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.

Babette Mangolte

What does it mean for an artist to be “contemporary”? Does it mean sensing what is current and thus able to reflect one’s intuitions about the “now” in the work produced? Is doing what everyone else is doing a mark of being contemporary, or the opposite? Can one become contemporary by inventing something new that retroactively, at a future date, comes to signify this past era? And to what degree is contemporary art contingent upon the specifics of a historical moment, a given country, and precise social context? Can one feel at ease with the limitations imposed by outsider status? The mirror image is a false definition of the contemporary: being “next-to” rather than being “in” is more apt. One ambiguity inherent in any allusion to the contemporary in art is in determining whether it refers to the conditions that existed when one started the work or those in which the work is seen. As one’s life changes and evolves, so too does that which is considered contemporary.

What does it mean to co-exist in two “contemporary” moments at the same time? What is it to be contemporary when they are opposite moments—the second decade of the twenty-first century anywhere, and the 1970s somewhere in New York City; part of an avant-garde with a small but vibrantly optimistic community, circa 1973, and a world without territory or rules or limitations, circa 2011? The French refer to “the same period” without precisely marking the size of the historical frame (a decade? a century?), but with the adjective “contemporary” the time frame is assumed to be brief, perhaps a decade, especially within the context of art when it signifies “the now,” the way an artist reflects “the moment” or “today.” Is not being “contemporary” the ultimate illusion of the young artists of today? Their Holy Grail?

Can I still embody today the contemporaneity from earlier periods of my life? Or must I negate my own history and only embody that which is currently contemporary? The vagueness and avoidance of a specific historical reference, suddenly replaced by the “now,” reflects the sense of impermanence and rapidly increasing obsolescence occasioned by technology, specifically in media production.

Filmmakers are always immersed in the present of the action, but their purpose is not necessarily defined by it. As most filmmakers do, I think primarily about time and duration, and my concept of what is “present” is the ultimate end point of the work on the film. Filmmakers conceptualize time into three distinct blocks: the present time of the shoot, the given time in the narrative concept of the film, and the present moment when the film is seen. The editing and final sound mix of the film must be structured to regenerate a present each time it is projected. Films are constructed to appear current at the time of projection, so one made thirty years ago can seem as fresh and new as one made today. The final aim of filmmaking is to create a machine that actualizes the present, one that manufactures “contemporaneity.”

Photographers negotiate only two concepts of time: the decisive moment of the shooting...