Chapter 2 relinquishing ‘contemporary art’?
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Abstract
Chapter 2: relinquishing ‘contemporary art’? looks at the relationship between contemporary art and race privilege. It makes the case that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a way of creating art that does not reproduce privilege in my discipline of contemporary art. I start with a discussion of POWER (2019), an artwork by Australian artist Kay Abude which raised some lively discussion when it was exhibited because of the way it privileged viewers identifying as Black, Indigneous or as a Person of Colour. I bring in a number of different voices including British artist and writer Zarina Muhammad to help think through the implications of this work. Here I head towards the claim that the discipline of contemporary art is an inherently white and patriarchal one. In the next section I seek to prove that point by unpacking what Australian art historian Terry Smith calls the “world currents” of contemporary art. I argue that race privilege associated with contemporary art can be found not only in how he defines contemporary art, but also in the fact that it is him doing the defining work. I illustrate this argument with an assessment of three large exhibitions from recent years, each of which offered a unique perspective on race diversity and inclusion in the field: the 10th Berlin Biennale, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India. Next I discuss the projects of three contemporary artists to show how this argument also works at the level of the individual artist. These are American artist Sam Durant’s Scaffold from 2012, Australian artist megan evans’s What it’s like to be white from 2019, and Irish artist Richard Mosse’s Incoming from 2015–16. While each of these works exhibit the privilege of whiteness to different extents, I aim to show how in each case that privilege is reinforced and reproduced by those works and through their association with contemporary art. And finally I take a very brief glance at the ways contemporary artists have for decades sought to escape contemporary art for very similar reasons to mine. On one hand these are inspiring projects for my research, but at the same time, none of them succeed in doing art differently enough to dismantle the dominating forces already within contemporary art. Instead, they complicate the idea of “doing differently” altogether as they co-opt that idea into the contemporary art framework as its own way of working.