Slow Futurism

The economic crisis coupled with swine flu has brought upon a feverish quest for real-time information.  Mankind has been fully immersed in the moment, but, this moment is hanging and waiting for "the future".  Here right now, with rapt attention, we want to know.  All the tools for this state are in place, with a global information system at our disposal.  Tomorrow never comes.

This state of prediction of now for later is endemic of our culture.  It is counterbalanced by the "Slow" movement of past and present and thoughts of the future for "now".  But even this slow now promises a better future.  As an aside, this is nothing new.  Various religions have historically offered perspectives on our relationship with the state of now.  Now has always been a participatory endeavor.  In this month's issue of Frieze Magazine, Jonathan Griffin offers an analysis of cultural perspectives on "The Future" and proposes it is time to "resurrect the lost art of looking forward".  This essay, entitled "Future Conditional" points out the current lack of children's reading material which is futuristic in essence.

Futuristic tendencies often arise when old boundaries are erased.  The man on the moon was a shaping force for the cultural products of our youth.  For our children, the internet is not a new frontier, but, a given part of everyday reality.  Instead of new spaces, our children are faced with fatalistic concerns about the lack of new boundaries.  The global boundless nature of our culture has given birth to fears about globalism, global warming, global pandemics.  So, a retreat from the notion of new spaces providing new opportunities is underway and the shaping of the concept of the word "future" is being redrawn.

The future has shifted back to the "now".  Conceptually, this does not have to be problematic or purely nostalgic.  The "now" is and always has been immensely creative.  Think, make, do and march forward.  Real-time is your tool.

Altermodern

A most worthwhile morning was spent in the Tate with the children.  We took in the Tate Triennial which, from a curatorial perspective, was one of the best "of the moment" exhibitions Missmc has seen in a very long time. Entitled "Altermodern", it was pitched as a theoretical exhibition but it was easy to digest; much of the art expressed a great deal of sentiment.   Most surprisingly, it entertained the children as well.  A discourse about These-Modern-Times and how they are shifting is lost on a child: the perspective of a child is always in flux and an ever-shifting perspective is a given.  Humor and menace were the prevailing attractions for the small ones.  Clearly, they are my children.

Altermodern - the ideas of alternative ways sprouting and intermixing in a global world was the base concept and a nice broad one so that the art covered tangents across the spectrum. There was a strong bleakness to much of the work but the humor of many of the pieces lifted it out of the apocalypse.

The exhibit nailed the credit-crunch moment but the moment is changing rapidly.  The artist Charles Avery contributed a piece that will survive the "momentness" - his head of Aleph and associated drawings are divorced from the present and float in an imaginary narrative.  It is the absurdity and escapism of the piece that places it in the now.  The idea of discourses in art, literature, philosophy and well, anything, being in a rather large state of flux is exciting and this snapshot of current sentiment will be glanced at again in the future.

I'm still mulling over the exhibition title "Altermodern".  A reasonable choice perhaps --Postcrunch sounds too much like a cereal and postcrunchinism brings to mind a hobbling one-legged thing...