Description
Book SynopsisIncluding twenty essays and seventy-seven images, this book inquires into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment. It argues that predictions that post-modernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated.
Trade Review“Anyone wishing to assess the state of contemporary art and its relation to institutions, politics, social movements, and indeed, the entire project of imagining and naming the world at the present moment will find this brilliant book essential and disturbing reading. It offers no grand synthesis but provides a shattered mosaic of the crucial elements that will have to be assembled by any future historian looking back on the early twenty-first century.”—
W. J. T. Mitchell, author of
What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images“This is a provocative and indeed challenging assessment of the relation between ‘art’ and ‘culture’ (in scare quotes because both concepts are questioned) in the post-post-modernist moment. The essays successfully reposition discussion in a genuinely worldwide perspective, redefine modernism on a global scale, and push avant-garde thinking in new directions.”—
Hayden White, University Professor Emeritus, University of California, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
“This remarkable orchestration of voices, visualities, and political visions lays bare the antinomies and contradictions that haunt the sovereign claims of globalization. Each consummate essay is an artful reflection on the complex resistances and revisions that emanate from cultural practices that transform the aesthetic and ethical realities of embedded and embattled localities. I warmly recommend Antinomies of Art and Culture.”—
Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments svii
Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question / Terry Smith 1
Part I: The Politics of Temporality
1. Contemporaneity between Modernity and Postmodernity / Antonio Negri 23
2. A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary / Geeta Kapur 30
3. Some Rotten Shoots from the Seeds of Time / Rosalind Krauss 60
4. The Topology of Contemporary Art / Boris Groys 71
Part 2: Multiple Modernities
5. On the Contingency of Modernity and the Persistence of Canons / Monica Amor 83
6. Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event Work of Lygia Clark / Suely Rolnik 97
7. Double Modernity, Para-Modernity / Jonathan Hay 113
8. "Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth": Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art / Gao Minglu 133
9. The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist Metaphors and the New Global Order / Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie 165
10. Analogue: 1998-2007 / Zoe Leonard, Introduced by Helen Molesworth 187
Part 3: Afterworlds
11. The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition / Okwui Enwezor 207
12. From Emigration to E-migration: Contemporaneity and the Former Second World / Nancy Condee 235
13. Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art / Colin Richards 250
14. A Case of Being "Contemporary": Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art / Wu Hung 290
Part 4: Cotemporalities
15. Emancipation or Attachments? The Different Futures of Politics / Bruno Latour 309
16. The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism / James Meyer 324
17. Introduction to Info-Aesthetics / Lev Manovich 333
18. The Giftshop at the End of History / McKenzie Wark 345
19. Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary / Nikos Papastergiadis 363
References 383
Contributors 413
Index 417
