Envisioning the Contemporary
I couldn’t obtain a syllabus for the workshop, but I can make some assumptions based on its title and some of the ideas about art floating around our culture. Haman sees a visit to a museum as a creativity vitamin, a boost to the creative juices of people developing new products, laying marketing plans, and forging business partnerships. This crowd equates creative inspiration with the lightbulb that goes off over an executive’s head: “We don’t have to just sell fries, we can sell plastic toys, too!”
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The installation of the art, however, is not random, and the show’s emphases and juxtapositions make clear that Gerald Haman’s corporate spin on contemporary art is dead wrong. Rather, contemporary art appears to be a sustained, polymorphous protest against the culture promoted by big business in general and against the misreadings advocated by the likes of Haman specifically. Imagine this review as a refutation of Haman’s approach: the tour I would give of “Envisioning the Contemporary” would break down into four parts.
Third, focus on the works that adhere to Marshall McLuhan’s formula: The medium is the message. Quintessentially contemporary, this formulation describes art whose primary reason for being is the material; the form is secondary. In this exhibit Chris Burden’s Eighteenth-Century Gunpowder consists of a glass case displaying the three elements of gunpowder–charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur–arranged in neat mounds. Burden doesn’t add anything, nor does he shape the materials or make any suggestions: the material is threatening enough as it is. But it helps to know a little about Burden: over the course of his career he’s had himself shot, had himself nailed to an automobile, invited gallerygoers to electrocute him, and designed projects for the destruction of museums. It’s safe to say that he may have antisocial plans for these materials.
