Contemporary Artistic Sense-Making: By now it seems uncontroversial to remark that “contemporary art” has substituted “modern art” as descriptor of the art of our times, or what we might call the historical present. In current art discourses, it is, however, still unclear what this substitution of adjectives to qualify the art of the present implies. Why is “modern” no longer adequate to describe the art of our moment? What does the notion of “the contemporary” mean? What does it grasp that “modern” does not? How do they differ in their understanding of history and futurity?
Considering the replacement of “modern art” with “contemporary art” we need to historicize the very notion of the contemporary, Lund argues. When we understand contemporary art as an art of the present, an art that is directed toward and somehow gives expression to the present, we also need to question the category of the present itself. The notion of the contemporary, understood critically, refers to a change in our relation to and experience of time itself, a change in the temporal quality of the present. Due to developments in communication technology, the emergence of planetary scale computation, growing awareness of climate crisis and eco-systemic change, and processes of decolonization, among other factors, the very constitution of the present is fundamentally changing. The present to which contemporary art refers is one characterized by contemporaneity in the sense that it is constituted by an intensified global or planetary interconnectedness of a multitude of different times, temporalities, and experiences of time.
Following an outline of the condition of contemporaneity, Lund will present some reflections on its consequences for artistic practice and sense-making in relation to the work of Claire Fontaine and Forensic Architecture, amongst others.
Jacob Lund is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture and Director of Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. He is editor, with Geoff Cox, of the book series The Contemporary Condition with Sternberg Press (since 2016). He was the Editor-in-Chief of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 2007-2023. Lund has published widely within aesthetics, art studies, critical theory, and comparative literature on topics such as image-politics, subjectivity, memory, mediality, enunciation, and contemporaneity. 2015-2021 he was PI on the research project The Contemporary Condition, which focused on the concept of contemporaneity and changes in our experiences of time as these might be seen to be registered in contemporary art: www.contemporaneity.au.dk (funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research). Currently he is engaged on the research project Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions, running 2022-2026 and made possible by an Investigator Grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. His most recent book is The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity (Sternberg, 2022).