Sharmini Pereira

In my view, the future of art will be defined by a desire to reach the unknown recipient – from the consumer of culture to the man in the street, from the girl next door to the man in our dreams, from the global village to aliens in outer space. Already, museum programs and funding policies commit ever-increasing funds and intelligence into developing new audiences, outreach initiatives and community development. Indeed, for many artists, the reception of the mass audience to their work is either germane; as in the hyper-paced vernacular of manga used by a number of leading Japanese artists, integral; as in the work of ‘The Tokyo Recycling’ project and the performative rituals of Lee Ming Wei, or evoked cosmically through the ongoing series of ‘Projects for Extra Terrestrials’ by Cai Guo Qiang. Together, such examples of practice ask: is there anybody else out there? Art is finally coming out.

In the future, contemporary art will reach audiences too large and illusive to profile.
This future will be premised on the creation of scenarios and prototypes, which will be exhibited, distributed, launched, published, inserted, whispered, directed, performed, exchanged and packaged not into the art market nor the art world, but the universe at large. If the universe has, in the past, been gnomically sent to test us, in the future contemporary art will send messages back the other way.

The future of contemporary art will do a spectrum of cultural surfaces, from the physical to the virtual. It will appear in a variety of viewing spaces, from the permanent to the temporary, and will tour and be distributed as anecdotes, adverts, gift-giving and via mail order. Cultural and geographic borders will be crossed and in the process a dissolution of the prototype and scenario will be altered. The future of art will shirk responsibility towards the precious and the pure, but will find renewed value in the crafting of knowledge, which will necessarily bring forth moments of lucidity and insight that will make us draw breath akin to the aura ascribed to art of the past.

The imprint for such a future will involve artists working in one of two ways. In the tradition of making unique works of art, they will construct prototypes of objects and ideas. The role of craft will play an all important role in this process, introducing aspects of the everyday, which have already been gathering ground within recent developments of contemporary critical practice. The production of prototypes will see a revival in the hand-made, which will gratify the audiences desire for consuming virtuosity and the artists desire for indulging in radical pleasure. The artist’s palette of materials will continue to expand and borrow across cultures, disciplines, traditions and resources – real and imagined. The utilitarian aspect of craft-based work will also carve out a suggestive course of applications for contemporary art as it moves in search of wider arenas of supporters, aficionados, and message receivers and responders. Prototypes will remain with the artist, and permission to reproduce, build or fabricate will be bought by an individual, a fashion house, a publisher, a manufacturer or a municipality. The future of contemporary art might appear as a button on a shirt, a brick in a building, a light on the street, a font in a book, the dial tone of a phone or as an image in the front room of a quarter of a country’s population.

Parallel to making prototypes, artists will also be involved in constructing scenarios which they will license for distribution in the form of films and still images using the existing patrons of local and global business firms and corporations. In the future, art will have a much more direct relationship to these industries and will use them to reach unchartered territories. All importantly, this move will see an embracement of artists as cultural thinkers, able to effect change on a visual level through images, sounds and words. Foremost in this process will be the conceptualising of scenarios by artists, to promote not only the products or brands of a business but something of their own style, views and aesthetics. Great museum collections around the world have, after all, striven to brand themselves through artists they collect in this way for centuries. As the course of contemporary art strides more steadily in the direction of moving beyond representation into the realms of the hyper-real, the extraordinary and the imagined, the future of art will increasingly find and require outlets that can support the presentation of time-based scenarios in the form of lens-based stills or moving images. Media creatives and big business will become the new collectors of such an art, and their collections will be circulated via ad campaigns, cinema trailers and hoardings, terrestrial and satellite television stations and surreptitious packaging schemes.

If the future of art is to be defined by its consumers, then its makers will also direct it. Will there be compromises at stake to assure the later? Possibly. Will this be the future of art? Inevitably.

THE ANTHOLOGY OF ART
Art and Theory in Dialogue

For over one year, the Anthology of Art has provided an internet-based platform for dialogue between artists and theorists from all over the world. This process focused on current visions of art and the relationship of art to theoretical discourse. The Anthology of Art website now houses the complete archive of 156 images and 156 texts.

Jochen Gerz
The Anthology of Art: Art and Theory in Dialogue

Contemporary art reflects the conditions of its production and promotion. The appropriation of art by art history and theory tends to show that art and the discourse about art are more interconnected then ever before, and that an equal emphasis is placed on theoretical reflection as on the work of art itself.

The Anthology of Art investigated the connection between art production and art theory instead of presuming it. The project also shows how much traditional relationships within the international art world are changing through the medium of the Internet. The yearlong process was an online experiment that provided insight about the contemporary artistic process itself, with artists, theorists, and institutions more and more interacting via the Web.

To launch the project, six artists and six theorists were invited by Jochen Gerz. Each of them made a contributions to the Anthology of Art : www.anthology-of-art.net. Artists chose one of their own images and theorists wrote a short text (one to three pages) in their native language or in English, all answering the question:

"In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?"

Each of the original twelve participants was asked to invite an artist or theorist of their choice to follow suit. Since September 2001, twelve different artists and theorists have made new contributions every other week. The website has been updated each time so that no more than twelve contributions appeared at any given time. Now this process is completed and a total of 312 independent verbal and visual contributions—156 images and 156 texts— have been collected. The Anthology of Art is a plural artwork whose content and contributors were unpredictable. Do the self-curated process and the diversity of the contributions provide clues about the direction of an emerging form?

Beyond compiling a representative collection of contemporary theory, the intention was to investigate a collaborative process, largely without interference or influence by a traditional author. It may be assumed that today art itself is no longer being questioned. On the contrary, every word about art tends to transform itself into art as well. The Anthology of Art tested the limits of this tendency: Can a large number of independent authors produce a work of art? Does this form of production reflect a global society better than traditional curated models of art exhibitions?

The objective of this work in progress was to encourage a new dialogue between art and theory, word and image. Members of an international art community are the authors and curators of the Anthology of Art. Existing contacts were nurtured and unexpected relationships initiated.

The claim of an international and interdisciplinary contemporary art has often been taken for granted. It has been questioned by the simultaneous, ephemeral and aleatoric confrontations between authors in different regions of the world connected through the Internet - no longer from privileged centres or isolated peripheries and no longer from naive or informed perspectives.

The Anthology of Art website now houses the complete archive of 156 images and 156 texts. For the first time this ensemble is accessible.

All contributions will be published in a catalogue for the Anthology of Art exhibition at the Gropius-Bau in Berlin from April to August 2004. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Akademie der Künste and the Neuhardenberg Foundation will organize the "Manifest/Symposium".

In 2002/2003 a research-project about the Anthology of Art, supported by the Culture 2000 Programme of the European Union, was realised by the School of Fine Arts at Braunschweig/ Germany, the University of Rennes2/ France, and the University of Craft and Design at Budapest/ Hungary. The research results have been published under the title "Through the 'Net. Studies in Jochen Gerz' »Anthology of Art«" (ISBN 3-89770-197-9). The publication is available through Salon-Verlag Cologne (info@vice-versa-vertrieb.de).