I hope that when the apocalypse comes I will be able to lock myself up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and just get lost there before everything goes to dark. Is it because I want to be surrounded by beauty till the very end? Yes and no.
My friend who is a Swiss architect asked me in an email not long ago what art is to me. He was irritated by the fact that more and more people keep introducing themselves as artists and that the definition lost its meaning. I answered that the longer I live, art is more of a verb than it is a noun. Art is knowing rules and moving beyond them in order to pursue new qualities. That could also mean that, in the spirit of history of art not being a linear narrative, a museum collection – especially the one like MET’s – is a catalog of past eruptions of dismantling one status quo for another one and so on. Art is always contextual, even if we cannot experience its time-space in full length. Also, time is the most real illusion that has ever been invented, therefore art is the evidence of our crime of wasting it, passing it, consuming it.
So when I say, I want to get lost at MET before the world comes to an end, it is because I want to be so aware of the previous ends of the worlds and be painlessly present with the possibility of not ever being able to entertain another thought about them.
It is really liberating and joy-inducing to have this fantasy. It is less fun to acknowledge that getting locked up at MET seems more attainable than applying effective efforts to help meet 2050 goals of carbon net zero. It seems like a wild nightmare that we all dream now, just some of us still don’t realize it. In a Polish sci-fi movie called “On The Silver Globe” by Andrzej Żuławski, a group of astronauts leave Earth in order to start a new civilization. The tragedy of the process is the ease in which explorers fall into old patterns of reproducing destructive systems of social organization. Instead of finding freedom, they end up spreading fear and oppression.
In one of the heartbreaking scenes a voice from off askes one of the space travelers: “There is only one thing that interests me. Earth, the planet you are coming from – what is it?”. The movie was shot in the 70s, and yet we still don’t have a good answer.
Having big art fairs like the Venice Biennale inspiring artists to propose narratives that will comment on the ways to understand and capture the present times – is really not helping. It just shows the lack of impact of the sphere of art market and art institutions. However, their weakness does not lie in the methods they choose for telling particular stories.
What I mean by that is for example the impression that I got during a discussion about the Polish Pavilion at this year’s Biennale. The meeting was held at James Howell Foundation in New York. The choice of the venue corresponded nicely with the aura of the discussed concepts since Howell was an artist who dedicated himself to the concept that art is a vehicle for harmony and enlightenment. It was striking how powerful and completely in tune with the contemporary curatorial tactics exhibition at the Polish pavilion was.
From the perspective of New York and a year of observing and visiting american art institutions, the idea of using embroidery and textiles to introduce the iconosphere with representations of overlooked Roma culture, seem very 2022. This exhibition could easily be transported to be presented here in the US. The fact that American Pavilion on the Biennale uses basically the same techniques of narration proves my point for me. Simone Leigh’s large-scale sculptural works join forms derived from vernacular architecture and the female body, rendering them via materials and processes associated with the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, redefining notions of space, time, and existence.
The idea of tapping into the past in order to explain and understand the present is an old one. Albrecht Durer’s drawing ‘The Rape of Europa’ from 1495 is a good example here. Historian of art Erwin Panofsky saw this image as a part of a change in understanding of European identity, because the Renaissance was the moment that Europe started to see itself as a superior individuality. It is also interesting to understand that the formulation of this independence starts with an act of violence – Europe being raped by Jupiter.
Today however, the idea of explaining the present by looking into the past is a part of a contemporary trend of speaking about overlooked aspects of our civilisation.
For this very reason New York’s Morgan Museum and Library closes this year programming with the exhibition of the first poet author ever registered by name who was also a woman – and that is a story of power struggle dating back to ancient Mesopotamia. That is also a ‘fashion’ that famous American art critic Jerry Saltz notes in his newest book from November 2022: “Today, artists are living by Seneca’s notion that sometimes we need to look backward to see forward. Rather than trying to kill the past, to make everything make sense – like their Modernist predecessors – artists are choosing their own forebears inside and outside the canon. […] Artists are astronauts of the present-day world […] that change history in the way they portray it. […] Yet Seneca’s credo has hidden fissures; history is treacherous territory”. Not only that: it is a vast territory too. So perhaps by focusing on the overlooked, by being more inclusive we are getting in fact more exclusive than we were to begin with – because we tell stories to do justice instead of finding solutions to not make the same mistakes moving forward. And perhaps it is not art’s job to propose such solutions anyway.
Of course the curator of Venice Biennale argues that it indeed is art’s job. In her curatorial statement she writes: “The Milk of Dreams is not an Exhibition about the pandemic, but it inevitably registers the upheavals of our era. In times like this, as the history of La Biennale di Venezia clearly shows, art and artists can help us imagine new modes of coexistence and infinite new possibilities of transformation.”. Jerry Saltz – again in his newest book – proposes a little more realistic approach of understanding the transformative power of art: “Art doesn’t change the world, it changes lives and lives change the world”. Well, dah. But that is just another opinion from inside of the contemporary context we are based in, the context of art being an outcome of interests of many players like: institutions, market, donors, etc. The unproductive context as I keep arguing.
Trying to understand the present by decoding the past is simply not enough. Changing lives little by little too. Why? Because I was writing these words in November 2022, on a very sunny Wednesday. So sunny it allowed me to sit on a patio without my jacket. It took closing my eyes to pretend that it is May and I am only 3 days away from starting to wear sandals again. I pointed that out to Edouard Francois in my latest interview with him. He is one of the first ecology architecture visioners, he started looking for sustainable design solutions 30 years ago, when no one was thinking about carbon net zero goals. He told me: “we build as we cook”.
And when I asked him what is more necessary for the architecture and the planet: reinterpreting old ideas or inventing new ones, he said: “For many architects now it is obvious that concrete as a material is done. There is not enough sand left to make it, it is energetically too consuming. But that is a perspective you get only once you project yourself a little bit further into the future”. So perhaps we are traveling in time in the wrong direction as art practitioners. Maybe the wisdom lies in the lyrics of Coldplay’s song: “Where you want to go, how much you want to risk? I’m not looking for somebody with some superhuman gifts.” (“Something Just Like This”, 2017). And perhaps Biennales formulas should be expanded just as urban planning teams are, when you invite not only designers and architects to decide about new developments in the city but also activists, administration representatives, city officials and landscape planners. .
We keep being stupid or ineffective only because we think we still have time. We never had time to begin with. Time has us.
“We are not lost in the contemplation of the world. It is lost in our contemplation” – that is another quote from Żuławski’s “On The Silver Globe” movie. Doesn’t mean that we should not keep applying gentle efforts to get where we want to go.
Please, bury me at MET, when the time comes.
