Being Contemporary

One of the essential concerns of visual art, performance, and critical thought is the idea of the “contemporary” or the “new.” We are part of an era that had cast forth great themes, and complex ways of organizing society and culture, while also being challenged by many received ideas. How does one take the measure of one’s work in the zeitgeist of the times?

What makes a performance, a play, a piece of music, or an essay contemporary? What does the search for the contemporary or the innovative mean to the arts and to the public today? How is it recognized or understood?

Consider your own work, or another artist’s work, in this context.

Robert Wilson

My work is something very personal, something that happened not as a result of formal education, but by living life. I learned to make theatre by doing it. You learn to walk by walking. And you also learn to walk by falling down. Lincoln Kirstein said, “Modern dance will have no tradition.” My work is a product of the time. It is not meant to be repeated in the future. It’s like a shooting star. It’s an event that happens once. Therefore, my work will only be experienced by my contemporaries. I don’t want to leave a school or a “Robert Wilson way of doing things.” I am seventy-years old this year, and my mission is to give a place and a chance for young people to develop their own work and their own aesthetic that will in turn speak to their contemporaries. I want to give them a place where we understand it is okay to fall down.

Charles Bernstein

Innovation is not so much an aesthetic value as an aesthetic necessity. Nevertheless, I understand full well the great suspicion with which claims to innovation and originality are now held. Some of this suspicion is a justified response to progressivist ideas in modernism (and modernization) that value the new over any other aesthetic quality, with the concomitant beliefs that the new replaces the old or that the new is better than the old. Too often claims for innovation seem to mime the marketing (and generational) imperative for “new and improved” (cultural) products. But such claims fail to recognize that aesthetic innovation is not necessarily related to improvement; at its most engaged, it is a means of keeping up with the present, grappling with the contemporary. We have to constantly reinvent our forms and vocabularies so that we don’t lose touch with ourselves and the world we live in. The need for change in art is prompted by changes in the social and economic environment. The responses of the past are not always able to engage the present.

But such arguments for aesthetic innovation too often fall on deafened ears. The idea that innovation is a luxury for the privileged or those who remove themselves from struggle creates an, at best, Romantic, at worst, demagogic nostalgia for the greater authenticity of the experience of the imagined less well-off “other,” as if only severe forms of oppression can create “relevant” poetry, as if we are so well-off ourselves with so many things to keep us company. More accurate would be to say that innovation comes as response to the human crisis: innovation is the mark of rethinking, trying to break out of the obsessive repetition-compulsion that we see all around us, whether in an individual or a family, or politically (in the conflict between states or groups). You might say that severe forms of oppression rob a people of its right to poetry—and the crisis for poetry, for the aesthetic, is to create a space for poetry again and again.

For that, anything less than invention falters. Sometimes that faltering can be exquisitely...