*Nam June Paik — Tate Modern, 2019
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It’s around this time of year that the predictions for the year ahead begin to pop up. I enjoy these as they are usually jam packed with interesting case studies and rabbit holes to dig down into. But more, I enjoy them because they give me something to anchor to. A sense of reassurance in a future that is otherwise unpredictable (2020 — case in point).
Over the years I’ve noticed art more explicitly seep it’s way into these annual forecasts — particularly as the creator economy has taken shape.
In a shift away from art as a way to represent the past (as seen in state courts and museums), art has spent the best part of two centuries becoming a key to unlock the future. Reaching its present state, as increasingly homegrown, virtual and activist. So it gives a good subtext to a number of emergent themes.
But as Rosie and Faris Yakob pointed out in their brilliant newsletter “history creates the present and informs the future”.
So while we sometimes think of emergent themes as something revelatory and new, equally, as they noted — ‘nothing ever really ends’.
I’ve often thought art a reassuring example of this in action. It’s something to anchor to. A captured moment of what’s past, and perhaps even away to find identity. But equally it hints at what’s to come. As Paul Klee said, “art does not recreate the visible, but makes visible”. And Mark Twain affirmed “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”.
As Fischli and Weiss demonstrated in ‘The Way Things Go’, rather life is a “mechanical ballet of cause and effect”**.
Meaning, that while we can’t predict the future, we can find our own ways of making sense of it, and of using the past to guide it.
As I’ve noted before, the pendulum swing of culture will keep ticking regardless.
So maybe we can indulge in the liminality of it all. And maybe that’s where the excitement lies.
This has been particularly useful to think about in a year when all plans and predictions got tossed out the window before we’d even had chance to give up on our new year’s resolutions.
So, as we reach the dawn of a new year I started to think about just 3 of my favourite examples of when art made the future visible to see if there’s anything we can learn from that.
1.Nam June Paik - from the internet to video conferencing
Realising the power of the television to not just broadcast but connect, Nam June Paik is said to be the first person to coin the phrase “Electronic Superhighway” in 1974. A medium by which everyone would be connected, and location would not longer matter.
He wrote about this in a report titled ‘Media Planning for the Post Industrial Society — The 21st Century is only 26 years Away’ saying: ‘Conferences between people in different locations via color video telephones will become commercially feasible…’ ‘it will become a springboard for new and surprising human endeavours’ and ‘[it] will drastically reduce air travel, and along with it the chaotic shuttling of airport buses through city streets — forever!’
While previously his work was in the abstract and seen only in galleries and perhaps akin to Futurama in tone. Now, looking back on a year where video calls have pretty much kept us metaphorically moving, his prediction has become eerily relevant — 46 years later.
Of course, this is not to say that he is solely responsible for predicting the internet, or the circumstances in which it would be used. But for me, amongst a number of examples of when Paik used technology to talk about his vision of the future, it is (perhaps topically), a favourite. It doesn’t suggest an ending to the story — just an interesting middle, peppered with possibility and hope.
2. Olafur Eliasson — from instagrammable moments to climate change
Part artist, part activist, Eliasson has spent his career trying to make art more accessible, and with it drive behavioural change. Particularly when it comes to the climate. 2003’s installation ‘The Weather Project’ is perhaps the most famous example of this. Turning the Turbine Hall into a vast Sunscape, he used mirrors and artificially created mist and fog to make us acutely aware of not just our own presence but the power and delicate nature of the atmosphere in which we exist.
Immensely photogenic it acted as a canvas to make the viewer as much as the subject, as the installation itself. And much like Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Infinity Rooms’ was perhaps a precursor to ‘instagrammable’ moments when the digital camera was in it’s heavily pixelated infancy.
But beyond being a superficial show it was a spiritual and activist act. His work from ‘The Glacier Melt Series’ to ‘Your Uncertain Shadow’ to ‘Ice Watch’ puts art, culture and people centre-stage. Beyond being reserved for the gallery, much like Paik, his aim is to make us acutely aware of the future that is unfolding before our eyes. He turns, ‘thinking into doing’ by making us part of the change.
As he said in Netflix’s ‘Abstract’ — The role of the artist is not to “walk out of reality and into some sort of dream world”. They “walk into the studio and see the real world in a microscope”.
“If we want to change something about the climate, it has to be explicit, it has to be physical. And that is the culture isn’t it? Culture is for the most part, physical. They are the stuff that is out there in the world.”
3. Basquiat — from identity to BLM
Finally, arguably one of the most notable contemporary artists to have a direct impact on culture is Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Much like his friend and predictor of everyone’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ Andy Warhol, “from the clothes he wore to the art he made…he was acutely aware that his whole life was a performance” (GQ), designed to make a point, in a wholly ironic way. As his former girlfriend Alexis Adler pointed out when speaking of the time they lived together in the East Village of New York “Our lives converged at an extraordinary moment…a vortex where art was life and life was art.”
Now his name seeps it’s way into mainstream culture from t-shirts to rap songs, and everything in between. In 2017 his painting ‘Untitled’ sold at auction for $110.5 million USD — the most expensive work by any U.S. artist at that time.
But it’s not because people want to simply own a piece of him, or vicariously imitate his acts. More than that, like the Guerilla Girls, and others he inspired since, it’s because he relentlessly worked to push the world forward.
The pre-eminent black artist, he was a poster boy of neo-expressionism. Using art as a platform to democratise, and make visible. To make a stance on achingly important issues from politics to inequality to police brutality. Long before, systemic problems were publicly acknowledged.
As he said of his work “I was trying to communicate an idea…I was trying to make paintings different from the paintings that I saw a lot of at the time, which were mostly minimal, and they were highbrow and alienating, and I wanted to make very direct paintings that most people would feel the emotion behind when they saw them.”
“At that point, [an artist] was somebody who could draw, but my ideas have changed since then. Now I see an artist as something a lot broader than that.”
Over 30 years after his death, this idea is more pressingly true than ever.
A way forward?
Of course these artists aren’t the first, and only people to speak of these ideas. But, for me, it does give a reassuring route in. Because not only do they give a sense of comfort when the world seems out of control. They give hope that thoughts laid down now, will bear fruit in years to come.
Artists look at what’s happening in the world, in culture, at what needs to change, and do their part to nudge the world forward. To share their ideas. No matter how far reaching or difficult it seems at the time.
Perhaps there’s a lesson for all of us in that.
As Paik allegedly said, ‘the future is now’. And while we can’t predict the future, we can use the past to inspire it.
So I’ll end on one of my favourite quotes from the man himself.
“I bet there are still many new openings and loopholes in…history… which are being overlooked right now by millions of young people who complain that everything has already been done, so that they cannot do new breakthroughs. However, the history of the world says that we don’t win the games, but we change the rules of the games”.
Learn the rules, break the rules, embrace the newness.
Hold the vision. The future has just begun.
**(Defining Contemporary Art — 25 years in 200 pivotal artworks, Phaidon, 2011)