Presenting the Project
Speaking about contemporary art we have to ask ourselves, first of all: What does it mean to be contemporary? Modern art is (or, rather, was) directed toward the future. Being modern means to live in a project, to practice a work in progress. Because of this permanent movement toward the future modern art tends to overlook, to forget the present, to reduce it to a permanently self-effacing moment of transition from past to future. Postmodern discourse and art tried to avoid this self-effacement of the present by presenting the Modern Project as finished, as already fulfilled – and to focus on the criticism of this Project and its consequences. But by relegating the Modern Project to the past, postmodern art misses the present again.
It seems to me that the contemporary artists who try to be genuinely contemporary still see the Modern Project as unfullfilled, unrealised, ongoing Project. But relating to this Project, as well as any other project, they concentrate their attention more on its context, on the conditions of its fulfilling than on the project itself. Through investigation and documentation of the context of the modern projects, including their own artistic projects, these artists shift our attention from the goal of the project to the present conditions of its realisation. Accordingly, the shift from the traditional art production toward the art documentation takes place. These artists increasingly use in their practice the typical means of media coverage. And they also increasingly use the installation as an art form that gives a possibility to demonstrate a scene of devising and realising a project. Beyond that the space of installation is temporary – it is nor a museum of the past, neither the future Kingdom of Light. In a certain sense the question of the aesthetics of contemporary art and the question of the aesthetics of installation are identical questions.
The modern life is the life in a project that is oriented toward the future – being it understood as the technological progress, economic improvement or political utopia. The formulation of diverse projects has now become the major preoccupation of contemporary man. These days, whatever endeavour one sets out to pursue in the economic, political or cultural field, one first has to formulate a fitting project in order to apply for official approval or funding of the project from one or several public authorities. Should this project in its original form be rejected, it is then modified in an attempt to improve its chances of being accepted. If the revised project is dismissed out of hand one has no alternative but to propose an entirely new one in its place. In this manner, all members of our society are constantly preoccupied with devising, discussing and dismissing an endless series of projects. Appraisals are written, budgets meticulously calculated, commissions assembled, committees appointed and resolutions tabled. Not inconsiderable numbers of our contemporaries spend their time reading nothing but proposals, appraisals and budgets of this nature. Most of these projects remain for ever unrealized. All it requires is one or another assessor to report that a project lacks promise, is difficult to finance or is simply undesirable, and the entire labour invested in the project’s formulation has been a waste of time.
Needless to say, the degree of work invested in the presentation of a project is quite considerable – and becomes increasingly labour-intensive as time progresses. The projects submitted to various juries, commissions and public bodies are packaged in increasingly elaborate design and formulated with ever greater detail so as to suitably impress their potential assessors. Accordingly, this mode of project formulation is gradually advancing to an art form in its own right whose significance for our society is
still all too little acknowledged. For, regardless of whether or not it is actually carried out, each project in fact represents a draft for a particular vision of the future, and in each case one that can be fascinating and instructive. However, most of the projects our civilization is ceaselessly generating often just vanish or are simply thrown away once they have been rejected. This culpably negligent treatment of the project as an art form is indeed highly regrettable since it bars us from analyzing and understanding the hopes and visions for the future that have been invested in these projects – and which might offer greater insight into our society than anything else. This is clearly not the appropriate context to undertake a sociological analysis of contemporary projects. But the question one might ask at this point is what hopes are linked to the project as such? Or, why do people want to do a project at all, instead of just living on into the future unfettered by projects?
The following answer can be given to this question: above all else, each project allows to its author to acquire a socially sanctioned and represented status of loneliness. That may seem paradoxical, on the first glance, because every project is social in its nature. But every project makes a distinction among the time of its realization, the moment of presentation of its result and the time after this presentation. Now, the time of realization of the project is a very private time – a time of seclusion and reflection. It can be an individual seclusion or a group, collective seclusion if a certain project involves the collaboration of many individuals. But in any case certain self-isolation from a greater social context is a necessary condition for a realization of any project. And this kind of self-isolation is fully appreciated and respected by the society.
Under the prevailing conditions of daily life, individuals who are not prepared to enter into communication at any moment with their fellow-men rate as difficult, antisocial and unfriendly, and are subject to social censure. But this situation undergoes a radical
change the moment someone can present a socially sanctioned individual project as the reason for his self-isolation and renunciation of any form of communication. We all understand that when somebody has to carry out a project he is under immense time pressure that leaves him no time whatsoever for anything else. It is commonly accepted that writing a book, preparing an exhibition or striving to make a scientific discovery are projects that require from the individual to avoid social contact, to discommunicate, if not to excommunicate himself – yet without automatically being judged a bad person. The (agreeable) paradox about this is that the longer the project is scheduled to run, the greater the time pressure one is subjected to. Most projects that are approved in the framework of the contemporary artistic world are scheduled to run for a period of up to five years at the most. In exchange, after this limited period of seclusion, the individual is expected to present a finished product and return to the fray of social communication – at least up to the point, possibly, when he or she submits a proposal for yet another project. Actually, together with the result of the project an individual – or a group – are expected to present documentation that testifies how they spent the time that was allowed to it to use for the project realization. But this documentation is not so important in comparison with the result of the project. The result, the product of the project demonstrates by itself the work that is accumulated in this product. The life of the authors and participants of the project that took place during its realization is erased by the product of this project. It remains socially relevant, purely private.
But what can be said about the projects that might preoccupy a person for the entire length of his or her life? And what about the projects that have life itself as their unique result? Now the most interesting projects of modern and contemporary art are precisely that: They want to manifest life as such – beyond any reason, goal, justification, instrumentality, utility etc. Beginning with Malevich or the artists of Dada movement like Hugo Ball or Tristan Tzara, we are confronted with the projects that want to be as infinite
and as non-utilitarian as life itself. Malevich speaks about life that simply happens – beyond any reason and objective – and formulates the artistic project to show life precisely as such autonomous, uncontrollable and potentially infinite process. And Malevich is ready to defend this notion of autonomous life against any instrumentalisation – even against the instrumentalisation by the projects of political or economical liberation. It is possible to cite many other comparable statements by very different artists of the historical avant-garde. One often tends to speak in this respect about the autonomy of art – and the autonomy of art is confronted then by the requirement to overcome this autonomy, to bring art into life. Now Malevich - as also other artists of the radical avant-garde - never speaks about the autonomy of art. He speaks only about the autonomy of life – and art is for him only a means to manifest this autonomy of life. We are confronted here with life that coincides with the project that has this life itself as its goal.
It seems to me that this project should be taken seriously because it is repeated time and again in the art of 20th Century by different artists and in many different ways. And I would say that the art of Ligia Clarke is for me also an example of such a radical project. Now it is obvious that it makes no sense to require this kind of art project be brought into life – because it is already life. But here a different question arises: How to bring this kind of life project into art – into the art context, into the art space? In this case we cannot speak about an artwork as a final product of this project – a product that summarizes the whole work that was invested in this project and that can be exhibited and brought into the field of the social communication after the seclusion of life in the project is finished. One remains confronted with a life that seems to be irredeemably private because it didn’t produce any result – so that its documentation and representation in the art space seems to be fundamental questionable, deficient, inappropriate. I must say at that point that I don’t share these reservations – and I will try to explain why.
As I have tried to show it is precisely the result, the product of the life in the project that divides life into, let say, pure life and work, private and social, communicable and non communicable. Everything that went into the product and was summarized by the product is by definition work. Everything that remained outside of the product is pure life that is not and cannot be communicated – pure life because it was purely and definitively lost in terms of the project. This purely and definitively lost life is non-retrievable, non represantable, indeed. But if the project is understood as having life as its only goal then the situation changes. In this case we don’t have a product, a result any more – and that means that the whole life becomes identical to the project and to its representation. Such life has no more loss, no irretrievable, unrepresentable rest, no private part. We have here life that is identical to its documentation. This kind of project has only one meaning: To erase the difference between inner life and outer life, between life and work, between private and social. We can say: Such a life project is from the beginning a communication. But it is communicating only itself – or, to say it in other way, it is communicating its own discommunication. Life is, as I already indicated, is understood by radical art of 20th Century as something that escapes any description, classification and utilization. So to communicate life – and also to communicate a life project that has as a goal to communicate life – is to communicate the dis-communication, to document the inadequacy of any documentation etc.
The process of modernisation is oft understood as the constant expansion of communication, as a process of progressive secularization that empties all states of loneliness, self-isolation, purely inner life. Modernization is seen as the emergence of a new society of total inclusion that rules out all forms of exclusivity. But, as already mentioned, each project first and foremost amounts to a proclamation and establishment
of seclusion and self-isolation. This gives modernity an ambivalent status. On the one hand it fosters a compulsion for total communication and total collective contemporaneity, while on the other it is constantly generating new projects that repeatedly end in the reconquest of radical isolation. Each project is above all the declaration of another, new future that is supposed to come about once the project has been executed. But in order to induce such a new future one first has to take a period of leave or absence for oneself, with which the project has transferred its agent into a parallel state of heterogeneous time. This other time-frame, in turn, is undocked from time as experienced by society – it is de-synchronized. Society’s life carries on regardless – the usual run of things remains unimpinged. But unnoticed somewhere beyond this general flow of time somebody has begun working on another project. He is writing a book, preparing an exhibition or planning a spectacular assassination. And he is doing this in the hope that once the book is published, the exhibition opened or the assassination carried out, the general run of things will change and all mankind will be bequeathed a different future – the very future, in fact, this project has anticipated and aspired to. In other words, at first glance every project would appear to thrive solely on the hope of its resynchronization with the general run of things. The project is deemed a success if this resynchronization manages to steer the run of things in the desired direction. And it is deemed a failure if the run of things remains unaffected by the project’s realization. Yet success and failure of the project both have one thing in common: both outcomes terminate the project, and both lead to the resynchronization of the project’s parallel state of time with that of the general run of things. And in both cases this resynchronization familiarly causes a malaise, even prompting despondency. Whether a project ends in success or failure plays no role whatsoever. In both cases what is felt to be distressing is the loss of this existence in parallel time, the abandonment of a life beyond the general run of things.
If one has a project – or more precisely, is living in a project – one is always already in the future. One is working on something that (still) cannot be shown to others, that remains concealed and incommunicable. The project allows one to emigrate from the present into a virtual future, thereby causing a temporal rupture between oneself and everyone else, for they have not yet arrived in this future and are still waiting for the future to happen. But the author of the project already knows what the future will look like since his project is nothing other than a description of this future. The key reason, incidentally, why the approval process for a project is so highly unpleasant to the project’s author is because at the earliest stage of it submission he is already being asked to give a meticulously detailed description of how this future will be brought about and what its outcome will be. If the author proves incapable of doing so, his project will be turned down and refused funding. Yet should he in fact manage to deliver the stipulated precise description he will eliminate this very distance between himself and the others that constitutes the entire appeal of his project. If everyone knows from the very outset what course the project is likely to take and what its outcome will be, then the future will no longer come as a surprise to them. With that, however, the project loses its inherent purpose. For the project’s author, namely, everything in the here and now is of no consequence since he is already living in the future and views the present as something that has to be overcome, abolished or at least changed. This is why he sees no reason why he should justify himself to, or communicate with the present. Quite the contrary, it is the present that needs to justify itself to the future that has been proclaimed in the project. It is precisely this time gap, the precious opportunity to take a look at the present from the future, that makes the life lived in the project so enticing to its author – and, inversely, that makes the project’s execution ultimately so upsetting. Hence, in the eyes of any author of a project the most agreeable projects are those which from their very inception are conceived never to be completed, since these are the ones that are most likely to maintain the gap between the future and the present for an unspecified
length of time. Such projects are never carried out, never generate an end result, never bring about a final product. But this is by no means to say that such unfinished, uncompletable projects are utterly excluded from social representation, even if they could never be expected to effect a resynchronization with the general run of things through some manner of specific result, successful or not. These kinds of projects can, after all, still be documented.
Sartre once described the state of ‘being-in-the-project’ as the ontological condition of human existence. According to Sartre, each person lives from the perspective of their own, individual future that perforce remains barred from the view of others. In Sartre’s terms, this condition results in the radical alienation of each individual, since everyone else can only see him as the finished product of his personal circumstances, but never
as a heterogeneous project of these circumstances. Consequently, the heterogeneous parallel time-frame of the project remains elusive to any form of representation in the present. Hence for Sartre, the project is tainted by the suspicion of escapism, the deliberate avoidance of social communication and individual responsibility. So it is no surprise that Sartre also describes the subject’s ontological condition as a state of ‘mauvaise foi’ or insincerity. And for this reason the existential hero of Sartrean provenience is perennially tempted to close the gap between the time of his project and that of the general run of things through a violent ‘action directe’ and thereby, if only for a brief moment, synchronize both frames. But while the heterogeneous time of the project cannot be brought to a conclusion, it can, as previously observed, be documented. One could even claim that art is nothing other than the documentation and representation of such project-based heterogeneous time. Long ago this meant documenting divine history as a project for world redemption. Nowadays it is about individual and collective projects for diverse futures. In any case, art documentation now grants all unrealized or unrealizable projects a place in the present without forcing them to be either a success
or a failure. In these terms, Sartre’s own writings could also be considered documentation of this kind.
Precisely this ambivalence is demonstrated and radicalized by the various projects of the art of the 20th Century. Each of this project demonstrates an unavoidable time gap, a radical desynchronisation between itself and the life time of society. That is why the languages of the avant-garde – also visual languages – are predominantly communicating the discommunication. These languages do not want to be understandable – just in opposite, they will convey the break of the communication. These projects do not want to unite private and social, life and work, form and content. On the contrary, they show that such a unity can be only a paradoxical unity of contradictions that can communicate itself only through impossibility of communication. In this sense to document these projects as impossible to document is precisely to remain true to their initial intent. In the case of the classical avant-garde there could be still a certain ambivalence in this respect because in one way or another the classical avant-garde still produced artworks.
In the past two decades the art project – in lieu of the work of art – has without question moved centre stage in the art world’s attention. Each art project may presuppose the formulation of a specific aim and a strategy designed to achieve this aim, but this target is mostly formulated in such a way that we are denied the criteria which would allow us to ascertain whether the project’s aim has or has not been achieved, whether excessive time is required to reach its goal or even if the target is as such intrinsically unattainable. Our attention is thereby shifted away from the production of a work (including a work of art) onto life in the art project – life that is not primarily a productive process, that is not tailored to developing a product, that is not ‘result-oriented’. In these terms, art is no longer understood as the production of works of art but as documentation of life-in-the-
project – regardless of the outcome the life in question has or is supposed to have had. This clearly has an effect on the way art is now defined. Nowadays art is no longer manifested as another, new object for contemplation that has been produced by the artist, but as another, heterogeneous time-frame of the art project, which is documented as such.
A work of art is traditionally understood as something that wholly embodies art, lending it immediacy and palpable, visible presence. When we go to an art exhibition we generally assume that whatever is there on display – paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, ready-mades or installations – must be art. The works can of course in one way or another make references to things that they are not, maybe to real world objects or to certain political issues, but they do not allude to art itself, because they themselves are art. However, this traditional assumption defining visits to exhibitions and museums has proved progressively more misleading. Besides works of art, in present-day art spaces we are now to an ever increasing degree also confronted with the documentation of art in various guises. Similarly, here too we see pictures, drawings, photographs, videos, texts and installations – in other words, the same forms and media in which art is commonly presented. But when it comes to art documentation, art is no longer presented through these media but simply documented. For art documentation is per definitionem not art. Precisely by merely referring to art, art documentation makes it quite clear that art itself is no longer at hand and instantly visible but, instead, absent and hidden.
Art documentation thus signals the attempt to use artistic media within art spaces to make direct reference to life itself, in other words to a form of pure activity or pure praxis, as it were – indeed, a reference to life in the art project – yet without wishing to directly represent it. Here, art is transformed into a way of life, whereby the work of art is turned
into non-art, to mere documentation of this way of life. Or, put in different terms, art is now becoming biopolitical because it has begun to produce and document life itself as pure activity by artistic means. Not only that, but art documentation could only have evolved at all under the conditions of our biopolitical age, in which life itself has become the object of technical and artistic creativity. So once more we are faced with the question as to the relationship between life and art – but in an utterly novel constellation, one which is characterized by the paradox of art in the guise of the art project now also wanting to become life, instead of, say, simply reproducing life or furnishing it with art products. But the conventional question that comes to mind is to what extent documentation, including art documentation, can actually represent life itself?
All documentation is under general suspicion of inexorably adulterating life. For each act of documentation and archiving presupposes a certain choice of things and circumstances. Yet such a selection is determined by criteria and values which are always questionable, and necessarily remain so. Furthermore, the process of documenting something always opens up a disparity between the document itself and the documented events, a divergence that can neither be bridged nor erased. But even if we managed to develop a procedure capable of reproducing life in its entirety and with total authenticity, we would again ultimately end up not with life itself but with life’s death mask, for it is the very uniqueness of life that constitutes is vitality. It is for this reason that our culture today is marked by a deep malaise towards documentation and the archive – and even by vociferous protest against the archive in the name of life. The archivists and bureaucrats in charge of documentation are widely regarded as the enemies of true life, favouring the compilation and administration of dead documents over the direct experience of life. In particular, the bureaucrat is viewed as an agent of death who wields the chilling power of documentation to render life grey, monotonous, uneventful and bloodless – in brief, deathlike. Similarly, once the artist too starts to
become involved with documentation, he runs the risk of being associated with the bureaucrat, under suspicion as a new agent of death.
As we know, however, the bureaucratic documentation stored in archives does not consist solely of recorded memories, but also includes projects and plans directed not at the past but at the future. These archives of projects contain drafts for life that has not yet taken place, but as it is perhaps meant to in the future. And what this means in our own biopolitical era is not merely making changes to the fundamental conditions of life but actively engaging in the production of life itself. Biopolitics is frequently mistaken for the scientific and technological strategies of genetic manipulation which, theoretically at least, aim to reshape individual living beings. Instead, the real achievement of biopolitical technology has far more to do with shaping longevity itself – with organizing life as an event, as pure activity that occurs in time. From procreation and the provision of life-long medical care to the regulation of the balance between work and leisure and medically supervised, if not medically induced death, the life of each individual today is permanently subject to artificial control and improvement. And precisely because life is now no longer perceived as a primeval, elementary event of being, as fate or fortuna, as time that unravels of its own accord, but is seen instead as time that can be artificially produced and formed, life can be documented and archived before it has even taken place. Indeed, bureaucratic and technological documentation serves as the primary medium of modern biopolitics. The schedules, regulations, investigative reports, statistical surveys and project outlines that this kind of documentation consists of are constantly generating new life. Even the genetic archive that is contained in every living being can ultimately be understood as a component of this documentation – one that both documents the genetic structure of previous, obsolete organisms, but also enables the same genetic structure to be interpreted as a blueprint for creating future living organisms. This means that, given the current state of biopolitics, the archive no longer
allows us to differentiate between memory and project, between past and future. This, incidentally, also offers the rational basis for what in the Christian tradition is termed the Resurrection – and for what in political and cultural domains is known as a revival. For the archive of elapsed forms of life can at any moment turn out to be a script for the future. By being stored in the archive as documentation, life can be repeatedly re-lived and constantly reproduced within historical time – should anyone resolve to undertake such reproduction. The archive is the site where past and future become reversible.
Translated by Matthew Partridge
