James Peter Coolsen Photographic History, Theory and Criticism #23-6730, Greg Foster-Rice February 1, 2015

Questionnaire on the Contemporary Part II, Johanna Burton

Synopsis

Johanna Burton, Associate Director of the Whitney Museum in New York City was one of the few curators who responded to the Questionnaire on the Contemporary. She suggests that in higher education “contemporary art” is presented very unevenly and often does not extend very far into “current day artistic practices”. On the institutional level, Burton points to a lack of coherence as to what constitutes “contemporary” and suggests that the term is “at once meaningless and increasingly ubiquitous within art, historical, museum and curatorial circles”. She suggests that, in spite of the ambiguity, what the contemporary offers is the opportunity for “praxis”, and that “writing, thinking and teaching about art, whose consequences we cannot fully know, provides us with a kind of meta-experience, one not dissociated from historical accounts”, but rather, a practice which is “alive and awake to connections to be made between now and then while nonetheless aware of their utter incompatibilities”. Comment I was taken by Johanna Burton’s discourse about “the contemporary” because it seems to reflect reality and the current state of ambiguity about “what is the contemporary in art”? Perhaps it is too soon to know the answer to this question. However, I appreciated Ms. Burton’s pragmatic viewpoint of art criticism, history and theory of the contemporary “as a way of making connections to something we cannot yet fully understand”. This viewpoint reminds me of what one hears from fiction writers concerning how the plot of their novel happened to arrive at a certain point. Often the answer that writers offer is that the novel arrived there because “that is where their character took them”. Perhaps we can use the same analogy in regards to criticism and theorizing about contemporary art. We must wait to see where it will take us.