Contemporary Art... Art for Society

By Nasir Baharuddin

Contemporary art is often engaging a multi-disciplinary discourse, utilizing a diverse body of skills and sometimes carry provocative dialogues pertaining to the relevant issues shaping the world right now. "Contemporary art" refers to serious works of art. Serious is hard to define in this context. Contemporary art is art that is intended to engage in a dialogue between the works of art deemed relevant by the art public. Serious of course does not mean "without humor." It is even debatable whether or not the artist called "contemporary" needs to have an awareness of currently active art issues. Nevertheless, most contemporary art is made by people who are fairly well aware of the issues in art and of the wider world”.( Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

It is continually engaging, pluralistic, and affecting the boundaries of perception. In other words, art was perceived as dialectic and building mind structure as living organism to society. It tasks to develop a visual text that can frame new phenomenological senses and shaped different context of vocabulary perception. As Robert Irwin put it, "to be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception." Further more, the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar" to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important”. (Shklovsky)

The idea of ‘not important’, I hope the artists will not misunderstood, it doesn’t meant that the artists will not producing any artwork, but the issue here is how the artwork become the matter of object of perception. Meaning that the artwork is only the reflection to create the state of consciousness and how the audience looks at it and developed into new experience. In which art can be understood as a process of inquiry, meaning that an object made by an artist can be seen as a method for collecting and preserving information and understanding. In other words the role of an art work is to give a voice by interpreting into a suitable theoretical context, where the final products can be seen as revealing their stories. (i.e. the whole body of knowledge). In this sense the artists will know what kind of thing that they do. So, the artistic activity is not just a medium for gathering and producing knowledge, but also a method for analyzing and commenting on the information thus produced. (Makela)

In the cultural moment of globalize, distributed, information networks, artists concerned with the relevance of art practice in terms of its social and political function – and for those who would wish to grasp (or engage) the complexity of social life -- can develop new methodologies, (these may include, appropriating anthropological ethnographic practice, cognitive biology and communications technologies), for the context and practice of an ethical, social and political art. These methodologies become fundamental mind structure in merging art or transforms into social architectural context as a form of ‘body’. The language of the ‘body’ plays an activity that aligning the systems of the social and patterning the way of thinking. To creates a sensible and convincing communication relationship between the doer and audience as a ‘useful’ self organizing systems. Looking further into the idea of ‘useful’, it becomes clear that for social architectures to exist, they must be functional -- in other words people have to have a good reason to be part of them (they must have a use for them). Social architectures as artworks are always functional artworks. People need a purpose for becoming part of the social organization beyond the simple fact that they are participating in an artwork, otherwise the motive force of the structure is dead.

As culture(s) or social systems evolve through networks of exchange and economies of relation, the relevance of art practice is increasingly dependent upon a strip of the tradition of individual authorship, in favor of a model based on self organizing systems. The one-way of communication between artists and audience and the privileging of autobiographical documentation should give way to the generation of frameworks for collaboration, which are meaningful relative to the social environment of the audience. Public should be invited, participate and involved discussion about new perspective of ‘body’ (mind and object) and bringing ‘self’ into provocative discourse. This will allow and proposed an environment of perception into various possibilities among audience that not only perceived art as a currency commodities and elitist pleasurable collection. It’s an element of visual paradoxical and the question of perception ambiguity.

Anyway, the practical application of contemporary art within the field of economics and business remains largely untapped. Art is not just the aspect of producing and selling to the aesthetic mind, much less the clothing of corporate identity. The major resource of art is the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and creative system know-how from the professionals who make, and base their whole livings on the intellectual differentiated observation. Apart of this, we are convinced that art must be transformed into a progressive force for change in the future. Understanding and accepting this premise, artists practicing now (particularly in light of available information and communications technologies) should inhabit and understand the context, perspective and social environment of the "other," or audience/participant, and seek to change that social environment "for the sake of more human and egalitarian future" – (Cork).

In this context, contemporary artist should think and shape beyond what they have and understand the nature of participant in order to transform a progressive force between both objects (art and social forms). To build the mechanism to understand the nature of participant, art can function critically and transformative without being oppositional, disruptive, or rapturous. In this case artist requires: a commitment to a new model of exchange and communication - collaboration and mutuality, an understanding that "Art" is dependent on society - that productive and effective works of art are dependent upon relationships between people not the product of one individual, and a desire among artists to function within the social fabric of the audience/participant's daily life. This does not mean that all art must be humorless and profound; art can take any form whatsoever. It simply means that art must always challenge other systems of culture in order to remain visible. The important of visibility of art is the important of communication.

This is a description of what I will call ‘Context Collaboration’, a conceptualization of art practice, which addresses the socio-economic and intellectual environment of the audience as similar to the socio-economic and intellectual environment of the "art world”. In post-avant-garde, context-collaboration, art practice the role of the artist is that of context-supporting establishing contexts, frameworks or systems relevant in particular social environments. "Audience" becomes "participant" given the opportunity, not merely to "interact," but to collaborate in the evolution of a system. Ethically, this collaboration must be framed in a manner that respects the participant's intelligence and intentionality.

The artist directly uses the audience's world of references and as a result is able to widen considerably the composition of his/her audience. Instead of presenting a preferred view, i.e. presuming that his/her audience will see the artist’s views as meaningful, the artist embraces the concept of pluralism and accepts the relativity of the audience's perception and the context-collaboration of his work. The artist directs the audience's attention towards a given view, and provides the means to examine it in a particular way, but does not prescribe specific meaning that should be brought to bear on it. Instead the audience experiences the work and searches for new meanings from within the realm of what is already meaningful to them.

To encourage the composition of context collaboration, it leans on institutions of the educational system such as academies as well as on the system of media: without catalogues, reviews, books, and even TV-shows about art, art would not exist at all because from a sociological point of view art is merely a phenomenon of communication. The art system is a system with a specific form of communication, and this communication uses a typical code dividing the world into binary distinctions such as beautiful versus ugly or interesting versus boring or matching versus non-matching, whereas other systems use other codes such as profitable versus non-profitable, true versus false, or right versus wrong. With the help of these codes the art system distinguishes itself from its environment, which consists of other systems and their codes.

Consequently, to treat contemporary art as a relationship between art and society, firstly, one must convincingly argue on its own terms against an art that is content to fold itself into the channels of communication and around everyday life. Meaning that we need to go deeper, if the artists think that art is capable to expanding its boundaries in order to facilitate innovation, and then it is no longer capable of distinguishing itself from the world. Artist should open more space to let the audience interact to a new model of exchange and communication. This is also the thrust of anti-elitism in visual art.

References:
Robert Irwin “ Islamic Art in Context: Art, Architecture, and the Literary World”
Prentice Hall (June 1997)
Cork, Richard, Art for whom, Serpentine Gallery and Arts Council of England, 1978.
Cork, Richard, Breaking Down the Barriers, Yale University Press (1990s)
Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovic, "Art as Technique" in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965,
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art
Maarit Makela : http://www.tii.se/reform/inthemaking/files/p86.pdf

*) Nasir Baharuddin (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). Email: mnbb11@yahoo.com. This article was published in Majalah Sentap! (Kuala Lumpur, 2005).