ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
describe art in the 1990s: the ‘project’. Although the term ‘project’ was used
by conceptual artists in the late 1960s (most notably by the Amsterdambased
gallery Art and Project), it tends to denote a proposal for a work of
art. A project in the sense I am identifying as crucial to art after 1989 aspires
to replace the work of art as a finite object with an open- ended, post- studio,
research- based, social process, extending over time and mutable in form. 2
Since the 1990s, the project has become an umbrella term for many types of
art: collective practice, self- organised activist groups, transdisciplinary
research, participatory and socially engaged art, and experimental curating.
By focusing on the last two of these tendencies, it is hoped that the
trajectory mapped in this chapter will provide a counter- narrative to the
mainstream commercial and institutional history of art since 1990, which
has tended to celebrate identity politics, the apotheosis of video installation,
large- scale cibachrome photographs, design- as- art, relational
aesthetics, conceptual painting, and spectacular new forms of installation
art. 3 My key point, however, is less to define a new tendency than to note
that the word chosen to describe these open- ended artistic activities arrives
at a moment when there is a conspicuous lack of what we could call a social
project – a collective political horizon or goal. The fraught relationship
between the artistic project and a political project is the central thrust of
this chapter.
When surveying art since 1989, it quickly becomes apparent that the
interest in participation and social engagement that we now consider to be
a characteristic tendency of the last twenty years was in fact rather slow to
emerge. The early years of the 1990s are best characterised, perhaps
unsurprisingly, as a continuation of the 1980s, unaffected by the newly
opened border to the East or the non- Western purview of Jean- Hubert
Martin’s ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (1989), billed as the ‘world’s first global
art show’. Documenta 9 (1992), for example, included only a handful of
non- Western artists (in deference to the precedent of ‘Magiciens’), but
was still an exhibition of European and North American sculpture and
painting, focused on the twin centres of New York and Cologne. By
contemporary standards its curatorial rhetoric seems irremediably dated,
evoking the romantic spirit of the individual producer. 4 Between Documenta
9 and Documenta 10 (1997) lies an aesthetic and intellectual chasm:
Catherine David’s interdisciplinary approach to the latter exhibition
included an 830- page catalogue pointing to a renewed interest in art’s
social and political orientation. Supplementing art historical essays with
texts by philosophers, urbanists and anthropologists, David posited political
philosophy and sociology as the new transdisciplinary frameworks for
contemporary art. 5 At the same time, it is telling that Documenta 10 as an
exhibition did not reflect many of the collective, activist and documentary
practices that had already begun to emerge in Europe (and whose promotion
would be the task of Documenta 11).
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