In the widely globalized scenario of “contemporary art” there is a trend which promotes an expositive praxis tending to consecrate the casual and the ephemeral, a subtle modality invading museums, art , fairs, public and private spaces and not requiring a general gnosis of history of Art.
This practice, characterized by its history- depriving culture and a bewitching sanctuary yet blooms as a hermeneutic garden of funereal ceilings, thereby reducing the multiple visions of any artistic vision to a prismatic skeleton, capriciously ornamented to satisfy, even by kneeling down, the greediness of that emptiness generated by the languishing art of figure; this is perhaps where its mediatized charisma resides as an art of massive and expendable values.
This swarm of chromatic inanity and conceptual impotence is the best example that, the so-called “contemporary art”, operates as the manager of a terrible, genocidal vision of aesthetics.
The expositive process may ignore “creativity” and vice-versa, but it would be a regretful burden if art completely abandons the science of the palette or the chromatic icon for the sake of an apocalypse merely resting on manipulated lightening techniques.
I am betting on the thesis that certain “contemporary” tendencies do not require any plastic knowledge but rather respond to a socio cultural acclimatization, or are mere vehicles of the expansion of audio-visual media I all realms of culture, including architecture, photography, literature and poetry.
Nevertheless, it is as admirable as respectable to witness –and I subscribe to them- any rupture or challenge as new techniques, materials and proposals including installations, digitalizing up to the video. They are faced against the other great orthodox posture in the history of art, the much deity-like “painting-painting” or “noble painting” searching to de-categorize any alternative praxis beneath the comfortable position of academic historicism, to write a monogram as a huge universal, unifocal library, all art of yesterday and today as a succession and selection of ways to create yet using the same hyper –classical supports of the old plastic tradition.
That cunning lyricism, which becomes an accomplice patenting the pseudo-spontaneity idolized by the messages cast by certain media, succeeds and then ends up devoured by its own massive gestures…
The esthetical praxis we have adopted these later years, as have some of the promoters of “Transpositionism” departs from philosophical proposals constantly searching the de-materialization of Art without abandoning in a suicidal or absolute fashion plastic arts, for the sake of visual art pragmatism, but rather generating symbiosis codes or ‘symbionizing’ both dynamics in a culture alien in the territory of ideological factors.
I venture to resume these proposals as follows:
a) Reason is a simulacrum of emptiness
b)To invent is not to exhibit nor flee culture in search for alternate spaces. It is to reveal from the silent secret of flesh.
c) To create is to dematerialize the anthropology of multiculturalism and the thematic art of representation in circumstantial universes.
d) Universality lasts just a few hours. It is a tiny bark in the geological chronometer of life.
By Bartus Bartolomes
Venice, Italy, 2010.