Questionnaire on

“The Contemporary”*

The category of “contemporary art” is not a new one. What is new is the
sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of
historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. Such
paradigms as “the neo-avant-garde” and “postmodernism,” which once oriented
some art and theory, have run into the sand, and, arguably, no models of much
explanatory reach or intellectual force have risen in their stead. At the same
time, perhaps paradoxically, “contemporary art” has become an institutional
object in its own right: in the academic world there are professorships and pro-
grams, and in the museum world departments and institutions, all devoted to
the subject, and most tend to treat it as apart not only from prewar practice but
from most postwar practice as well.
Is this floating-free real or imagined? A merely local perception? A simple
effect of the end-of-grand-narratives? If it is real, how can we specify some of its
principal causes, that is, beyond general reference to “the market” and “global-
ization”? Or is it indeed a direct outcome of a neoliberal economy, one that,
moreover, is now in crisis? What are some of its salient consequences for artists,
critics, curators, and historians—for their formation and their practice alike?
Are there collateral effects in other fields of art history? Are there instructive
analogies to be drawn from the situation in other arts and disciplines? Finally,
are there benefits to this apparent lightness of being?

—Hal Foster for the Editors

* This questionnaire was sent to approximately seventy critics and curators, based in the United
States and Europe, who are identified with this field. Two notes: the questions, as formulated, were felt
to be specific to these regions; and very few curators responded.

OCTOBER 130, Fall 2009, pp. 3–124. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

They have cut off the hot water in the building where I teach. The rumor is
that we will soon lose our office phones, as the Women’s Studies department
already has. In this underfunded public university, the global economic crisis
could not be more local, immediate, and material. Given my current working con-
ditions, I cannot help but think about the problem of “the contemporary” in
relation to the urgencies of the troubled future.
These destabilizing times are recalibrating my sense of temporality—and it is
temporality above all that ramifies across the admittedly paradoxical formation
“contemporary art history.” We spend a lot
of time debating about how to reconcile the
presumed presentism of the contemporary
with an attention to the past. But teaching
“art now” does not mean simply mapping
the current moment or grappling with his-
tory: it also involves forecasting about—and
in some respect s producing — the future.
Professors transform into prognosticators as
we teach the artists, artworks, and critical
ideas that we anticipate will endure. We
must predict, using our best guesses, what
contemporary work we think will last for
later histories. These speculations—limited,
partial, and biased speculations—about what
might continue to resonate into the future
are more than crystal-ball gazing. (Is such a
discursive activity related, if only because of
shared vocabulary, to economic speculation
and commodity futures?)
Design for stone structures to be erected at
Let me get specific with an example
the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, about futurology from my own research. It is
New Mexico, from “Permanent Markers not drawn from the art world. Rather, it is
Implementation Plan” (U.S. Department of taken from a government-sponsored report
Energy, 2004). issued in 2004 by the U.S. Department of
Energy. This is a design for a marker—not
yet built—that will be used as a warning sign over a highly toxic radioactive waste
dump near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the
only place in the United States that stores spent transuranic waste. It is currently
accepting shipments (barrels of plutonium-laced fuel cells and other deadly
items) from across the country that are then buried deep under the Southwest
Questionnaire: Bryan-Wilson 5

desert land. In twenty years, when the underground chamber is filled to capacity,
the storage unit will be closed and sealed. Because this radioactivity remains so
lethal for so long and any contact with it could prove fatal for many years to come,
the Department of Energy has commissioned a marker that is meant to warn
future generations from digging or drilling on this site for the next 10,000 years.
This drawing details the schematic design for the planned marker: it will
consist of a series of monumental geometric granite towers along the perimeter
of the dump area. Each will be inscribed with messages in seven languages about
the poisonous waste underneath; they are meant to withstand any climate
changes, as well as the likely evolution of the written word over the next ten cen-
turies. Room has been left on the surface of each tower for future viewers to
translate the warning into their own language and chisel it into the rock, with the
anticipation that it will become a sort of Rosetta stone. Though it bears a resem-
blance to both ancient obelisks and minimalist forms, the committee that the
government assembled to design this marker notably did not include art histori-
ans or practicing artists. The omission is striking: though the design team
included anthropologists, linguists, and engineers, no one specifically trained to
think about how images function across time was invited to participate in this pro-
ject. Instead, contemporary art was lambasted in the preliminary planning report
for being “trivial,” elitist, and unreadable to the everyman that the warning
marker specifically set out to address.
The markers will be inscribed with the following message: DANGER. POISON-
OUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE BURIED HERE. DO NOT DIG OR DRILL HERE
UNTIL 12,000 A.D. Flanking these words are two faces: on the right, an image from
a textbook on human ethology showing the “universal” facial registration of disgust
or nausea. And on the left, a schematic outline of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which
is here meant to signify a general, abstract sense of horror. Even though the marker
designers reject art history, they are vitally dependent upon it, as in this citation of a
famous painting made familiar by its many pop-cultural references. In the past one
hundred years alone, Munch’s image has generated conflicting readings and under-
gone significant semant ic transformations—who knows how it might read
thousands of years from now? This is forecasting at its most prophetic, unmoored
from art history’s methodological attention to the “period eye.”
In the WIPP marker project, the problem of endurance across history is
made quite literal, yet it is impossible to predict if the design will work, if its broad
address will be heeded and radioactive catastrophe avoided throughout this
almost unthinkably vast time span. But to intentionally exclude art historians and
artists seems a mistake, as artists invent new tools with which to mine the rich
interface between past, present, and future. Against this exclusion, I think con-
temporar y art at it s best offer s a v ibrant sense of inclusion, foster ing
collaborations between art historians, scientists, policy makers, activists, and
artists, as well as admitting all kinds of objects (canonical, mass-media, and
6 OCTOBER

otherwise). More to the point, contemporary art history, because it is always in for-
mation, necessarily admits its own instabilities, its own fissures and holes; it
cannot presume singular meanings, etched in stone, as it were. It understands the
limits and powers of art, how images and practices clarify social relationships as
well as destabilize positions and scramble histories. Far from quasi-scientific assur-
ances of the nuclear marker (or the betting mentality of the futures market), such
speculations are rooted in theoretical understandings about the doubts and con-
tingencies of meaning: that images, artifacts, and social relations do not smoothly
translate between eras, or between places; that there is friction and slippage
within interpretation; that time itself distorts, erodes, and recodes meanings.
The contradictions that attend the worry about contemporary art history
(the fear about its ossification and the parallel re-investment in its coherence) can
foster a welcome, heightened sense of self-awareness about how we teach and what
we study—and more importantly, why we teach, why we research, why we continue
to organize panels or write papers or curate exhibitions or answer questionnaires.
If there is something uniquely pressured about “the contemporary” right now, this
pressure also presents a chance to rethink our investments in contemporary art
history as a space of radical uncertainty. How can we strategize about, and remain
open to, new formations with an awareness that, as furloughs are implemented
and layoffs continue, such uncertainty is double-edged?
What kinds of interventions, art, and information will persevere in the
future beyond the rapid cycles of boom and bust? We admit we cannot know
what might happen in the next twelve months, much less the next 10,000 years.
That not-knowing could be a strength. It could produce an art history that revels
in the warping of time by looking past the contemporary—that is, a method that
still attends to its history, while also trying (even if failing) to see beyond the
present. The model of forecasting could be both a problem and an opportunity
for contemporary art history, for it permits and encourages unpredictability,
and even disaster.

JULIA BRYAN-WILSON is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Ph.D. Program in
Visual Studies at UC Irvine.