Any artist who claims to be serious about what he or she does has to contend with the fact that there are tens of thousands of younger artists also wanting to be taken seriously. Every year fresh new ranks of art-producers rise up almost fully-formed from the art schools, au fait with the current ways of art-knowingness, hard on the heels of their predecessors, intent on subverting the art world hierarchy and establishing their own rightful niches within it. They have to be seen to be doing something different from what was done before, or revamping the old in contemporary guise, to live up to and perpetuate the Western art tradition of continual innovation.

We are now in the new century, thus the new must be seen to replace the old with a vengeance, in the same way that late 19th century Symbolists and Post-Impressionists were seen by Modernists to be tainted with the decaying odour of a cloyingly decadent yesteryear. It doesn't seem to have happened yet, at least not decisively, but we can expect 21st century art as a mass phenomenon to move into vastly different realms from that of the 20th century. Last century's art was distinguished most obviously by abstraction and abstracting tendencies; the vanguard art of this century may be made specifically for the Internet and exist in no other format or medium. It may be art which continually mutates, with no fixed or final form, created by no-one in particular, which anyone anywhere can experience, participate in, contribute to--so long as they have access to the required technologies. Picture the 'art' equivalent of techno--music that requires not exactly musical skills, in the traditional sense, so much as the ability to manipulate computerised sounds. Why shouldn't art be like that too? Maybe it already is, and the tranced-out musical rave or gathering is an evolved form of the 60's art 'happening' (a term coined by Allan Kaprow in 1959). In cutting-edge contemporary art, boundaries are continually dissolving between one art form and another. If a 'boundary' is seen to exist, it is the vanguardist's raison d'être to subvert or transgress it--to create something new by defying and re-mapping the established territories of the old. The boundary between art and music is no more sacrosanct than those between painting, sculpture, photography, and other visual arts media. The artist subversionist's intent is to collapse all categories of art in upon each other, to implode the established order of the art world system, to negate the idea of art history, and to destroy art itself. The ultimate goal is the destruction of society, whether by revolution or evolution. Why? Why not? The spirit of Dada, of anti-art and anti-society, lives on and is continually being reborn anew. The Situationist Movement, for example, which flourished between 1957 and 1972, demanded a revolution of everyday life: "do not adjust your mind, there is a fault with reality." And there is nothing which has revolutionised everyday life, for us, so much as the IT revolution.

Filippo Marinetti, the Futurist polemicist par excellence, did not shrink in his 1909 manifesto from baying for the utter destruction of all that was old, anticipating the Internet global village of instantaneity long before it became a virtual reality: "Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed." His targets were reverential and slavish worshippers of the past, a past encapsulated in the great canonical works of art, literature, philosophy and science that constitute the intellectual foundation of Western civilization. "Museums: cemeteries!" he wrote, implying that the only tangible reality exists in the present moment, in life and struggle and ceaseless motion--to become an established cultural commodity, to receive official or academic recognition, is to be embalmed in the dank mausoleum of history. Not that even Marinetti could escape the clutches of the "foul gangrene of professors, archaeologists, guides and antiquarians," especially after having stuck his tongue out and insulted them.

Every right-thinking rationalist would immediately dismiss Marinetti as a preposterous iconoclast, and worse, a proto-fascist. However there is something about his over-the-top trenchant ranting that strikes a paradoxical accord, and I don't mean in his precognition of the IT future as we now experience it, but in his desire to escape the moribund but illusory certainty of the past. Whereas the experiential present is always unfolding into an uncertain future, the past changes only as we read it through revisionist literature, presuming that there must be some authentic truth underpinning it in primary historical documents. Marinetti was dangerously right in exposing that fallacious presumption, in pointing out that authentic reality is always first-hand, as it is being experienced, before a document or an artifact or a relic is mistaken for the reality that gave birth to it. I prefer to take his admonitions to destroy museums as little more than colourful rhetoric, poetic licence. The trouble is that such free-thinkers tend to be interpreted too literally. We need to maintain the illusion of historical stability and continuity just as we need to find individual freedom in the present. So, kids, don't try to flood your local museum or burn down your library, despite Marinetti's injunctions to do just that.

Which brings me--via a very circuitous route, admittedly--to another piece of rhetorical bombast, this one with a heck of a lot less going for it than the Futurist Manifesto: a recent article in ARTnews (Dec. 1999, www.ARTnewsonline.com) which--to use New Zealand painter Bill Hammond's phrase--is "asking for it." The cover of the issue proclaims: "Who are the 10 best living artists?" and underneath that--can you believe it?--are the photos of exactly ten people, no more, no less, who turn out to be artists. (I just counted them to make sure, and yes, there are indeed ten.) Which means that the ARTnews people have the answer to their own question right there, under their noses: I suppose they realise that? Yes of course they do, because when you turn to the article the question mark has gone, so it seems they knew the answer all along. The artists (apparently in no ranked order) are: Matthew Barney; Louise Bourgeois; Jasper Johns; Ilya Kabakov; Agnes Martin; Bruce Nauman; Sigmar Polke; Gerhard Richter; Cindy Sherman; and Jeff Wall. So now you know who they are!

Anyway, this is NEWS because that's what this magazine is all about: art news (hence the name ARTnews, in case you hadn't made that connection). It seems that--and this is quoted directly from the first page of the article: "Experts around the world confront[ed] a tough assignment--assessing just what it means to be THE BEST" (my capitals, I just couldn't resist it). Heck, that is a tough assignment, I can see why they got experts around the world to confront it rather than just some guy off the street who doesn't know a damn thing about art. They don't explicitly reveal who the experts are, because it was all done "in confidence," and I expect their identities have to be protected in case someone disagrees with their choices or something. In which case things could get real nasty! Just imagine it: "He's the best living artist." "No, she is." "Look, he is the best, trust me, I know." "Oh yeah? How do you know?" "Anonymous experts around the world say so, that's how!" "Well if I ever find out their identities I'm going to punch them right in the nose!" Smart move to keep their identities under wraps.

Eight of the artists work in the United States, according to the article, though only three were born there. I think it shows how wonderfully unbiased ARTnews is, for an American publication, to include two artists who don't even work in the U.S. It's made so clear, too, just what it is that makes today's best living artists so different, so appealing. The piece on Jasper Johns, for instance, is entitled "Complexity and contradiction," and how many artists can that be said about these days?! The point is amply reinforced by the fact that he "teases cryptic art out of the commonplace." Agnes Martin "reminds us how much can be expressed with (seemingly) so little," and, you know, I really needed reminding of that, having completely forgotten that wise old saying, "less is more." Matthew Barney forces viewers "to question the boundaries between sculpture, installation, body art, and video art." God, what brilliance! Who but Barney could have thought of precisely that combination of boundaries to question? His "perversely eccentric imagery has caused more than a few viewers to shudder." And here was me mistakenly believing that eccentric and grossly disturbing art was completely passé! As for Louise Bourgeois, her art "invokes her childhood memories" and includes a preponderance of "sexually suggestive figures." Now that's what I call mind-boggling originality in this day and age, though I know she's been doing it for a while. That almost gives justification enough as to why these particular artists were chosen and not some others, doesn't it?

It is significant that these were ARTnews's "10 best living artists" at the end of the 20th century, which is a nice way of canonising them--congratulating them for their efforts, before the new century kicks in and this old guard is politely but firmly kicked aside. It's also a nice way of solidifying their reputations, simultaneously increasing the market value of their work. And it demonstrates to young emerging talents that they too might reach the pinnacle of success one day, if they work really, really hard and move to the U.S. (preferably New York), and then the struggle for recognition will all have been worthwhile.

Can you blame Marinetti?

Copyright © 2000 Max Podstolski All Rights Reserved

Max Podstolski is an information specialist in Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Canterbury Library in Christchurch, New Zealand, and occasionally-exhibiting 'primitive modernist' painter.