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1
The World Changes, the Art World Expands

Jean Robertson
Craig McDaniel
Scott Contreras-Koterbay

This volume explores visual art created in the period 1980 to 2020. Within the span of these four decades, two
factors are fundamental to what we witness taking shape in the arena known as the art world: first, the world
changes at an accelerating pace and, second, within the practice of visual art, content matters. These two
fundamental circumstances interrelate. Within this opening chapter, we provide a concise analysis of both. We
consider, briefly, key changes in the world at large; and we chart key trends in ways artists respond to (represent,
recall, reformulate, and remediate) the real and imaginary worlds they inhabit.

Current art is in flux. Old hierarchies and categories are fracturing; new technologies are offering different ways of
conceptualizing, producing, and showing visual art. Established art forms are under scrutiny and revision. An
awareness of heritages and new practices from around the world is fostering cross-fertilizations, and everyday
culture is providing both inspiration for art and competing visual stimulation. The diversity and rapid
transformations are intriguing but can be daunting for those who want to understand contemporary art and actively
participate in discussions about what is happening.

While older forms of art, such as painting, photography, sculpture, and drawing, still attract a large number of
practitioners, they no longer subsume the field. Film, video, sound, installation, performance, texts, and digital
platforms are common media today; and artists are often fluent in several media. Artists freely mix media, or they
may practice a medium with a long lineage in an unconventional way, such as making paintings that look like
pixilated digital images or drawing with unconventional materials such as chocolate syrup.

Consider the example of Cai Guo-Qiang. Like many notable artists working since 1980, Cai does not focus his
practice on a single creative medium (e.g., painting or ceramics or photography). Instead, his art production includes
large-scale drawings, installations, and performance events and has involved gunpowder, fireworks, Chinese herbal
medicines, computers, and vending machines, among many other materials and means. For Inopportune: Stage One
(2004), Cai incorporated nine identical white cars, suspended dramatically in midair [1-1]. Later in this chapter (see
“Social Experience as Art”), we look at another artwork by Cai that features actual people congregating in a hot tub.

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1 - 1 Cai Guo-Qiang Inopportune: Stage One, 2004 Nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes, dimensions variable

Along with the expanded range of materials and media being used to make art today, a key characteristic of
contemporary art is that content matters. In the case of Cai’s artwork, the cars are positioned to create the
impression of successive stages of a car flipping over in an explosion from a car bombing, while long tubes radiating
colored light burst out in all directions from the windows. For a visitor staring up at the overhanging sequence of
cascading cars, the experience, most likely, combines a rich mixture of wonder, interest, and dismay. Yes, clearly
current art is in flux.

Nevertheless, would the demonstration that content matters distinguish contemporary art from art in earlier
epochs? In a word, no. Over the long span of art’s history, the vast majority of objects, images, and participatory
activities were designed in the service of meaning(s) above and beyond the pure manipulation of form for form’s
sake. Although a special case can be made that content declined in importance for art in the mid-twentieth century,
looking back closely at the history of modern art, it is debatable whether the idea of “art for art’s sake” truly took over
the thinking of modernist theorists and artists. Nevertheless, certainly there were periods in the twentieth century,
especially just after World War II, when critics (famously the American Clement Greenberg, who died in 1994) and
some influential avant-garde artists advocated formalism, an emphasis on form rather than content when creating
and interpreting art. Those invested in formalism were and are concerned mainly with investigating the properties of
specific media and techniques, as well as the general language of traditional aesthetics (the role of color or
composition, for instance). But formalism is inadequate for interpreting art that expresses the inner visions of artists
or art that refers to the world beyond art. When pop art appeared in the 1960s, with its references to cartoons,
consumer products, and other elements of shared culture, the limitations of formalism became evident and a broader

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range of theories surfaced, including postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism, as we
discuss later in this chapter (see “Theory Flexes Its Muscles”).

Artists active after 1980 have been motivated by a range of purposes and ideas beyond a desire to express personal
emotions and visions or to display a mastery of media and techniques. Political events, science, technology, mass
media, social media, popular culture, literature, music, the built environment, the flow of capital, the flow of ideas,
and other forces and developments are propelling artists and providing content for their artworks.

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Overview of History and Art History|1980–2020

The period since 1980 has been eventful in virtually every area of human activity, including politics, medicine,
science, technology, culture, and art. In the 1980s, fax machines and compact disc players entered widespread use,
the first laptop computers were introduced, and early cellphones became available. Also in the 1980s, for the first
time in the United States, a woman was appointed to the Supreme Court, a woman traveled in space, and a woman
headed a major party ticket as a candidate for vice president. The Berlin Wall was dismantled and Germany reunified
in 1989, presaging the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe (although the hoped-for end to the Cold War
standoff between Russia and the United States has not been as complete as optimists predicted).

In the 1990s, numerous controversies raged over threats of global warming and genetic engineering of plants and
animals. Also in the 1990s, a brutal civil war led to the breakup of Yugoslavia into several independent republics,
ethnic massacres devastated the African state of Rwanda, and nationalist conflicts broke out in the new states of
Georgia and Azerbaijan in the former Soviet Union. Early in the 1990s, apartheid officially ended in South Africa. In
1995, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by American terrorists.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century were extremely dangerous. In September 2001, the World Trade
Center in New York was destroyed and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., was attacked by Islamist terrorists. The
US–led invasion of Afghanistan commenced later that fall, and in 2003, the United States led an invasion of Iraq that
toppled the government of Saddam Hussein. Civil unrest and even open warfare have plagued many regions,
including the Darfur region of Sudan; Jewish and Palestinian settlements in the Middle East; Chechnya, on the
border of Russia; and Syria, where an ongoing civil war began in 2011. Food shortages and famines, infectious
diseases, rising costs of basic necessities, and increasing evidence of climate change offered a bleak outlook to people
worldwide, especially in the poorest nations. Meanwhile, new economic powerhouses, including China and India,
were exerting influence on the global economy. Technological changes were continuing to have a social impact,
including new medical and scientific discoveries and increasingly popular forms of instant communication such as
texting and tweeting.

The decade of the 2020s started with widespread, dreadful challenges, notably the global pandemic known as
COVID-19. The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus demonstrated, to a degree not seen in a hundred years, the
vulnerability of human populations to infectious disease. By the end of 2020, an estimate of close to two million
people had died globally. In an effort to level the curve of the numbers infected, measures to limit face-to-face human
interactions by keeping people at home resulted in a dramatic global economic recession and highlighted the
economic interconnectedness of societies across the planet.

The demographics of various parts of the world have changed dramatically in the period this text addresses. The
overall world population increased dramatically to a total estimated at 4.5 billion in 1981, 6 billion in 1999, and 7.8
billion in 2020. The United States alone “experienced a profound demographic shift in the 1980s, with an influx of
over 7 million immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. By 1990, the U.S. population was 247
million—25 percent of whom claimed African, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American ancestry.”1 Every year, across the
globe, the uprooting of vast numbers of people occurs in response to wars, famines, ethnic violence, and economic
pressures and opportunities. Alterations in national boundaries and distributions of power are commonplace.
According to a 2010 study, “Since 1960, more than half of the world’s 195 countries have been born—or reborn.”2
Reporting on the state of refugees in 2019, the New York Times stated the following: “Today the United Nations
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estimates that there are 25.9 million refugees worldwide, the highest number since … World War II. That is double
the total from 2012, and may undercount displaced Venezuelans. More than half the refugees are children. If you
include people forced from home who remain within their national borders, the number of displaced is more than 70
million.”3

The fortunes and misfortunes of contemporary artists took shape, to a large degree, within the sphere of the
commercial art market. Reputations were built by the support of prominent gallery dealers and the approval of the
critics, curators, and collectors who carefully monitored and judged the quality of the art featured in highly
publicized exhibitions. During the era, there were frequent shifts in the zones of concentrated art activity (such as the
reduction of galleries located in New York’s SoHo area and the dramatic influx of galleries into the historic
meatpacking district known as Chelsea by the mid-1990s), as well as numerous gallery openings and closings, which
reflected fluctuations in national economies. The rise of neo-expressionism in the early 1980s, for instance, was tied
to a boom in the US stock market, whereas an economic recession later in the decade was responsible in part for
retrenchment and attention to more modestly scaled artistic projects. In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the art market boomed again, until another, even larger recession started in 2008. Today, the ability of artists to
reach audiences and market their work online is altering the dynamics of the global art market. All of this, of course,
is not without precedent. General forces at work in society, including politics, demographics, and economics, have
always influenced the history of art.

During economic boom periods, a notable trend has been the supersizing of art, found in the production of
spectacular, often highly crafted and technically complex works that require teams of assistants, specialist
consultants, and big budgets to realize. For example, Cai’s Inopportune: Stage One [1-1] was made with the help of
consultants and assistants. The interest in monumentality has been pronounced in several distinctive venues now
known for commissioning grandiose temporary installations, including the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in
London and the Park Avenue Armory in New York, among others. The merits of funneling vast sums of capital into
gigantic projects are a matter of debate.

In general, the art scene expanded dramatically after 1980, with a marked increase in artists, dealers, collectors,
publications, and exhibition spaces. The formation of new institutions, as well as new or revamped facilities at
existing institutions, increased the number, size, and quality of locations where the latest in visual art could be seen
by a growing public, including tourists seeking entertainment. In addition to exhibitions and activities presented by
public institutions within facilities devoted to contemporary art, the era witnessed a surge of public art—visual arts
activities in public settings, such as city streets, plazas, parks, airports, and commercial facilities, as well as in more
transitory locations, such as billboards, magazine pages, and social networking services such as Instagram. For
example, Charles Ray’s Boy with Frog (2009), is an eight-foot-tall sculpture commissioned for a temporary
installation on the tip of an island at the southern entrance of the Grand Canal in Venice [1-2]. Designed for that
prominent site, the sculpture displays the artist’s characteristic combination of conceptualism and humor. The
dazzling white finish refers to the long tradition of marble sculpture in Italy; the white color of the sculpture also
makes the figures look ghostly, otherworldly. The larger-than-life boy, who is on the cusp between adolescence and
manhood, dangles a goliath frog. His pose suggests he has just fished the frog out of the nearby water and now is
pausing to consider its form and its fate.

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1 - 2 Charles Ray Boy with Frog, 2009 Painted steel, 96 × 29.5 × 41.25 inches (244 × 75 × 105 cm)

Public dollars funded many art activities (although not Ray’s sculpture), a fact that turned out to be something of a
double-edged sword. The support of contemporary art with government dollars was a crucial means of enlarging the
funds available to artists and institutions; in the United States and Britain, such support was often a percentage of
the amount budgeted for new government-funded public construction projects. The use of government funds
increased attention to contemporary art (taxpayers were interested in knowing how their money was being spent),
but the increased attention also resulted in more controversy whenever a vocal core trumpeted their outrage over a
specific project. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981–1984), located on the National Mall in Washington,
D.C., and Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981), installed in a public plaza near a government office building in
Manhattan, are early examples of public art projects that galvanized public opinion, both pro and con. The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial ultimately was embraced even by its original opponents. A more conservative outlook prevailed
for Tilted Arc: Serra’s work was removed in 1989 after a lengthy legal battle.

In the United States from the late 1960s to the start of the 1980s, the rebellions and successes of the women’s
liberation movement and the civil rights movement influenced art by opening up the stage to more voices. These
newly visible participants brought fresh ideas to the field, as well as expanding ideas about means, media, and
techniques for expressing those ideas. Since 1980, the highly visible activism of LGBTQ artists has added more voices
to the mix. Art by feminists, artists perceived to be unpatriotic or sacrilegious, and LGBTQ artists became targets of
public uproar, fueling the so-called culture wars that erupted in the United States in the late 1980s and 1990s over
public funding and freedom of expression. Highly publicized controversies accompanied a traveling exhibition of
photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1990s that included some photos showing activities by gay men.
Piss Christ (1987) [see chapter 9, “Spirituality,” 9-5] by Andres Serrano, a photographic image of a plastic crucifix
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submerged in urine, was deemed blasphemous by some religious spokespersons. The offer in 1990 by feminist artist
Judy Chicago to donate her monumental collaborative creation The Dinner Party (1979) to the University of the
District of Columbia was blocked by conservative members of Congress who called the work pornographic because
some interpreted the imagery as representing female genitalia. (In 2002, The Dinner Party was acquired by the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it now is on permanent view.) Also under pressure from Congress, the National
Endowment for the Arts eliminated fellowships to individual artists in 1995.

Political considerations influenced some artists to engage in institutional critiques. Such critiques took aim both at
art institutions—with artists attempting to reveal how museums, commercial galleries, and other organizations
control how art is produced, displayed, and marketed—and at institutions and practices within the wider society; for
example, feminists critiqued the social structures and hierarchies that limit female potential. Although they have yet
to achieve full equality in terms of income, influence, prestige, and recognition, women and minority artists have
become empowered and have had a major influence on who makes art, what art is about, and how art is viewed and
interpreted. The collective imagination of what is possible in art has opened up to acknowledge diversity.

Activist art addressed social realities heard and seen in the news and experienced directly by the artists involved. Art
about AIDS provides a key example. AIDS began its destructive impact in the early 1980s, when the disease was first
recognized and named. In the 1980s, before treatments had been developed and refined, an AIDS diagnosis was like
a death sentence. “Life was lived with that bell tolling all the time,” recalls writer Stephen Koch.4 The association of
AIDS with gay men at that time brought forth a wave of virulent homophobia. In response to the crisis and to
massive losses from AIDS within the arts community, numerous artists, including David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring,
and the art collective known as Gran Fury, put their art in the service of AIDS activism. Other arenas that provided
serious political content for contemporary art included feminist politics and issues of race, homelessness, corporate
capitalism, consumerism, and militarism.

The history of contemporary art is not entirely a story of young artists bursting onto the scene with new ideas.
Although many previously unknown artists emerged after 1980, the presence and influence of older artists were
important as well. For example, Joseph Beuys died in 1986, Andy Warhol in 1987, Louise Nevelson in 1988, Roy
Lichtenstein in 1997, Nam June Paik in 2006, Louise Bourgeois in 2010, and I. M. Pei in 2019. Most of these were
making vital work up until their deaths so that even an art movement such as pop art, which we normally associate
with the 1960s, was evolving within the ongoing production of the oeuvres of Warhol and Lichtenstein. Ida
Applebroog and Yayoi Kusama—each born in 1929—remained active with recent exhibitions.

Themes of Contemporary Art is not a chronological survey. The history of art after 1980 is fantastically rich and
involves many diverse stories, motivations, influences, ideas, and approaches. Attempting to map recent art into a
tight chronological structure of movements or even of collections of major artists would misrepresent the period.
Whereas the art world before 1980 is distant enough that we can perceive some sequence of trends (really multiple
intersecting and interacting trends), more recent art practices are much more pluralistic and amorphous in
character. Many of the artists we discuss are in midcareer and still defining their practices. As artist Haim Steinbach
said (remembering the 1980s, although his statement applies to the entire contemporary period), “I see [the period]
as an archipelago, in which different things were going on, on different islands. They were going on concurrently but
not always moving in the same direction.”5

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Traditions Survive, New Trends Arrive

If we cannot place contemporary art into neat compartments or a series of movements, we can still make a few broad
observations about developments and tendencies in art since 1980.

Painting Didn’t Die

Painting didn’t die in contemporary art, despite predictions to the contrary made in the 1970s. Indeed, painting
enjoyed something of a rebirth in Europe in the 1970s and in the United States in the early 1980s, during the heyday
of neo-expressionism, “an international movement dominated by oversized canvases and emotional gestures, and by
a bustling commercial market.”6 Young Americans making bold, gestural paintings, including Julian Schnabel and
David Salle, were celebrated and compared to dramatic painters who had emerged in Europe in the 1970s, such as
the German neo-expressionist Anselm Kiefer. Although it was enormously popular, neo-expressionism had its
detractors, who saw the artists as opportunists simulating emotion in order to appeal to the market. By 1990, the
neo-expressionist momentum had died down, but in its wake painting continued to attract critical attention,
although with some rising and falling in its influence (especially when examined on a regional basis) and changes in
the concerns of its practitioners.

The practice of painting saw its boundaries stretched in the contemporary period. What defines a painting? Can we
still recognize one when we see one? Thousands upon thousands of paintings are created each year in the familiar
portable, rectangular, paint-on-canvas format. But exciting work has pushed painting into areas in which it embraces
unconventional materials and often overlaps with sculpture and installation art. For example, Fred Tomaselli makes
“paintings” that are collages of plants, pills (over-the-counter and prescription), insect wings, and catalog clippings
[see chapter 9, “Spirituality,” 9-6]. Kara Walker cuts silhouettes from paper to make large-scale murals [see chapter
5, “Memory,” 5-17].

For many artists, the practice of painting has been impacted by digital technologies and platforms both in terms of
what gets painted and how it gets painted. For example, going digital has resulted in more emphasis on interactive
art. British-born artist Matthew Ritchie was an early experimenter in the interactive realm. He developed his first
online project in 1996. Titled The Hard Way, the site allows viewers to experience a narrative by following Ritchie’s
imagined avatars through a complex universe of the artist’s invention. The site includes text, drawings, computer
animations, and paintings he manipulated digitally.7 Since then, Ritchie has created even larger projects that include
interactive internet sites along with producing physical objects—for example, installing sculptures, paintings,
computer games, and other forms within a gallery context. Like Charles Ray, Ritchie uses digital tools to design the
physical works, such as the painting illustrated [1-3]. Ritchie’s paintings and sculptures are the result of a process
where Ritchie scans his drawings into a computer, deconstructing and reforming them into designs for physical
objects. The artist, who has extensively educated himself in physics, particularly chaos theory, has devised systematic
rules for the colors, shapes, characters, and physical properties he uses to select his symbols and narratives.

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1 - 3 Matthew Ritchie Self-Portrait in 2064, 2001 Oil and marker on canvas, 80 × 100 inches (203.2 × 254 cm)

Photograph yand video became players

Even as brushy neo-expressionist painting garnered headlines, the 1980s saw a surge of camera-based art. Artists
had used photography as a medium from its officially announced invention in 1839, but it was in the 1980s that
photography really escaped its secondary status and “moved to the very centre of avant-garde art practices …
rivalling painting and sculpture in size, spectacular effects, market appreciation, and critical importance.”8 Large-
scale color printing of photographs became feasible for the first time, propelling the interest of museums and
collectors. Photography also exerted a noticeable influence on other forms of art, particularly some genres of
painting.

Photography expanded its own boundaries as artists gave free rein to experimentation, adopting digital innovations
as soon as they became available and hybridizing with other forms of art, including installation and performance.
More and more photographers turned to elaborate fabrications, constructing staged scenes that they then
photographed or altering camera images after shooting. The widespread leap into digital photography facilitated and
accelerated the manipulation of photographs, with computer programs such as Photoshop replacing the hands-on
darkroom procedures needed to alter analog negatives. Examples of photography’s use as a tool for fabricating
convincing portrayals of imaginary realms can be found in the tableaus of Canadian artist Jeff Wall and American
Sandy Skoglund.

Video technology attracted experimenters within the field of art, notably Nam June Paik, as soon as it became
available in the 1960s. By the 1990s, video became a prominent medium, in part because its time-based character
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supports a renewed interest in telling stories in art and exploring narrative structures. For example, Miranda July is
a multimedia performance and video artist and a film director, who employs creative blends of technology to tell
fable-like stories. Early in July’s career, her performance, The Swan Tool (2001) [1-4], involved the artist situating
her actual body between video projections of a maze of cubicles in a generic-looking office, intermingling live art on a
stage with projections on screens and live and recorded music and sound. The video changed direction in synch with
July’s body movements. The plot of The Swan Tool, narrated by July assuming the role of several characters,
involved the struggles of Lisa, an insurance worker.

1 - 4 Miranda July The Swan Tool, 2001 Performance

Sculpture as an Art Form

Sculpture as an art form widely expanded its sphere of influence, and the range of content and forms within the
genre expanded as well. In the 1980s, and extending into the present, sculptors dramatically broadened the forms,
techniques, and materials they selected. In addition to creating sculptures from traditional materials, such as bronze,
marble, and wood, artists made sculptures from a wide array of materials as well as found objects, such as the cars
and light tubes used by Cai Guo-Qiang to make his sculptural installation Inopportune: Stage One [1-1].
Furthermore, while sculptors continued to carve, cast, and construct discrete, unique objects, others expanded their
practice so that sculpture overlapped with other art forms, such as performance and video.

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The Ready-Made Became the Remix
Early in the twentieth century Dada artist Marcel Duchamp famously exhibited unaltered found objects such as a
urinal and a snow shovel as what he called ready-mades, or found sculptures. Numerous artists since have
experimented with found objects and images, including other Dada artists, the surrealists, the so-called junk
sculptors of the 1950s, pop artists, and a range of artists interested in techniques of assemblage or the conceptual
implications of the ready-made. Performance artists likewise have mixed everyday movements, sounds, props, and
behaviors with more conventionally theatrical elements.

In the 1980s, in line with then up-to-the-minute theories of postmodernism, visual artists adopted appropriation as
an approach to using ready-made objects and images. Appropriation artists comb both art history and vernacular
culture for found objects, styles, images, subjects, and compositions and recombine details borrowed here and there
into eclectic visual pastiches. Schlock and kitsch borrowings are readily combined with details from high art,
architecture, and design.9

In the twenty-first century, new terminology captures expanded practices and ideas around the concept of the ready-
made. Borrowed from hip-hop culture and the world of music, the terms sampling and remixing are sometimes
substituted for the older terms appropriation and collage. The use of such terms recognizes that found object
practices now encompass the tools and networks of the digital age, which give artists instant access to an endless
supply of images, sounds, and data, as well as the technology to recombine and reconfigure them at will. What this
all means for the future of artistic production and the value of old and new media is open to debate.

Sound Infiltrates the Visual Arts

Referring to art practices that take listening and hearing as the main focus, sound art has become an increasingly
important genre within the visual arts. Susan Philipsz won England’s 2010 Turner Prize for her sound installation
Lowlands (which played overlapping recordings of the artist singing three different versions of an ancient Scottish
lament), the first time a work of sound art won this important prize. Although Lowlands has no visual component,
other works of sound art often take a hybrid form that combines visual and aural components. There are many
overlaps and interconnections with experimental music. Sound art can involve any theme, although we give the
genre special attention in chapter 7, “Language.”10

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Globalization

Today we live on a planet in which people in diverse societies, separated by geography and ideology, nevertheless
find themselves linked by powerful global connections, including far-reaching networks of global capital and
information exchange. Large international corporations control sizeable swathes of the world’s production and
commerce, and media conglomerates own the lion’s share of the news and entertainment industries. Simultaneously,
the internet offers instant global access to information and other users virtually anywhere, 24/7.

What are the effects of globalization? Consumer capitalism has made huge strides in extending its reach to global
markets. Notably, the economic rise of countries of the Pacific Rim, especially China with its steps toward a more
capitalist-style economy, has opened up portions of the world that had been significantly insulated from capitalist
business practices. Meanwhile, multinational corporations and supranational economic institutions such as the
World Bank and the World Trade Organization are engaged in activities that sometimes support and sometimes are
in conflict with national interests. Systems of power now make up a globalized network that is not centered (or
policed) in any one country. Some theorists see the emergence of a new emphasis on the control of information
becoming more significant than the control of the means of production. Félix Guattari, writing in 1989, presciently
observed, “Post-industrial capitalism … tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from
structures producing goods and services to structures producing signs, syntax and—in particular, through the control
which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc.—subjectivity.”11 New strategies to dominate the
flow of opinions can be seen, for example, in attempts to interfere in political elections in the United States and
Europe.

The emergence of a linked global society (linked both technologically and economically) has not resulted in
international unity and worldwide equality; indeed, it is improbable whether any institution operating on a global
scale can possibly represent the political, cultural, or aesthetic interests of the diverse individuals in all countries.
According to Stuart Hall, “You see massive disparities of access, of visibility, huge yawning gaps between who can
and can’t be represented in any effective way.”12 For example, not every person everywhere has access to computers
and the internet, and thus technologies reinforce privilege and power for those who are well connected to the flow of
information.

The art world, not surprisingly, is affected by globalization. For starters, the art world itself underwent major
changes during the period covered in this text. Major art centers lost some of their dominance as art activities
became more decentralized and new collectors and dealers emerged all over the world. The changed artistic
landscape led to a significant cross-fertilization of ideas among locations across the globe. Although New York City
remained a primary destination on the art world map, other urban centers—including London, Tokyo, Shanghai,
Dubai, Mumbai, Istanbul, Berlin, Cologne, São Paulo, Johannesburg, and Havana—ratcheted up their support and
presentation of new art to such a degree that anyone who expected to remain knowledgeably informed felt pressure
to research (and visit) current activities in these locations.

As a result of the expansion of art markets and institutions globally in recent decades, artists in Africa, Central and
South America, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific have been gaining visibility on the world stage. At the same time,
national and regional issues are complicated by the broader geopolitics of national and international politics and
conflicts. Although the cross-fertilization of ideas has been stimulating, the growth of a globalized art market has
increased the disparity between the few who are well connected and everyone else. International art fairs and
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biennial and triennial contemporary art survey exhibitions have proliferated and are held in numerous cities on
every continent, to the point where they are nearly impossible to keep up with.13 Geographic mobility has become
important, and artists, gallery dealers, critics, and collectors who have the resources to participate in international
events increase their visibility and influence.

The directors and curators who select artists and orchestrate the international events have remarkable status and
power. Why should this be the case? Acclaimed works of art do not pass through global channels of commerce in the
same way that most products are bought and sold. Artworks are, generally speaking, unique and, therefore, uniquely
owned. A very small number of people of wealth hold power as potential purchasers. (In contrast, for a movie to meet
with commercial success, a large number of people must elect to purchase a theater ticket or stream it.)

Besides issues of access and visibility, another issue is the potential for homogenization of culture. One could argue
that globalization is dehumanizing people and leveling out differences because it is bringing the same consumer
products, images, and information to many all over the world, including art that starts to look alike no matter what
part of the world an artist hails from. Critic Julia A. Fenton asks, “Has the explosion of international art expositions
around the world, and the mobility of artists from all cultures (either through the high art market or the Internet)
served to erase the particular in favor of the general—in style, content and theory? Do formal considerations again
become primary when we have obliterated cultural boundaries and posited a new universality?”14

Nevertheless, many artists continue to produce art whose materials, techniques, subjects, and forms appear to relate
to local histories and identities. Such expressions of cultural difference often are genuine and can serve as a form of
resistance to globalization by disrupting standardization. Some of this kind of art is a simulation of cultural
difference, however, promoted by international capitalism because it is marketable. Fredric Jameson, an important
Marxist theorist, has pointed out the many contradictions in globalization, such as the argument about whether
globalizing economic forces prefer to market cultural sameness or difference. Jameson further points out the irony
that nationalism, once seen as driving European colonialism, is today espoused as a model by formerly colonized
people who want to resist forces of globalization.15

Artists have explored various issues and topics related to globalization, including the economic systems that leverage
the global flow of capital, resources, information, and workers. Spanish artist Santiago Sierra considers the situation
of the hourly laborer within global capitalism. Sierra is known for projects that involve hiring laborers at their
customary wage to complete pointless, unpleasant tasks, often staged in art settings. For example, in 2000, he paid a
person $10 an hour to remain secluded for 360 continuous hours behind a brick wall erected at P.S.1 Contemporary
Art in New York; in 2002, he paid day laborers in Morocco a minimum wage to dig holes in an empty lot with
shovels. One of Sierra’s concerns is the perpetual underemployment of the worker who is also a refugee. His Workers
who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes was first shown in Berlin in 2000 [1-5]. (It has
been restaged in other locations since.) At that time, German law did not allow political refugees to earn money.
Sierra paid six such individuals an hourly wage to sit inside small boxes displayed in a gallery.

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1 - 5 Santiago Sierra Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes, Kunst Werke, Berlin, 2000

Sierra’s artworks create provocative situations. The viewer—someone who has the luxury of attending an art
exhibition—confronts their own role in supporting the economic structure that underpins the hiring of someone to
perform the menial “art” task the viewer is observing. This situation underscores that someone is so impoverished
that they are willing to be hired for this task, while the viewer is participating in validating the activity as art. More
empathetically, a viewer might consider how a body would feel crammed inside a cardboard box, remaining in such a
position for hours. It is on this somatic level, involving the viewer’s recognition of bodily discomfort, that the artwork
achieves its full, disturbing resonance. We are all implicated, caught up in the web of unequal economic power
relations that force so many to, literally, sell our bodies to the highest bidder.

Sierra’s works raise numerous issues about the distinction between art and ethics. Is Sierra himself exploiting
marginalized workers in order to create his art? In an interview, the artist asserted, “Well, I have been called an
exploiter. At the Kunst-Werke in Berlin they criticized me because I had people sitting for four hours a day, but they
didn’t realize that a little further up the hallway the guard spends eight hours a day on his feet … when you put your
name on the work it seems that you’re held responsible for the capitalist system itself.”16

Simply put, awareness of international developments in art has made the art world more dynamic and complex. But
globalization is not an unequivocal good, particularly when art production comes under market pressure from
international institutions and corporations that support the production and display of new art. To unpack this
statement more fully—incorporating, as it does, such concepts as “art production” and “market pressure”—we could
apply any number of ideas from the realms of economics, sociology, psychology, and politics. The application of ideas
could proceed piecemeal, or we might focus our thinking within the structure of an interconnected set of ideas—a

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theory. (Marxist theory, for instance, would be powerful in terms of addressing the conditions of global capitalism.)
Sierra’s artwork points to one end of the divide between those at the lowest levels of economic rewards and those at
the top.

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Theory Flexes Its Muscles

The relationship of current art to theory can be a source of consternation, especially for those who are relative
newcomers to the field. Artists—and students studying studio art—often wonder, “Why do I need to know about
theory? Can’t I just make my art, and doesn’t it mean what is visibly there, without the need for explanation?”
Viewers of art likewise may subscribe to the belief that theory is not necessary for appreciation—as in the oft-
repeated assertion, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”

Theoretical frameworks may prove vexing to the uninitiated, but numerous artists and critics active during the
period this book addresses have been heavily invested in theory and critical analysis. In the wake of conceptual art (a
movement that emerged in the mid-1960s), art became increasingly theoretical and idea-driven and began to sprout
difficult and obscure branches. Influential art graduate schools in Europe and the United States began advocating the
acquisition of theoretical knowledge and teaching analytical and interpretative skills, in some cases to the detriment
of providing training in technical and manual skills. According to writer and curator Bennett Simpson, “ ‘Knowledge
work’ became detached from its antecedent, technical work.”17 (Although today technical skill and refined production
values have become priorities again for many of the best-known artists’ creations, often these are made by assistants
working for the artist or an institutional sponsor.)

What Is Theory and What Is Its Function?

A key purpose of theory is to assist in learning to think about art. Art theorist Hilary Robinson defines the term
theory as “a set of ideas and knowledge that can be used in analysis.” Robinson’s definition combines two central
factors. First, Robinson emphasizes that a theory is (or is on the way to becoming) a coherent, cohesive, and
systematic arrangement of thoughts. Second, a theory in art has a function: a theory is a formulation of related ideas
“that can be used in analysis.”18 In subsequent chapters, we delve deeper into various theoretical viewpoints in
conjunction with analyzing specific themes and works of art. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate that theory need
not remain only theoretical. However, some general thoughts now should be useful as an introduction.

In our view, art theory is a conscious, deliberate thoughtfulness about art; theory offers an interconnected set of
assumptions, hypotheses, and predictions about possible meanings, purposes, and judgments of art. Theory provides
an intellectual lens through which we interrogate the practice of art; theory activates a mode of thinking about art,
providing us with a purposeful set of questions that frames our engagement.

Complicating matters, the 1970s and 1980s saw the dramatic rise in theoretical writings about other fields of
intellectual discourse, such as film and literary studies, linguistics, and history, and in turn the discussion and
deployment of a broad spectrum of these writings in the analysis of visual art. Fundamental issues about the
meaning and purpose of art were explored and debated. Is an aesthetics that focuses centrally on beauty too
restrictive? Should art be politically motivated and directed? Indeed, is art always political—the expression of a
particular ideology—even when the artist doesn’t believe they do this purposely? A theoretical manifestation of this
stance may claim that art is most effective when it challenges conventional ways of thinking in order to effect social
change. Momentum built, and some strands of theory gained power and excitement as intellectual energy
concentrated.

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Concepts from a range of theoretical perspectives, including postmodernism, semiotics, poststructuralism, feminism,
and postcolonialism, to name several of the most influential, were applied with increasing frequency in the analysis
of art and, in turn, helped shape the creation and reception of new art. The theoretical critiques of the period
examined many arenas of visual culture, including the structure and biases of art history; the politics and practices of
museums, galleries, and festivals; the nature and operation of art-market economics and how reputations are built;
the visual means through which mass media influence ideas and taste; and the representation in visual media of all
kinds of identities revolving around gender, race, sexuality, age, religion, and nationality. We discuss theories in
more depth as they become relevant in different thematic chapters. We focus primarily on theories that gained
prominence and power during the period after 1980. Here we provide just a brief overview.

Postmodernism Became a Catch-All Term

The term postmodernism cropped up in art criticism in the 1970s but became more commonly used in the 1980s.
Writers and thinkers engaged with postmodernism include Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva,
Charles Jencks, and Umberto Eco. The term is vague and open-ended, initially implying an opposition to some of the
tenets of modernism, including modernists’ confidence in social and technological progress; faith that history
unfolds in a rational, linear direction; and belief in individual self-determination. Postmodernists are skeptical about
progress; tend to be anti-elitist (for example, embracing kitsch as readily as the art of museums); think that the
forms of culture are hybrid, eclectic, and heterogeneous rather than pure and easily defined and contained; and
believe that individuals are inevitably molded by culture. (Prior to postmodernism, various artists, including the
Dadaists and many surrealists, also were interested in kitsch.) Postmodernists believe we are all prisoners, to some
degree, of identities constructed for us by artistic and popular media, among other cultural influences. Moreover, the
contemporary world is becoming increasingly more artificial because secondhand images filtered through digital
platforms, television, film, video, and other media now substitute for direct experiences and exert a powerful
influence on how we perceive and understand the world. In addition, more and more mediated images and
experiences are manufactured illusions with no basis in tangible reality—simulacra, to use Baudrillard’s term.
Baudrillard, according to art historian John Rajchman, “took the words ‘simulation’ and ‘simulacrum’ to describe the
‘Beaubourg effect’—no longer able to distinguish model from copy, we had lost any sense of reality, leaving us only
19
with ‘irony,’ hyperrealism, kitsch, quotation, appropriation.”

There is no single style associated with postmodernism. Instead, any and all styles and visual vocabularies are valid,
and pluralism rules. Appropriation became a frequent strategy used by postmodernists, however. Postmodern
appropriationists may mine the distant and recent past with little historical consciousness of what visual
representations meant in their original context. They use appropriation uncritically, simply adopting the approach as
an artistic fashion. But others attend to the conceptual implications of appropriation, using found objects and
appropriated styles and images as a means to raise philosophical questions about whether it is possible for artists to
be original or express authentic feelings and beliefs. Such artists often quote from the past and vernacular culture
with an attitude of irony or even parody. The most politically motivated appropriationists also challenge as elitist the
modernist identification and celebration of a handful of supposedly innovative artists. By appropriating, such artists
imply that originality does not matter.

Although still influential in the 1990s, postmodernism began to lose some of its appeal. According to curator Toby
Kamps, in

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an ideologically uncertain moment, artistic strategies of the 1980s—appropriation, critiques of commodification, deconstruction—
seemed empty or calculating. Instead, artists took up accessibility, communication, humor, and play. As a style, Postmodernism,
positing stylistic eclecticism, social criticism, and end-of-history irony, appeared bankrupt; as an attitude, however, it was the
definitive zeitgeist. The art of the 1990s, with its interest in complexity, multivalency, and ambiguity, mirrored an uncertain,
20
transitional period.

Today, postmodernism has become such a generalized catch-all term for so many different trends and ideas that it
has lost nuance and functionality, especially for art of the twenty-first century. Moreover, many people disavow the
term as binary and as keeping Western aesthetics in the center by implying a dialectical relationship with modernism
for all countertrends.

Art Is Understood as a Kind of Language

Influenced by the ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce, both active in the late nineteenth century, complex permutations of semiotics (the science of signs) were
applied to the visual arts in the late twentieth century. Whereas linguists analyze the structure of (verbal) language,
semioticians open up virtually any field of human activity as a potential subject for an analysis of the signs that
function within that field. Clothing styles, rules of etiquette, codes of conduct for adults—all of these and countless
other realms of experience can be analyzed in terms of semiotics. Scholars of visual culture have been especially
eager to adopt and adapt semiotics to their field.

As scholars (and artists) surmised, all of the arts also function on the basis of the conventional use of signs, so
semiotics is a powerful tool for the analysis of the practice of art. Art topics such as styles of representation, the rules
of linear perspective, and the metalanguage of various media (painting, for instance, signals “tradition” in a way that
video does not) are ripe for analysis through the magnifying glass of semiotics. For example, Cal Lane has developed
a process of cutting industrial metal with a welding torch to create lace patterns in automobile fenders, garden
shovels [1-6], dumpsters, and other found objects. In terms of semiotics, lacemaking is understood as a feminine
textile practice used for domestic purposes, whereas metal cutting signals a traditionally masculine skill used to
make tools and machines. Lane, who is female, creates semiotic dissonance by mixing the two.

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1 - 6 Cal Lane Shovels, 2005 (detail view) Plasma cut steel

Theories associated with poststructuralism are closely identified with postmodernism and semiotics. What
poststructuralism added to the mix was the concept that the underlying structure of a language or any other symbolic
system is not fixed and permanent.21 With individual variations, poststructuralist thinkers argued that any symbolic
system or cultural artifact (for example, a language, a work of literature, a painting, a social system)—what they
called a text—can be shown to have internal contradictions and hidden ideologies. Through this perspective, the
culture we live in, like any culture, can be seen as a forest of signs; the meanings of these signs around us shift,
sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes in dramatic turns, as competing ideologies negotiate and at times struggle
mightily, always reaching for the upper hand. Whoever gets to determine what images and signs represent, what
images and signs are made, and what images and signs are seen controls in no small measure the ongoing
production, meaning, and maintenance of culture.

Poststructuralists use a strategy developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida known as deconstruction to
analyze visual and verbal texts. Deconstruction looks at a text or symbolic system in terms of the underlying
worldview that gave rise to it, exposing contradictions and hidden biases in order to challenge the validity of the
worldview as well as the text. Derrida also argued that the meanings of texts are unstable because different readers
(or viewers, in the case of visual texts) bring their own worldviews to their reading and looking, which skew
interpretation. No text has any single, correct interpretation; meanings change with the reader, the time, and the
22
context.

According to postmodernists and poststructuralists, truth and reality are not as truthful and real as they may seem;
in fact, there are many truths and many realities. All truths and realities are relative and contingent, constructed by

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culture, dependent on context, and subject to negotiation and change; none is inherent in the natural order of things.
Moreover, today the contradictions are more apparent because the cultural landscape is filled with texts that express
competing worldviews, simultaneously available and bleeding over into one another’s domains as a result of the
rapid flow of information from numerous sources constantly bombarding us. These texts interact and compete with
one another (creating a condition of intertextuality, to use the term favored by Derrida and Roland Barthes, another
influential French theorist). Poststructuralist thinkers believe that the onslaught of information in our media-
saturated society has made it impossible for any single worldview to dominate. Instead, boundaries and divisions
between categories of all kinds are eroding. In particular, the dualities, or binary pairs, so common in Western
thinking and culture no longer are convincing as polar opposites. Male and female, gay and straight, white and black,
public and private, painting and sculpture, high art and low art—distinctions between these and other categories
dissolve, and the elements merge into hybrids.

Feminism and Postcolonialism Offer Bolder, Broader Perspectives

The perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism have profoundly affected contemporary visual culture. Feminists
and postcolonialists challenge artists, art historians, critics, and audiences to consider politics and social issues.
Feminists look at experience from the perspective of gender and are particularly concerned with ensuring that
women have the same rights and opportunities as men. Feminist theoretical critiques analyze hierarchical structures
that contribute to masculine dominance, what feminists call patriarchy—that is, the cultural beliefs, rules, and
structures that reinforce and sustain masculine values and male power. A key area of feminist analysis in the visual
arts is the gaze, a term used to refer to how categories of people are stereotyped in visual representations by gender,
race, sexuality, and other factors. (We return to the topic of the gaze in chapter 3, “The Body.”)

Postcolonialists are interested in cultural interactions of all kinds (in politics, economics, religion, the arts,
philosophy, mass media, and so on) among peoples of different regions and communities. Postcolonialists examine
how peoples’ histories and identities demonstrate the economic, political, social, and psychological legacy of
colonization, which harmed indigenous peoples and resulted in hybridity and syncretism, or a mingling of cultures.
They also analyze migrations and displacements of peoples (diasporas and nomadism, to use two of the current
terms) and highlight the diversity of cultures that coexist in contemporary communities. Postcolonialists’ attention
to the visual cultures of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas has helped foster the internationalization of the art
world.

Many different theories have influenced feminism and postcolonialism, and ideas and positions are constantly
mutating.23 The perspectives are usually multidisciplinary, drawing from literature, history, sociology, anthropology,
and other disciplines. Since 1980, critics and artists have used deconstructive strategies to analyze, or “decode,” how
power functions to limit the achievements and potential of women, minorities, and postcolonial people around the
world. Feminists and postcolonialists have applied other theories as well, including Marxism and psychoanalysis,
and have contributed theories of their own. Postcolonialists have promoted the use of theoretical models that
attempt to understand the visual arts of various cultures on their own terms rather than primarily in comparison
with art traditions in Europe and the United States.24

The theories just discussed, as well as others not discussed, permeate the production, reception, and interpretation
of contemporary art. But the explicit embrace of theory has not been constant, and its influence is often diffuse and
unacknowledged rather than systematic. For example, there has been a widespread cultural backlash against
feminism; as a result, younger artists are often reluctant to call themselves feminists, even when their art and ideas
support feminist tenets.
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In the twenty-first century, art continues to offer meaningful content, whether or not artists espouse a singular
political or theoretical position. Ethical questions and resonant themes, such as political agency, spirituality, beauty,
violence, sexuality, transience, extinction, memory, and healing, are powerful currents in the most recent art. The
real world is treacherous and volatile. As Homi K. Bhabha wrote, “The ’80s inaugurated a dream of difference which
is now being haunted by horror and doubt: abhorrence of the ‘deterritorialized flows’ of global terror networks;
doubts about the feasibility of global politics with the increase in ‘homeland’ security and international surveillance;
doubts about preemptive strikes; doubts about war; doubts about our rights and responsibilities for the world
ourselves. What happened to the dream?”25

The Theorization of Information

Concurrent with the rapid and broad adoption of digital forms of communication as important strategies for art-
making (a complex topic we explore further below, see “Impact of the Digital”), the theoretical frameworks of
computer science have impacted the scope and directions many artists have chosen to explore. For example, artists
have explored how information can be analyzed by specialized software, and imagery can be manipulated in ways
that would be impossible to achieve manually or by human computation. One example is Ben Rubin’s Shakespeare
Machine (2012) [1-7], a permanent installation in the lobby at New York City’s Public Theater. The Shakespeare
Machine, a chandelier suspended over the lobby bar where patrons gather before shows and at intermissions, has
thirty-seven four-foot-long blades outfitted with bright LED emitters, one blade for each of Shakespeare’s plays. The
emitters stream words along the blades that are found by algorithms that mine Shakespeare’s plays for specific types
of text fragments. The blades are programmed to stream a word or phrase culled from all thirty-seven plays, such as
every instance of two adjectives joined by and (dead and drowsy, mutinous and unnatural) or phrases where you is
matched up with a noun (you king, you fool, you whoreson). The algorithms are designed to keep changing the logic
behind selections of words from the plays. As you stand underneath the chandelier, the culled mixtures of
Shakespeare’s language churn overhead.

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1 - 7 Ben Rubin The Shakespeare Machine, 2012 Installed in Public Theater in New York City

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Impact of the Digital

During recent decades, the pace of development and impact of digital technologies and products have increased
almost exponentially. By 1989 the internet was already twenty years old,26 and the function of computers had
changed from being self-contained machines solely tasked with analyzing data to becoming a means of transmitting
that data among connected machines. What started with the expansion of a limited number of different types of
communication—e-mail, chatrooms, and instant messaging, for example—soon expanded to change all fields of
inquiry and human activity, down to the most common everyday events. It could be argued that after 2000, with the
introduction of Web 2.0, almost everyone in technologically advanced societies inhabits a space in a digital
environment defined by increasing levels of interactive operability.

There are significant differences among the generations who have grown up with digital technology. The first group
had access to personal computers and learned how to use computers as tools in ways that were limited by their
programmability; the next grew up with the internet, accessing information that was available on remote servers; the
current generation of so-called post-millennials are “digital natives,” who have always had smartphones and defined
themselves digitally in a responsive manner in a world that is constantly connected and mutating. These changes are
evident in the many ways artists have used and responded to the digital, which has evolved from being simply a set of
new art-making tools through to a means of communication and source of information and is now a theme of art in
its own right. In many ways, this has opened up entirely new fields of art. Today’s art world includes artists who
either use digital technologies to make and display art (alone or in combination with older analog technologies), use
the internet and social media in innovative ways to reach and involve audiences, and/or make art that responds to
issues raised by the internet, social media, and other aspects of the virtual world.

Early Adoption of Digital Technology in Art

The effects of digital technology on art practice can be traced directly to the impact of newly introduced hardware
and software. The late twentieth century saw the rise in importance of digital cameras and image manipulation,
sidelining darkroom photography.27 The introduction of Photoshop (1988) increased the lure of the digital as
software expanded the possibilities for postproduction image manipulation. In other media as well, artists have been
using digital tools and techniques to create objects and images that would be difficult, if not impossible, to make by
hand or with analogic tools. For example, computer numerical control machines, which enable 3D printing and laser
cutting, have radically reshaped sculpture and craft techniques.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when powerful personal computers became affordable for many, artists began to use digital
tools both in the service of traditional media and as a new medium and conceptual arena in itself. The embrace of
digital technologies has varied in different sectors of art practice. American Mark Wilson, a digital art pioneer, began
writing computer code in the 1980s to generate imagery by plotting complex geometric forms that he then
manipulates on the computer in three dimensions and stacks into a configuration that enhances the interplay of the
different visual elements, which he then outputs as prints and paintings. Wilson noted, “Using my software, the
development of complex imagery is a natural extension of the power of the computer to perform highly repetitive
tasks.”28 While the repetition of elements might seem superfluous, it is deeply rooted in the exploration of abstract
aesthetic principles. Wilson’s control of the output allows the imagery to emerge as art that far exceeds its original
mathematical parameters.
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The acceptance of digitally created art that exists entirely in an electronic form, to be viewed exclusively on a screen,
has been slower than the embrace of art that has components existing in the physical here and now. Pioneers who
have explored the opportunities created by digital media for interactivity and connectivity include those involved in
the idea of Net.art. As artist Jon Love explains the early practices, “Net.art refers to a group of artists creating strictly
web/browser based artworks in the mid 1990s concurrent with the rise of the World Wide Web. Though the work
differs dramatically between different artists within the group (including, but not limited to, hyperlinked narrative
stories, subversions/duplications of corporate websites, and faux browser glitches), generally the work explored and
pushed the boundaries of the Web’s conventions.”29 Some of Net.art’s most famous pioneers are Vuk Cosic, Olia
Lialina, Jodi (or jodi.org), and Eva and Franco Mattes (or 0100101110101101.org).30

Digital technology has enabled an increase in interactive art in the twenty-first century, often combining the virtual
and the material. With advances in cameras, sensors, and processing capability, artists have been able to create
installations of responsive and immersive environments, accommodating and responding to viewers’ actions. The
French Adrien M & Claire B Company, for example, has developed custom-designed computational devices to create
digitized spaces in which the viewer seemingly becomes part of the programming. With examples like Hakanaï
(2013; “fleeting” in Japanese) [1-8] and Le mouvement de l’air (“The Movement of Air”) (2015), the Adrien M &
Claire B Company provides a performative space fashioned as a moving cube for a dancer to articulate a responsive
relationship to projected data; after the performance, viewers are invited to experience the same space as almost a
living, independent entity. Adrien M & Claire B describe Hakanaï as an effort that “captures an elusive aspect of the
human condition and its precariousness.”31

1 - 8 Adrien M & Claire B Hakanaï, 2013 Choreographed performance with moving digital images and soundscapes

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New forms of interactive art have developed as our interactions with computers and the internet have changed in
important ways in other areas of experience. With increasingly capable hardware, especially mobile hardware
(smartphones and tablets), we’ve been able to take our computers with us. Visual representations are responding to
the increased digitalization of our lives, especially the way we interact with them through screens. For some artists
and theorists, we have become “screen essentialists,” meaning that our interaction with data has become both highly
visual and tactile: we touch objects on the screen, simulating physical interaction; but we’ve also quickly forgotten
how different and world-changing this type of interaction is. Chapter 2, “Identity,” discusses an Instagram
performance art project, Excellences & Perfections [2-16], in which Argentinian artist Amalia Ulman explored how
identity, celebrity, and gender are being transformed by the nature of digital interactive media. More than a
simulacrum in the theoretical sense promoted by Baudrillard, Ulman’s “fake Instagram feed”32 was anything but
fake, even if it was entirely fictional.

As the digital has entered more and more into our world, in the guise of an interactive medium, there has been a
natural evolution of its presence. The digital—the language and substance of computationality—was once used solely
by computer scientists, but its effects are now widespread and commonplace. Recognizing this, artists have
increasingly entered into an engagement with the real-world presence of the digital, often referred to as its
“computational materiality,” in a way that expands the notion of digital beyond binary forms into the material world.
For some artists, the digital is no longer confined to computer hardware but is colonizing the rest of the world; there
is a growing awareness that software is increasingly evolving and recognizes that it has a real world. Software is now
more than simply electronic data and algorithms; it persistently exists in the world.

What Is Post-Internet or Post-Digital Art?

With an increased awareness of softwarization (the potential of software rather than hardware to provide solutions)
comes the idea of the post-internet or post-digital. These terms refer to art that is dependent on its networked nature
for its existence, marking the “difference between art produced in the age of the Internet, and art produced with
33
regards to the Internet.” Artist and critic Marisa Olson (born 1977) coined the term post-internet around 2006 to
34
describe her own practice’s relationship to the internet, claiming, “I surfed, and then I created art.” The term was
popularized by critics looking for a catch-all term to refer to artists whose work relates to or investigates some aspect
of the internet; and now, because digital devices such as smartphones are so ubiquitous, it describes a state of
existence wherein we are essentially always online. Michael Connor has analyzed the situation as follows: “After
Olson’s 2006 formulation, of course, the cultural conditions of the internet continued to change, rapidly . … Olson’s
concept of making art after the internet no longer applied in the same way. There was no after the internet, only
during, during, during. The artist could no longer realistically adopt a position on the outside.”35

An important formulation of post-internet is also found in Artie Vierkant’s 2010 essay “The Image Object Post-
Internet,” which emphasizes the social nature of changes brought about by the internet in the era of a post-medium
condition, in line with Rosalind Krauss’s and Lev Manovich’s theories, whereby “it is assumed that the work of art
lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other
representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its
36
representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.” Post-internet
art, in effect, exists equally and simultaneously in various forms and mediums.

The American artist Cory Arcangel is a well-known example of someone working within both threads of post-internet
art. Rooted in his interest in coding and open source culture, Arcangel works in a variety of mediums to produce art
that highlights the possibilities of recycling digital material and exploring digital art’s relationship to pop culture. For
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example, his series Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations comprises colorful prints produced using the gradient tool
built into Adobe’s Photoshop software. Examples such as Photoshop CS: 84 by 144 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square
pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=24433 x=24933, mouseup y=13681 x=24933; tool "Wand",
select y=9500 x=23366, tolerance=94, contiguous= off; default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=9500 x=4425,
mouseup y=9500 x=38534 (2017) take Arcangel’s exploration of networkability and social effect into interesting
positions. These are both physical objects, in the form of chromogenic prints, as well as a set of instructions
(provided in the lengthy title) that gives anyone with some skill using Photoshop the ability to reproduce them with a
great deal of precision. Like earlier conceptual artists who relinquished ownership of an artwork once its conceptual
parameters are understood, Arcangel’s instructions retain their artistic value. The Photoshop Gradient
Demonstrations series challenges ownership by intersecting a space anchored in the specificity of the program used
to create the imagery and the infinitely reproducible nature of the digital files.

A different appearance of aesthetic softwarization appears in the work of American Ben Grosser. With a background
in music and new media, Grosser has been exploring the effects that digital algorithms and artifacts have in the
world in ways that illuminate how pervasively the digital has become a determinative force rather than merely a
descriptive or analytical tool. Two bodies of art by Grosser take this even further: Facebook Demetricator (2012) and
Computers Watching Movies (2014). Facebook Demetricator is a browser extension program that hides all
numerical representations of Facebook data from the user’s view, including the number of “friends” a user has,
comments and likes for postings, and how many shares have taken place of postings. Although Facebook’s appeal
and corporate profits are driven by these metrics, Grosser’s program aesthetically interferes with its intersection into
our lives.37 Grosser noted about Facebook Demetricator, “What purpose does this enumeration serve for a system
(and a corporation) that depends on its user’s continued free labor to produce the information that fills its
databases? Where does it lead when quantity, not quality is foremost?”38

The idea that Facebook functions almost as an algorithmic entity with its own agency, exhibiting behavior and
“desires” for more information about its users, is explored in a related sense with Computers Watching Movies,
which documents the aesthetic response of software to six well-known movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, American
Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, and Annie Hall. Computers Watching Movies “shows what a
computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do.”39 Tracing the software’s focus of interest
across the temporal length of the movies, through the use of computer vision algorithms and artificial intelligence
routines, a computer-generated visual representation of that focus contrasts with the memories of our own cinematic
experiences. “While big explosions and beautiful women are the biggest draws to our society’s eyes, Grosser’s
algorithm has a different set of interests and motives … [focusing on] very precise movements, colors, and activities,
possibly impossible for the human eye to detect.”40Computers Watching Movies reveals the possibility of an
independent nonhuman aesthetic digital agency reacting to movies in ways that are entirely distinct from our human
experiences.

The New Aesthetic

41
First appearing in 2011 on a blog written by English artist James Bridle, the term the New Aesthetic describes a
wide range of digital objects (such as activities, hardware, software, and the internet) and their increasing
appearances and effects in the world. Generating a wide range of different theoretical approaches and conclusions,
the concept articulates ”the underlying systems that produce [digital objects], and/or the human viewpoint which
42 43
frames them.” Described as “an attitude, a feeling, a sensibility” that recognizes and responds to the self-
determinative nature of digital objects and the independence of their own aesthetic systems, the New Aesthetics is an
44
identification of digital aesthetics as a “determinative aspect of contemporary existence.” British-Colombian artist
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Matthew Plummer-Fernández creates art within this context, with examples such as sekuMoi Mecy (2012) and
Every Mickey (2017) [1-9], 3D printed sculptures of progressive scans of Mickey Mouse (the first title is a simple
anagram of the Disney character’s name). What makes the transformations of Mickey Mouse important examples of
New Aesthetic art is that they exist in legal limbo. The remixings of Mickey exist outside the increasingly outdated
legal structures that the Disney character was originally bound to and within the pervasive network of corporate
entanglements that drive digital innovation and developments.

1 - 9 Matthew Plummer-Fernández Every Mickey, 2017 SLS nylon, acrylic paint, STL file, 50.688 × 23.858 × 49.376 cm

Bridle’s own art exemplifies the New Aesthetic. Iraq War Wikihistoriography (2010) is a twelve-volume set of
physical books, almost 7,000 pages in length, containing every change made from December 2004 to November
2009 to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War; the set of books renders the physicality of data in concrete form. What
is normally thought of as immaterial edits that disappear once overwritten are revealed as having continuing
presence in the world despite their functional invisibility that is sustained by the technology and its governing
structural systems.

An important aspect of many examples of New Aesthetic art is the glitch, though not a defining one. Glitches appear
as mistakes, but they also reveal the presence of the computational in the moment in which the form of the coding
breaks down. Normally the experience of digital objects is always intended to be seamless, but glitches appear as
artifacts that alert us at a phenomenological level to instabilities in digital objects; they are literally examples of
programming going wrong that heighten our sense of the programmed nature of the digital experience. A number of
artists have been deliberately working with glitches in different ways, such as Chris Foley, Sabato Visconti, and Kohei
Nawa; but artist and designer Ferrucio Laviani’s Good Vibrations (2012) [1-10] is particularly noteworthy because it
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translates the glitch directly into the everyday. Laviani’s computer-controlled, router-carved cabinet was produced by
filtering digital “static” reminiscent of distortions in analog video into the design.45 The glitches ensure our
awareness of the dialectical nature inherent in the final form. By dialectical nature, we mean that the final form
toggles between the artist’s response to digital processes in the world and the capability of his computerized
manufacturing equipment to reproduce them in contrast to normative methods of woodworking. The result is
visually stunning and technically virtuosic but also unnerving because the digital appears to be subsuming the form
into itself.

1 - 1 0 Feruccio Laviani Good Vibrations, 2012 Oak

Alexander Galloway noted in 2004, “on the Internet there is no reason to know the name of a particular user, only to
know what that user likes, where they shop, where they live, and so on. The clustering of descriptive information
around a specific user becomes sufficient to explain the identity of that user.”46 For one thing, digital products
change quickly, and it is hard to keep up. Moreover, online distractions can turn internet users into passive
consumers without the mental space to reflect about the meaning of what they are consuming. The impact of the
relentless change in digital technologies has proceeded in step with global economic forces exerting increasing power
over the individual. Art historian and critic Jonathan Crary is among the skeptics, writing, “There is an ever closer
linking of individual needs with the functional and ideological programs in which each new product is embedded.
‘Products’ are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly
become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality.”47 Is Crary correct? Are we powerless
to do anything but try to stay in synch with the onslaught of changing technologies and platforms (such as social
media and information exchange) that infiltrate all aspects of contemporary living? Have digital capabilities

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advanced so quickly that we are no longer able to recognize them even?48 Or, in contrast, are social media potentially
empowering for those otherwise marginalized in mainstream society? In terms of art, one could argue that an app
such as Instagram gives art a wider audience and makes it possible for more artists to emerge and find their
particular audience. Are artists compromised and shackled, or are they inspired and enhanced by their situation
within a complex network of connections? Our ability to present radically different versions of ourselves on social
media is nearly limitless, but at the same time governments’ and corporations’ abilities to monitor our online
activities and manipulate our opinions and understanding of the world increasingly exceed our control. There is a
sense, for many artists, that the digital has become just as much of a threat as an opportunity.

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Social Experience as Art

Critical theory is constantly undergoing transformation and negotiation, particularly as novel forms of art take the
stage. In the twenty-first century, one of the areas of theory that has gained traction concerns art that invites
participation by viewers, particularly social interactions. According to scholar Claire Bishop, the term work of art
may not even be appropriate for these kinds of activities. Bishop says that participatory art projects are “less likely to
be ‘works’ than social events, publications, workshops or performances. … The intersubjective space created through
these projects becomes the focus—and medium—of artistic investigation.”49

Many critics and curators use the term relational aesthetics for the analysis of art focused on interhuman relations,
adopting the expression advocated by French critic Nicolas Bourriaud in the mid-1990s.50 Bourriaud, according to
Nadja Rottner, applied the term to a particular group of artists “and what he considers their novel approach to a
socially-conscious art of participation: an art that takes as its content the human relations elicited by the artwork.” 51
Relational art’s boundaries expand to include the lived, sensory experiences of viewers interacting with other people
and perhaps with the artist in a shared social situation. The ability to promote the social situation is much more
important than any tangible objects or images an artist might create or employ.

Cai Guo-Qiang, who created the dramatic installation Inopportune: Stage One [1-1] highlighted at the beginning of
this chapter, has made relational art among his varied art practices. Cai’s installation Cultural Melting Bath [1-11]
includes a Chinese rock garden, banyan tree roots, and a modern hot tub infused with Chinese medicinal herbs, in
which museum visitors are invited to bathe together. The installation provides an opportunity for the therapeutic
cultural mixing Cai hopes that his art fosters. The conviviality among the bathers sharing the tub is the central aspect
of the art, rather than the tub itself as a physical, sculptural entity. The social exchanges between participants involve
what critic Jörg Heiser calls “delegated action.” According to Heiser, in this form of exchange the artist gives up
control over meaning. He explains, “This term [delegated action] makes clear that besides a relationship being
established, there is also sharing or total relinquishing of responsibility for actions, handing over partial control
either to the participants or to the process itself.”52

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1 - 1 1 Cai Guo-Qiang Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century, 1997 First realized August 1997 at Queens Museum of Art, New
York 18 Taihu rocks, hot tub with hydrotherapy jets, bathwater infused with herbs, banyan tree root, translucent fabric, and live birds, dimensions
variable, various venues

British-German artist Tino Sehgal engineers encounters in art exhibition spaces that are an extreme version of
relational art. There are no objects on display, and the artist is not present. For instance, in a project at the
Guggenheim Museum in 2010, Sehgal offered The Progress, delegating responsibility for encounters to
“interpreters” (as Sehgal called them) who engaged museum visitors in conversation while walking up the museum’s
famous spiral ramp. In succession, a young child, adolescent, adult, and elderly person would engage the visitor in a
discussion of the idea of progress. Sehgal does not permit official documentation of his works; the only residue is
located in the memory of the interpreters and visitors and in art criticism.53

Critics, including Bishop, have critiqued aspects of Bourriaud’s formulation because he does not envision a political
dimension to relational art. These critics advocate participatory art that engages in institutional critique and aims to
improve society. Meaning is elaborated collectively rather than by means of individual responses.54 Forerunners of
this point of view include Marxist-influenced critics earlier in the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin, as well
as Guy Debord, a key figure in the Situationist International in the late 1950s and 1960s, who called for the
construction of participatory situations ultimately to construct a classless society beyond the bonds of religion and
capitalism.

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Art Meets Contemporary Culture

One of the leitmotifs of art in the West over the past hundred years has been the blurring of distinctions between the
realm of art and other categories of culture. In the contemporary period, the dissolution of boundaries between art
and life has continued in a number of directions. There continues to be cross-fertilization between high and low art.
For example, the creative use of comic book and cartoon imagery and styles, especially in graphic novels, has become
a thriving subset of visual culture as a whole.

The use of found objects and the ready-made, the use of appropriation, and the remixing of images and styles remain
significant directions, frequently involving borrowings from consumer and popular culture. American Jeff Koons
references the slick refinement and packaging of mass-produced consumer products in the creation of his art.
Koons’s gleaming Rabbit (1986) [1-12] is an appropriation of a novelty Mylar balloon, which the artist had cast in
polished stainless steel. Koons knowingly fuses, and confuses, commercial glitz with the polished forms of earlier
twentieth-century modern art and the everyday subjects of pop art sculptures. Like many of his other sculptures in
which the artist appropriates actual consumer objects (e.g., kitsch statuary, toys) and remakes them in a new
medium as highly crafted luxury objects for wealthy collectors, Koons’s Rabbit appears to warmly embrace our
consumer lifestyle while at the same time coolly appraising the shallowness of a civilization devoid of deeper
meaning.

1 - 1 2 Jeff Koons Rabbit, 1986 Stainless steel, 41 × 19 × 12 inches (104.1 × 48.3 × 30.5 cm)
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Popular culture, including television, films, rock music, and video games, has a powerful influence on artists. At the
same time, art appears more and more to be in competition with the bold graphics, seductive objects, and lively
stories of commerce and entertainment. Some artists adapt by making art that has become more like commercial
entertainment, adopting strategies of display and production from popular culture, installing multimedia spectacles
in exhibition sites; crossing over into the domains of film, music, and fashion; and serving professionally as
consultants and even entrepreneurs in business enterprises such as restaurants and advertising. Critiquing the trend,
photographer Jeff Wall said, “I think a new kind of art has emerged since the ’70s, a kind that is easier to appreciate,
more like entertainment, more attached to media attitudes. … It’s much closer to entertainment and depends on
production value and on spectacle in a way that serious art never did before.”55

Distinctions between art and visual culture at large are dissolving and even disappearing. Artists bring nonart
experiences into the sphere of art; they also introduce art into the larger visual culture. Artists mingle their works
with other products of visual culture by choosing not to limit their display opportunities to art venues only. Artists,
according to curator Benjamin Weil,

have been exploring approaches akin to an ambient strategy, focusing on ways to insert their projects within the chaos of an
overmediated public sphere. Billboards, usually designed to advertise commercial products, have been used by artists such as the
late Felix Gonzalez-Torres to ‘sell’ ideas. Marquees of abandoned theaters are ideal surfaces for the placement of inconspicuous
56
messages; stickers, posters, and other forms of street culture become compelling instruments in the hands of artists.

Online search engines and social media are powerful influences on the production of contemporary art in countries
from Korea to Brazil. Not only do we live in a world of greatly expanded information, but also the structure of
information has changed dramatically. The decentralized internet of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram is vastly different from the world of physical libraries, handwritten diaries, and printed books,
newspapers, and encyclopedias. The internet is bringing us closer to the concept of a universal library/marketplace
where one can search for scholarly articles, news, recipes, past acquaintances, maps, weather reports, medical
information, pornography, consumer products, and trivia or watch video on almost any subject imaginable. The
creation of knowledge is social because anyone can add to the flow of information. For instance, Wikipedia, the
online encyclopedia begun in 2001, had over 52 million articles written collaboratively by volunteers around the
world by 2020.

The term rhizome was used conceptually by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia to describe nonhierarchical knowledge networks that allow for
multiple entry and exit points.57 They borrowed the term from the botanical rhizome, a category that includes ginger,
some species of iris and ferns, and similar plants that send out horizontal stems and shoots from their nodes.
Deleuze and Guattari used the term to characterize research and thought that is interconnected but has no beginning
and end, has no set pathways through the system, resists rigid organization and dominating ideas, and has the
capacity to link together heterogeneous elements. Rhizome theory has gained currency in cultural discourse because
so many of today’s systems of representing and interpreting knowledge are fluid, nonhierarchical, nonlinear, and
decentered. The internet is a prime case of a rhizomatic model of knowledge. Any bit of information exists within an
enormous network: anyone using a web browser can enter the information stream anywhere and move among
multiple pathways by links, creating a synthesis of potentially unlike elements; anyone can search, duplicate,
manipulate, add to, or transmit information.
58
British artist Keith Tyson’s monumental artwork Large Field Array (2006–2007) [1-13] is rhizomatic in structure
and conception. The sculpture comprises three hundred modular units, most formed from polystyrene into
approximately two-foot cubes; the cubes are arranged into a grid occupying both the floor and walls of a gallery when
installed. Each highly crafted unit is unique and references something recognizable from the natural world, science,

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popular culture, consumer products, art history, or a range of other sources. Individual sculptures include an
airborne skateboarder, fungi, stacked cans of beer, a volcano, a model of the Hoover Dam, a man spanking a boy with
a belt, a square patch of cornfield, a rainbow over a jackpot, and an elaborate house of cards, as well as
appropriations from other artists, including Claes Oldenburg, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Yves Klein. Visitors can
move through the cubes on the floor via multiple pathways of their own choosing: forward, sideways, diagonally.
Although Tyson fosters certain associations through his choices for juxtapositions of individual sculptures, ultimately
each visitor is responsible for imagining their own visual, psychological, and philosophical connections and
meanings among the disparate units. A kind of 3D analog version of an online encyclopedia, Large Field Array
proposes that everything can be linked without the control or singularity of a hierarchical structure. Tyson said that
Large Field Array is a celebration of our transition from an industrial to an information age. “[We] embrace
complexity as a positive force. We can trust the rhizome to look after itself. … The system will take care of itself. And I
think we are more capable—this generation is more capable—of trusting the dynamic, than any other generation
before us.”59

1 - 1 3 Keith Tyson Installation view of Keith Tyson: Large Field Array, PaceWildenstein, New York, September 7–October 20, 2007

Rhizomatic artworks such as Tyson’s emphasize abrupt juxtapositions, linking, fragmentation, and multiplicity. They
require new forms of visual literacy, asking their audiences to cross borders between genres and subjects and to
make a leap of faith that connections exist, even though the web of knowledge is too large and complex for anyone to
master. Tyson’s artwork, assembling three hundred sculptures into one cohesive installation, embodies a
reconnoitering of reality from the diverse perspectives represented. Tyson’s Large Field Array implies that no single
field of knowledge can provide all the information or answers or frame the most probing questions.

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Artists Respond to the Anthropocene

Let’s repeat: a key characteristic of contemporary art is that content matters. While this volume introduces artists
and artworks that tackle many important issues, one topic warrants special recognition and urgency. Paralleling a
rising sense of alarm by scientists and the general public, a rapidly expanding number of artists are creating art in
response to how the natural environment is changing on a global scale.

But, wait, you may think: a changing landscape—is this new? After all, numerous artists in earlier periods responded
to fluctuations in the natural world of their own time and place. For example, in the early decades of the nineteenth
century, John James Audubon understood that he was painting specimens of bird species (such as the carrier
pigeon) that were vanishing during his lifetime. A changing natural world is not a recent phenomenon. Ancient
peoples faced years of drought, unexpected floods, forest fires. Searching for causes for change of flora and fauna is a
process that has been recorded at least as far back as Aristotle.

What is of fundamental difference now is twofold: first, we now recognize that disrupted patterns in the natural
world are taking place at a scale and pace unprecedented during human history and, second, the primary cause of
such change is us. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the ongoing, cumulative effects of human actions
have and continue to alter the climate and ecological balance of the Earth. Fundamental shifts in the climate are
underway, resulting in loss of habitats, endangering countless species, and, ultimately, imperiling our own fate.
While the impact on the planet defines the framework of change, such change will manifest in a cascade of related
results. Of significance, global warming will result in an increased mortality rate of humans, due to changes such as a
higher incidence of heatwave-related deaths and a rise in infectious diseases. “Among infectious diseases, water- and
foodborne infectious diseases and vector-borne infectious diseases are two main categories that are forecasted to be
most affected.”60 In 2020, a global pandemic of a highly infectious novel coronavirus spread through human-to-
human contact challenged healthcare systems worldwide.

Recognizing the dire trajectory of factors impacting climate change is, in the view of many artists, not a matter of
scare tactics. It is, frankly, that predictions of the future we appear headed for actually are downright scary.

What Is the Anthropocene?

As early as 1970, the Nobel Prize–winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen warned that human activity could damage the
ozone layer in the stratosphere that surrounds our planet and shields the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
According to Crutzen, and others who similarly have seen vast changes taking place across the globe, a new epoch
had dawned, which has gained the popular name of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is defined as a geologic era
(the previous is the Holocene) in which the dominance of the human species is so extensive that we impact the planet
on a geological scale.61 Our species’ collective impact affects the Earth broadly. Major, interconnected features of the
Anthropocene include climate change, rising greenhouse gas levels, plastic waste polluting oceans and waterways,
and reduction in biodiversity across the planet. When did the Anthropocene begin? There is no unanimous
agreement on a single start; there are numerous developments that mark major shifts in the scope and style of
human incursion, including the advent of agricultural practices (approximately 8,000 years ago) and the start of the
Industrial Revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century. In any case, cumulative change has occurred quickly
and over a brief span of time relative to the Earth’s age. Scientists and others who monitor the status of our planet’s
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ecological conditions agree that changes precipitated by or exacerbated by human agency have occurred and are
continuing to occur at an accelerating pace. The cumulative effects are both momentous and building momentum.
Sound the alarms.

Asked during a recent interview “What is Iceland for you today?” the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson
responded, “I used to think of nature as being infinitely larger than me. … But today nature has become fragile. The
glaciers that I knew as a child are disappearing …. It has become apparent that the consequences of our ways of living
are destabilizing the climate, and I have become more aware of the responsibility I have towards the earth—the
responsibility we all have.”62

In 2018, Eliasson, working with geologist Minik Rosing and a team of assistants, presented Ice Watch, London in
front of the Tate Modern, an art museum located along the Thames River in the heart of London [1-14]. Visitors to
the artwork could interact with twenty-four large chunks of ice arranged in a clocklike pattern on the public plaza.
The ice blocks, fished out of the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in southwestern Greenland, had broken off from the
Greenland ice sheet, the second largest body of ice in the world after Antarctica. Now, as an art installation in
London, the ice continued to melt, releasing freshwater that had been frozen since the last glacial age. The artwork
provoked a range of emotions, including mystification at the rate of water transforming from one state of matter to
another (solid to liquid) and, for many, sheer sorrow at the symbolic loss, seeing something precious melting before
viewers’ eyes.

1 - 1 4 Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing Ice Watch, 2018 Installation: Bankside, outside Tate Modern

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Eliasson explained what effect he hoped his work elicited: “By enabling people to experience and actually touch the
blocks of ice in this project, I hope we will connect people to their surroundings in a deeper way and inspire radical
change. … We must recognize that together we have the power to take individual actions to push for systemic change.
Let’s transform climate knowledge into climate action.”63

As we discuss in more detail in subsequent sections of this book (mainly in chapter 8, “Science”), human activity
impacts the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, especially through the use of fossil fuels and the
buildup of refuse such as plastics. What can be done? We will focus on the activities of artists taking action in the
manner that artists can, devoting all or a substantial portion of their art-making practices to responses to and
representations of the effects of human agency on the world. Often termed eco art (short for ecological art), this
direction in art has accelerated in recent years, although it is not without precedent. The first Earth Day was in 1970,
after all. In the United States in the 1980s, artists such as Agnes Denes and Mierle Laderman Ukeles were drawing
attention to the detrimental expansion of urban landfills, and Mel Chin was trying to revitalize industrially polluted
sites [see 8-16]. Today, in an effort to shine a spotlight on ecological issues around trash, artist Kelly Jazvac exhibits
as sculptural objects Plastiglomerates, “a hybrid entity that has begun to wash up on the shores of Hawaii.
Plastiglomerate is the term coined by geologist Patricia Corcoran, oceanographer Charles Moore, and … Jazvac for
the composite material of agglutinated plastic, volcanic rock, seashells, and coral that constitutes such entities.”
These fusions of plastic and rock found on beaches have “come to stand as both a scientific measure of the
Anthropocene and a cultural signifier of its impact.”64

Art historian Amanda Boetzkes describes a tight bond between the mounting production of waste and the expansion
of global capitalism. A leading edge of this relationship, in terms of the effect upon the natural environment, is in the
piling up of refuse, most notably plastics, a material that is famously flexible in its functionality and infamously
nefarious in its resistance to biodegradable composting. Is plastic waste a necessary output of consumerism and
global capitalism? Conversations are building around alternative concepts, such as calls for new policy initiatives that
aim for sustainable levels of economic growth, or even for no economic growth at all, in order to scale back the
building of refuse. The economy cannot be separated from the ecology. They intersect. “Contemporary art’s analysis
of waste configures the terms by which to see how life is deprived and exchanged with … global capitalism.”65

While there are those who, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence, assert that humans are not instrumental in
the cause of climate change, there are other aspects of our anthropogenic impact which no one can deny. Consider,
for example, Termining by the Icelandic artist Rúrí [1-15]. Her installation consists of a color photograph, seven
meters in length, that documents the waterfall Töfrafoss (or “Magical Falls”) in Iceland. When waters rose in the
reservoir created by damming the river, a corollary to the construction of the Karahnjukar Power Plant, the waterfall
disappeared. In Rúrí’s artwork, the photo of the waterfall moves into the shredding mechanism, a small randomized
segment at a time, whenever a visitor to the art gallery approaches. Artists living in Iceland and other imperiled
environments function like the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Global warming is a forceful presence all around,
and human alteration of the landscape is immediately noticeable.

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1 - 1 5 Rúrí Termining, 2008 Interactive installation; 250 × 100 × 100 cm

Themes of Contemporary Art is a reconnoitering mission through art after 1980. We end by reasserting this
chapter’s initial, two-pronged premise: the world changes and content matters, even if the meanings are open-
ended. It is with this fundamental framework in mind that we turn to an examination of contemporary artworks that
embody eight resonating and interlinked themes: identity, the body, time, memory, place, language, science, and
spirituality.

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PROFILE:
Hito Steyerl

In her book The Wretched of the Screen (2012), Hito Steyerl writes, “art doesn’t stop at occupying people,
space, or time. It also occupies life as such.”66 Opposing the notion that art doesn’t function in the world,
Steyerl takes the position that art seizes possession of aspects of life and transforms them in ways that take
the forms of an intervention, territorialization, alienation, articulation, and enclosure. Often with a sense of
wry humor and irony, Steyerl’s work also puts into artistic form the inherent contradictory nature of this
occupation.
One of the best-known of Steyerl’s artworks is the approximately sixteen-minute single-channel video
How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) [1-16]. With a reference to a Monty
Python comedy sketch in the title, How Not to Be Seen is both funny and remarkably insightful. The video
includes footage filmed in the middle of the California desert of crumbling concrete slabs painted to be
targets, which were formerly used by the military to calibrate their satellite cameras. The artwork appears at
first to be a satire of the kind of instructional training videos that plague students and new corporate
employees alike worldwide. Five lessons structure the video, explaining different ways an individual can avoid
being captured by digital surveillance technology: 1. Make something invisible for a camera; 2. Be invisible in
plain sight; 3. Become invisible by becoming a picture; 4. Be invisible by disappearing; and 5. Become
invisible by merging into a world made of pictures. Over the course of the video, however, it quickly becomes
apparent that more is at stake. Through a dynamic contrast between the calibration of visualization
technology versus Steyerl’s personal appearance against a green screen that alternately heightens and
erases her semblance through the use of makeup, costume, and video editing techniques, How Not to Be
Seen is an unsettling exploration of our presence in the world as visible objects in an increasingly digital age.
Steyerl’s work of art asserts that we live in an embattled reality, in the middle of struggling against being
involuntarily rendered invisible by digital technology while striving to retain our own place in the world.
Though there are moments of lightheartedness—each lesson plays with different tactics, such as hiding in
plain sight, becoming smaller than a pixel, living in a gated community, and “being female and over 50 years
old”—the political implications reveal the negative consequences inherent in the weight of the digital as a
source of surveillance, identification, and data acquisition, wherein becoming invisible is impossible.

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1-16 Hito Steyerl How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV file, 2013 HD video, single screen in architectural
environment, 15 minutes, 52 seconds

The full title of How Not to Be Seen is significant. By including “.MOV File” (referring to the digital multimedia
file format in which the video was saved), Steyerl is ensuring that we are aware of how we have been
transformed by active digital instruments that are fundamentally political in nature. How Not to Be Seen
brings to our attention a new normal: that who we are is increasingly defined less by our decisions and
actions and more by how we are observed and categorized in ways outside of our control. According to
Steyerl in her essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image,”67 we find ourselves increasingly dematerialized as we
are captured by technology, reduced to pixels without semiotic significance in ways that contradict past
promises of digitalization and computationality as a beneficial and progressive science. Dematerialized by
technology, our actions are constantly observed and assessed in ways that we are unaware of. Even if we
develop awareness, that awareness comes with increasing demands for further levels of compliance. In this
context, the video’s inclusion of the Three Degrees hit song “When Can I See You Again?” (1974) resonates
on an entirely new level: without any irony and with only unanswered questions for lyrics, the song evokes a
sense of romantic longing that demands reciprocation but is never fulfilled, echoing the continuous need of
digital technology to gather data. In the end, How Not to Be Seen is less a set of instructions and more an
articulation of a genuine need to be invisible in today’s world that is increasingly impossible to meet.
The topics of intervention, of authenticity in art, and of a connection to an embattled notion of humanity
have been present in Steyerl’s art from the very beginning in complex ways. Writing about her first solo
exhibition in New York, Holland Cotter stated, “Here as elsewhere, Ms. Steyerl refuses to nail down a single
idea, or insist on a point of view. Instead, we get art—her video—as an act of moral thinking-in-progress. In
a very of-the-moment, digital-age way, the logic of that thinking is fractured, the nature of morality suspect.
But a belief in the necessity of thinking, restlessly, politically, never is in doubt.”68 Our contemporary world is
assaulted by overlapping and conflicting impulses, distractions, and powerful influences deceptively designed
to enclose us in an illusion of freedom; and Steyerl’s videos navigate what she describes as a “new
representational freedom”69 in an effort to counter these manipulations.
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Steyerl’s Drill (2019) reveals even further the confining effects of the digitalization of our world and its
inextricable relation to corporate identity and power as those are articulated through the ritual behavior
associated with the location of the artwork [1-17]. Drill was a tripartite video installation with massive
screens inside the otherwise almost empty space of the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall of New York
City’s Park Avenue Armory. Projected at enormous scale was a performance filmed in the Drill Hall of the Yale
University Precision Marching Band of a score algorithmically composed with data about mass shootings in
the United States, intercut with footage inside different spaces in the Armory of survivors of gun violence
talking about their experiences and documentary footage. Brilliantly edited, Drill elaborated the Armory’s
military legacy, the militarization of the culture of the United States, and the current gun violence epidemic.
The Armory was dedicated in 1880. At 55,000 square feet, its Drill Hall remains one of the largest
unobstructed interior spaces in New York City and has served as a venue for large art installations since
2006. Steyerl has remarked that the building is rather peculiar in that, if for no other reason, it is an art
space with a firing range in the basement. (In one video segment filmed in the basement, a school principal
points out bullet holes in the walls.) Continuing the ideas of How Not to Be Seen, Drill starts with the
statement, “History is the art of highlighting whatever is hiding in plain sight.” By heightening our awareness
of the art exhibition’s close ties to its own military surroundings, Steyerl is picking up on themes she explored
in earlier work while adding layers of nuanced meaning connecting wealth, art, and violence.

1-17 Hito Steyerl Drill, 2019 Video installation at the Park Avenue Armory, New York

Museums and exhibitions customarily become ways of organizing national identity, according to Steyerl in her
book Duty Free Art (2017); but they are also “a proxy for the global commons, for the lack of any common
ground, temporality, or space … defined by a proliferation of locations, and a lack of accountability.”70 The
play on words is a signature part of Steyerl’s artistic practice: “duty free” plays off the tax-free status art
often holds as a mechanism that separates it from the public for investment purposes while equally referring
to a sense that individuals are “duty free,” without duty as a rational responsibility as a kind of artificial
notion of radical freedom. What has emerged in a post-capitalist world driven by automation and the
monetization of information is a cultural condition that Steyerl clearly opposes through her conception of a
new representational freedom.
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If images can be shared and circulated, why can’t everything else be too? If data moves across screens, so can its material
incarnations move across shop windows and other enclosures. If copyright can be dodged and called into question, why
can’t private property? If one can share a restaurant dish JPEG on Facebook, why not the real meal. … Why only claim
open access to JSTOR and not MIT. … Why shouldn’t data clouds discharge as storming supermarkets?71

Steyerl’s art represents the increasingly complex state of the world today. She employs masterful editing and
a heightened focus on the technical language of film and video as an artistic medium—including the
juxtaposition of digital artifacts and natural cinematography with cuts and layering of imagery—to bring to
light how reality, in this artist’s view, is governed by her concept of verticality (a topographical and
hierarchical layering of information). Her art provides an intensely personal and fractured perspective that
embodies and is sustained by a moral force of artistic practice as intervention and responsibility while
echoing our increasingly shattered notions of place, identity, agency, and moral value. There’s a radical
political element in Steyerl’s work, but equally there’s an assertion that the possibility of an autonomous
artistic practice, separate from worldly considerations, is no longer genuinely possible when the art world is
so entangled in extrinsic issues.
Drill, in this sense, is not just the name of an artwork or a revelation of the warlike origins of halftime
entertainments by marching bands but an imperative to investigate the invasion of non-aesthetic forces into
the art world. Like a lot of Steyerl’s work, Drill is aggressive, complex, and funny in a way that is
simultaneously tragic. Drill represents the urgency in all of Steyerl’s work, one that demands a kind of
interventionist aesthetic that addresses the conditions of our world.
Hito Steyerl is a German artist of Japanese ethnicity, based in Berlin. She studied filmmaking at the
Academy of Visual Arts, Tokyo, and the University of Television and Film, Munich, while also working as a
stuntwoman and bouncer.72 Steyerl also is a cultural critic and a philosopher, having received her PhD in
philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
Profile by Scott Contreras-Koterbay

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