Kunstsammlung NRW

Art as A Projection Space for Utopia

Cécile Girardeau has accompanied the exhibition "Beneath the Ground: From Kafka to Kippenbeger" in the K21 Ständehaus for several weeks as a project assistant. She characterizes the role of utopia in art for #32.


Observable currently is a growing interest in an epoch during which avant-garde artists were absolutely convinced of the capacity of art to reshape the world and radical and absolute ways. In fact, the theme of utopia is the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world today. What kinds of questions do artistic utopias present us with today, when the concept of progress (in history, art, politics ...) is experiencing an unprecedented crisis, and what continues to resonate?

Early-20th-century avant-garde art pursued a deliberate break with the past and regarded itself as a stimulus for a better future. In their manifestoes, the artistic avant-gardes (Futurism, Suprematism, Surrealism ...) were not satisfied with denouncing the old order, they wanted to found a new one as well. They designated artists as the authorities on what it meant to create art. Understood in this way, art was confronted with an all-encompassing task, one that concerned humanity as a whole. According to this logic, "The aestheticization of reality and the fulfillment of aesthetics should go hand in hand," (1) as Régis Debray expressed it.

This leads toward a model of "revelation/revolution" (2) via art, one based on three indispensable preconditions: "Optimism concerning history, speculative idealism, and social commitment." (3). Accordingly, this model is inscribed into an order of time through which one faces the future as a form of transcendence.


The Light from the Future

The late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries correspond to a regime of historicity in which the light arrived from the future, and the present illuminated the past – hence the thesis, developed by François Hartog in his text Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps (2003) (and according to which the modes through which such historicity is experienced and conceptualized, the way in which past, present, and future are articulated, varies according to the specific epoch). While experiencing a gradual collapse in the course of the later 20th century, this regime of historicity was dissolved through a relationship to time which made a hypertrophic present the sole horizon: "An omnipresent, massive present that tolerated no perspective other than itself, and which fabricated both the past and the future that it required" (4). And was accompanied, moreover, by the triumph of uncertainty concerning individualism as well as identity.

How, in this context, is the role of utopia in art to be grasped? There where (to invoke Reinhart Kosellek's characterization of the problem) the "space of experience" enters into an unparalleled tension with the "horizon of expectation," art nonetheless seems to enable us to perceive utopia once again in a renewed fashion.


Art As a Contemporary Path toward Investigating Utopia

While people often prefer to believe that utopia has accomplished a lateral step and repositioned itself within the new communications technologies (the Internet, social networking...), which appear to abolish time and space and to create the conditions for new social forms, even for revolutionary solidarity (cf. the role of social networking in the Arab Spring) or social and economic connections (think for example of Bernard Stiegler's model of the Economy of Contribution), that these technologies have nonetheless often shown themselves to be counterutopian or trivial, and even to have served the interests of surveillance (cf. the scandal exposed by Edward Snowden) or profit maximization (software that makes it possible to place advertisements on the basis of the collected data of individual Internet users). In this way, the new technologies manifest far less the features of utopia and ubiquity than instead of a hypertrophied mirror of human society as we know it today, for which reason they by no means disqualify art as a contemporary resource for exploring utopias – very much to the contrary.

In opposition to the immediacy of the new technologies, art has repeatedly contemplated the theme of utopia anew according to its own rules – and in ways that continue to exercise a profound fascination on artists and public alike. At the same time, artists today approach the theme of utopia in a perhaps more distanced fashion than their predecessors in the avant-guard. Emilia Kabakov, for example, presented an installation scheduled to open soon at the Grand Palais in Paris with the words: "A few years ago, we were asked whether we believed art could influence politics. We said no, we didn't believe it could. We continue to hold this view, but through all of these years, we have worked with ideas that revolve around the imaginary and utopia. And we are deeply convinced that art, which occupies a prominent position in our culture, that the art we think, dream, act, and reflect on, can effect change. It can change our way of life." (5)


"The Infinite White Abyss" and
"Beneath the Ground"

Soon the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will be open two exhibitions for which utopia serves as a central theme. The first groups the three fathers of abstraction, Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky, around the theme of the color white and its relationship to infinity and transcendence; the other, its dark counterpoint, deals with the subterranean world, and leads us downward into the chthonic depths, with its multilayered resonances.

In my view, these two exhibitions – along with others on similar themes taking place currently worldwide – are an indication that art in our epoch still can and must say something about utopian ideals. All assemble works that can serve as potential projection surfaces by calling attention toward an imaginary Elsewhere. As a space of projection, and because it allows our minds to sense other possibilities, this art safeguards a power that is capable of raising utopia to the level of speech.

As a "latent figure that persists in the condition of the possible" (6), the contents of the utopian work can however only be discerned hazily, and remain forever separated from our own reality. "And my judgment march but uncertaine, and as it were groping, staggering, and stumbling at every rush: And when I have gone as far as I can, I have no whit pleased my selfe: for the further I saile the more land I descrie, and that so dimmed with fogges, and overcast with clouds, that my sight is so weakened, I cannot distinguish the same," wrote Montaigne* in his Essays, and Louis Marin adds: "To offer a presentiment of this cloudy land of beyond at the edge of the horizon of human history and human society is the contribution of the utopian fiction found in these dispassionate paintings, which accordingly visualize the fears and hopes, the yearnings, dreams and anxieties of a historical epoch." (7)


Cecile Girardeau

 

(1) Régis Debray, "La fin des manifestes?," Journées esthétiques de Mirmande, June 1994.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps, Paris, Seuil 2003.

(5) Emilia Kabakov, Internet page of the Monumenta, www.grandpalais.fr/fr/article/letrange-cite

(6) Louis Marin, "La Fiction poétique de l'utopie," Cinéma et Littérature, Valence, Centre de recherche et d'action culturelle 1989, nr. 7: Utopies, p. 13.

(7) Ibid.

* Michel de Montaigne, Essays, cited from http://pages.uoregon.edu/rbear/montaigne/1xxv.htm

Cécile Girardeau studied at the Institut National du Patrimoine in Paris and has accompanied the exhibition "Beneath the Earth: from Kafka to Kippenberger" for a period of two months as a project assistant. She lives and works in Paris.