A New World

On a key twist in the art of the past decade.

In several exhibitions from 2018–2021, American-Palestinian artist Jumana Manna (b. 1987) showed ceramic replicas of water pipes of various shapes. Sometimes they were displayed on pedestals, which emphasized their sculptural value, and against huge decorative panels of planks, metal frame and hanging fabric; at other times they were assembled into complex structures or elegantly arranged on the floor, creating a kind of relief. Russian artist Elena Artemenko (b. 1988) at this year's exhibition in the Moscow artist-run space Elektrozavod Gallery showed three-dimensional sculptures made of marble on high pedestals. Her work played on the theme of folds, creases, and delaminations of the seemingly solid material.

Both of these examples, if one does not know the context, appear as highly "formalist" moves, the apotheosis of artistic hermeticism. But Manna tells in this poetic way a dramatic story: Israel controls access to 85% of the groundwater in the West Bank, and the Palestinians who live there are severely deprived of this living substance. The viewer is presented with copies of real pipes devoid of filling due to settler colonialism. In Artemenko's case too, the sculptures are not just for decorating the interior, but behind them lies a story about the pressure on citizens in an autocratic state, where even the toughest are breaking down. So that this message doesn't get lost, she catches and hangs a couple of marble plaques on the wall with inscriptions like "your not your / not your not yo / ur not your not" (in three lines), and puts another one, with a reference to the law "ART 31 CRF", on the floor.

These artists came into art before the great paradigmatic shift in the mid-2010s, when the post-conceptual period ended and a new period came, for which we have not yet thought of a name. Manna has three academic degrees in the arts, the most recent of which, completed in 2011, is at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Artemenko graduated from the Rodchenko School in 2013, and before that she studied journalism. Both the American and Russian artists became known for their work in video. Manna, alone and with the co-author Norwegian Sille Storile, made highly political, almost cinematic films on subjects from Palestinian history. Artemenko made Kafkaesque and absurdist videos, showing the quiet nightmare of everyday life.

Of course, they were shaped by the understanding that art is a struggle for progressive values. But much more important: the artists are convinced that any work is a statement, that is, it can be translated into discursive forms. In exhibition practice, this has meant at least having a large, all-encompassing text (or at least the one aiming to complete this task) without which the works themselves "are not readable". The Western academy and art schools taught and still teach it (in Russia, of course, it is "more complicated", but the educational institutions that still proceed from the contemporary art project operate in the same paradigm), and the regular curatorial selection of works and authors for biennales, museums and kunsthalles was supposed to consolidate this state of affairs.

In the second half of the last decade, however, a new generation arrived. These people either did not go to art schools or were disappointed in what they were taught there and often dropped out and decided to defy the advice, or even the demands, of their elder colleagues. Instead of heavy biennials, they chose the Internet—especially social networks and aggregator sites—where they found people with similar sentiments and joined them in a variety of collaborations. Their disillusionment with contemporary art (though often the phrase continues to be used by inertia) led to a dramatic fading of this essence. Artists of the new generation disconnected from the post-conceptual tradition, lost interest in conventional professional networks and infrastructures, and were skeptical of the demonstrative political hyper-commitment of their predecessors and some of the indisputable opinions of theoretical gurus. And of course they began to create other art.

3D-printed objects are considered to be the calling card of the American Genevieve Hoffman (b. 1991), whose career in art began in the second half of the 2010s. These are complex, multi-figured compositions, a kind of model-scenography, usually in one color, without unnecessary coloring, from very tiny to up to 1.5 meters in size. There are lots of details and characters which are usually taken from fantasy, cartoons, fairy tales and video games. Dragons, griffins and other fantastic creatures, knights and soldiers, castles and labyrinths, magic beds and swords of heroes. Flora and fauna are abundantly represented, including mice, who are anthropomorphized and dressed in costumes. The artist is always more than happy to give us a list of sources she derives from—an endless list of classic and niche book series, cult TV projects, baroque and decadent aesthetics, historical and cultural studies, etc.

The Russian artist Olga Paramonova (b. 1994), who has appeared in the last two years on aggregators and independent art platforms, is creating two kinds of works: canvases without stretchers, on which she depicts frightening figures of conventional ghosts and monsters, and plastic arts of small forms—devils and strange biomorphic figures. The first thing that comes to mind is that the artist is inspired by the horror aesthetic. After all, horror is now the most popular trend in movies, TV series, literature and art. And the deliberately "sloppy" and "dirty" manner of the artist's performance should presumably confirm this compliance with the canons of the genre.

In both cases one might get the misleading impression that such art is saturated with meanings and motifs. In the works of Goffman and Paramonova, many signs are indeed collected, the former literally in composition, the latter through the viewer's speculations and guessing. But the human mind cannot digest these signs. Nor can we digest the flow of information that modern culture and its main supplier, the Internet, bombard us with. One can hear a concentrated, moderately compressed and diminished statement, while the hum of voices or the endlessly flickering kaleidoscope of symbols and cultural codes simply turns into white noise that cannot be decoded by the human senses and the productive capacities of the mind.

In spite of the multicompoundness of the new art objects, the surface is the main and only thing that they have. It is the only thing that matters. The surface is impenetrable, it neither lets in signals nor out signals. It resists viewer interpretation through a dizzying proliferation of multiple signposts leading nowhere (Hoffmann's case), or conversely, a maximum concentration on the obscure (Paramonova's case). There is nothing inside. No matter how tempting the idea of deciphering the supposed references may seem, it fails. Even tracing influences through art history, something critics often did when there was nothing left to write about, does not work here. The artists of the new generation diligently and sometimes barbarically reinvent the wheel, even where it seems they could do with homage or a quotation (an aversion to the educational system, which nurtured such approaches, evidently, has its effect).

Art today is programmatically abstract. Only instead of the world of things, with which Kazimir Malevich was at war with at the time of Suprematism, today's artists are trying to get rid of the world of words and meanings. It doesn't matter what forms this new art takes—whether it is paintings and graphics with an easily readable subject, videos and performances with more or less explainable action, or installations which suggest a situation and a context. All these terms—"plot", "action", "situation", "context"—are nothing more than a set of out-dated terms to reassure ourselves, because it is human nature to grasp at explanations as a life preserver, which of course doesn't help. Even for exhibitions, texts are now increasingly written to reinforce the impenetrability of the art itself (maybe they are not texts at all, but objects as well). It is paradoxical how things have turned around in the art world. Previously, the most decorative and incomprehensible at first sight works had quite clear explanations and "meanings". Now artists often produce imaginative objects which seem to hint at the possibility of interpretation but which are not in fact produced. Art will not cease to exist under such conditions, but it will probably undergo more transformation over time, because when discursiveness goes away, a whole other world opens up—and there are so many options there.

Published in the magazine Dialogue of Arts, 2022, №6, p. 18–21