of
Art and Culture: Modernity,
Postmodernity, Contemporaneity.
Durham, Duke University Press.

19. John Lewis and Partners
west elm Mid-Century Desk, Acorn
2020
https://www.johnlewis.com/west-elm-mid-century-desk-acorn/p3254251?
sku=234663833&s_ppc=2dx92700046359354015&tmad=c&tmcampid=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChM
IjPichZ6S5wIVgbHtCh1j7QDqEAQYAyABEgJ20fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
‘mid-century modern’
a creative anachronism?

20. Rodney Graham, "The Gifted Amateur, November 10th, 1962
(2007) dye coupler transparency in fluorescent lightbox
286.1 x 556 x 17.8 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

21. Terry Smith
What is Contemporary Art?
‘contemporary art’
an experience of time
‘the thickening of the present’

22. Terry Smith in Smith, T., O. Enwezor
and N. Condee (2008). Antinomies of
Art and Culture: Modernity,
Postmodernity, Contemporaneity.
Durham, Duke University Press.
‘contemporary art’
an experience of time
‘The word ‘‘contemporary’’ has always
meant more than just the plain and
passing present. […] The term
calibrates a number of distinct but
related ways of being in or with time,
even of being in and out of time at
the same time.

23. DOCUMENTA 13 : the book of books,
catalog 1/3 / [Artistic Director, Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev; Head of Publications,
Bettina Funcke]. Ostfildern, Germany :
Hatje Cantz, [2012]

24. Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg’s El Taco,
Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, 25.09.–14.11.2010

25. El Chaco Meteorite, Campo del Cielo, Chaco, Argentina

26. Artist book "The Campo del Cielo Meteorites – Vol.
II: Chaco", produced by dOCUMENTA (13),
published by Verlag Walther König.
Between October 26 and December 22 2012,
Faivovich & Goldberg presented part of their
Chaco-related research at the Goethe-Institut
Wyoming Building at 5 East 3rd Street NYC. as
part of Resonance.

27. Chronopolitics:
'the relationship between political behaviour of individuals and groups and their
time-perspectives.’ (Wallis 1970, 102).
What politics of time do
people need to develop
and share in order to
understand a culture as
something that takes
place ‘in our own time'?
Aboriginal Chaco communities protesting against the proposed removal of El Chaco Meteorite, Campo del Cielo, Chaco, Argentina
Source: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/corbett/documenta-2012_detail.asp?picnum=2

28. Here + Now: Scottish Art 1990-2001
by Maria Lind and John Calcutt
‘contemporary art’
as presentism?
‘Presentism is widely understood to
mean the practice of representing,
interpreting, and, more importantly,
evaluating the past according the values,
standards, ambitions, and anxieties of a
later “present”.’ (D'Arcens 2014, 181)

29. Il Palazzo Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedic Palace, part
of the 55th Biennale di Venezia 1st June > 24th
November 2013, Italy
Curated by Director Massimiliano Gioni

30. …the exhibition becomes a
type of anthropological
research in which the artwork
and other forms of figurative
expression are treated in a
similar manner, which is
frequently done in museums
devoted to other periods and
fields, but for some reason it's
not something we do when it
comes to contemporary art.
(Massimiliano Gioni in Bonami
2013, 16
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Plötzlich diese Übersicht [Suddenly This Overview],
1981-
Il Palazzo Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedic Palace, part of the 55th Biennale di
Venezia 1st June > 24th November 2013, Italy
Curated by Director Massimiliano Gioni

31. Video still from Episode 3, by Renzo
Martens (2008) 90 mins
Exhibited at the 6th Berlin Biennal
(2010) KW Institute for Contemporary
Art www.berlinbiennale.de

32. John Lewis and Partners
west elm Mid-Century Desk, Acorn
2020
https://www.johnlewis.com/west-elm-mid-century-desk-acorn/p3254251?
sku=234663833&s_ppc=2dx92700046359354015&tmad=c&tmcampid=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChM
IjPichZ6S5wIVgbHtCh1j7QDqEAQYAyABEgJ20fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
‘anachronism?’
anachronic time

33. Illustration from Carl Jung’s The Red
Book 1913– 30
ink, tempera and gold paint on paper, 40 × 31 cm, Courtesy:
© 2009 Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung, Zürich. First
published by W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2009
Il Palazzo Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedic Palace, part of the
55th Biennale di Venezia

34. This certainly looks like the world
as it is now. No longer does it feel
like ‘‘our time,’’ because ‘‘our’’
cannot stretch to encompass its
contrariness. Nor, indeed, is it ‘‘a
time,’’ because if the modern was
inclined above all to define itself
as a period, and sort the past into
periods, in contemporary
conditions periodization is
impossible.
Terry Smith in Smith, T., O. Enwezor
and N. Condee (2008). Antinomies of
Art and Culture: Modernity,
Postmodernity, Contemporaneity.
Durham, Duke University Press.

35. George Kubler
The Shape of Time
(1962)

36. John Baldessari -
Painting for Kubler
1966-68 Acrylic on
canvas 172.4 x
143.5 cm

37. Bedwyr Williams The Starry Messenger at the Wales Pavilion in the
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Venice, 2013
HD video 16:9 15mins

38. “Duration has different rates. It
cuts into different lengths, and it
displays different kinds of shapes.”
- George Kubler, The Shape of Time.
Reconsidered, Perspecta, Vol. 19
(1982) 112
Bedwyr Williams The Starry Messenger at the Wales Pavilion in the
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Venice, 2013
HD video 16:9 15mins

39. multiversal: multiple art worlds
existing + emerging genres entangled
different shapes of time overlapping

40. neilmulholland.co.uk
confraternityofneoflagellants.org.uk