Lane Relyea, ‘All Over and at Once’.

In ‘All Over and at Once’, Lane Relyea sets about describing the state of the art world as having reached a period of extreme contextualisation and indiviualisation; there is no more frame for art, only an endless list of contexts, references, captions and so on, that provide meaning only by relating art to something else outside of itself, in an almost subordinate relationship. This hyper-inter-textuality dilutes the boundary of art so much so, that it is often difficult to differentiate an art experience from any other experience in the culture industry – art is now simply another tool in the free market shed that is able to contribute to the shaping of experience in our overly designed lives.

In a broader sense, the extreme expansion of art production and the loss of a modernist sense of “harmony and dramatic coherence” (Relyea, p7) mean that art is now an “atomising spread of innumerable little monologues, in which each and every artist is credited with his or her own isolated, unconnected story.” (Relyea, p7) Individualism reigns supreme and Relyea is certain that this is not the free and open communication between a diverse range of peoples that was perhaps envisaged as the new arena for art in the postmodern world. Relyea posits that on the road to freedom, art was hijacked and taken to a destination so desolate that all that remains is “lazy equivocating and inclusiveness that borders on total indifference.” (Relyea, p7) This is a point that I’m sure many of us have felt at least once, whilst tyring to comprehend the current art-historical situation. One may feel a sense of camaraderie with the writer, instinctually throwing up your arms to say, “Yes! Let’s go back to a time when art meant something,” when it was still possible to believe, without cynicism, in the libratory capabilities of art.

Hal Foster, in his book ‘Design and Crime’, also tackles the issue of an over-saturated and directionless art system. He notes that our current “paradigm of no-paradigm can also abet a flat indifference, a stagnant incommensurability.” (Foster, p128) Both writers call for a new approach to art discourse, one that is “capable of framing art, that provides it with an adequately ambitious context.” (Relyea, p22) There is a need for “some narrative to focus our present practices.” (Foster, p128) The problem of course, is developing a narrative framework that will resist the internal structure of critique that has evolved to become one of the most prominent features of art operations today.

A fascinating idea here is that some critics are looking for a way out of post-modernist processes, since they appear to have become too corrupted by market forces. Somehow the opening up of art practice to all manner of self-critique and cross-discipline production, has in fact resulted in a field of research that is bloated, unfit and unmotivated, like a champion runner who no longer trains, their goals now rendered meaningless due to an over-crowded race-track.

References

Foster, Hal, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes, London, 2002

Relyea, Lane, ‘Allover and at Once’, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2003, pp3-23.