Historicizing "Contemporary Art": Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan

We now reach a point at which we should not relegate gendai into the generic concept of contemporain, a point at which we should redeem in advance gendai from contemporain.

—Miyakawa Atsushi, 1963

A Brief History of "Contemporaneity"

In philosophies of time, a classic conundrum is how to capture and define "now," or the perpetually shifting present. In art history, when contemporary art—by definition, art occurring in the present—is ordered and organized post hoc into sequential sections of time (e.g., the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and so forth, or the art of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries if a larger unit of time is used), it is customarily released from its ahistoricity, from its immersion in "now." Accordingly, the contemporary art of each period is securely fixed in the past in a neat linear progression of time.

However, as the present awareness of history as our living experience shows, history, or historical consciousness, does not always have to work in a unilateral direction. It could inform, and conversely be informed by, a dynamic process wherein a dialogue between the present and the past takes place. Such a process is possible when we redeem another meaning of contemporary in contemporary art: occurring at the same time, that is, contemporaneously. To consider something "occurring contemporaneously" is to consider something occurring contemporaneously with something else; at the minimum two entities are required in order for "contemporaneity" to be perceived. To put this in the context of art, we discuss "global contemporary art" today because we have acquired the ability to see the production of art in multiplicity. This is in good part thanks to globalization, despite its notoriety for its homogenizing effects in industry and commerce, and, to some extent, the precedent of multiculturalism.

In this sense, contemporary art exists in global contemporaneity, with such regional divisions as contemporary art in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and subdivisions that encompass practices in, say, Japan, South Africa, and Iran. Sites of the globalization of art, which has become a fact of life over the past decade or so, are often in various international institutions (especially the proliferating biennial and triennial exhibitions worldwide) and the ubiquitous realm of cyberspace. The media of choice are video and photography, which together comprise the lingua franca of globalized art, allowing diverse geographies and concerns—as in Shirin Neshat's intent gaze on gender, Mathew Barneys's fantastic postmodern self-myths, and Mariko Mori's neospiritual cosmology—not only to coexist but also to create a sense of togetherness, whereby the same time and space are shared. Transnational and transcultural have thus become the theoretical keywords of globalism in art.

It should be noted that an embrace of multiplicity that exists in contemporaneity is not limited to our understanding of the present but is increasingly extended to our immediate past (the postwar decades) and recent past (the modern age). For example, contemporary art in our immediate past is now increasingly reexamined as a worldwide phenomenon. Hitherto unrecognized or overlooked movements, individual artists, and groups from non-Western backgrounds of the postwar decades are now more frequently and routinely incorporated into canonical narratives of twentieth-century art history and introduced into museum collections and exhibitions.¹ That is to say, multiple practices that did exist but were omitted from history have been reclaimed to complete what may be called the world atlas of contemporary art—an atlas that had been originally delineated within the perimeters of the West, with sporadic notations of activity in terrae incognitae beyond. In some sense, a perception of contemporaneity is thus reconstituted retroactively to construct a whole and all-inclusive view of the immediate past.

A similar reconstruction of contemporaneity is also taking place in the studies of our recent past, or more precisely modernism and modernity. Here, inclusiveness takes the guise of multiplicity and alternatives...