This is the third and last part of my conversation with contemporary art curator Viktor Misiano held via Skype in October 2012. Here Misiano talks about the major changes he has been witnessing in contemporary art during his long career.
He talks about the very emotional and active decade of the 80s, the decade of the return to painting which could be now conceived as a conservative period.
Then he talks about the 90s when the art scene discovered the “out-of-the-institution” contexts. Artists discovered internet, public spaces, the possibility to produce art in completely unusual contexts. During this decade artist believed very much in communication, in relations, in interactions, they were very confident to mediums for the transmission of art messages.
The next decade, the so called “Zero” decade, was, according to Misiano, the less productive and the most conservative one. During this decade, art was very confident in art corporations and economical corporations. From corporations we were getting resources, economical resources or the possibility to represent art. Art became also very confident to the neo-ideology, to political ideas, to something which is happening beyond the individual; indeed art was looking for what a group of individuals or many individuals have in common.
Misiano thinks that, nowadays, we lost this blind confidence in the “out-of-the-subject” entities, something that is outside the artistic subjectivity. We are in a moment of transition and art is in a sort of disappointment mode. The most sensitive personalities, artists, curators, thinkers, are very uncomfortable with the main stream in art. The most important trends examined in the previous decade, in the decade Zero, revealed many contradictions. The main contradiction is the relation of artists and society. The debate is: should art be part of reality or should it keep its autonomy?
The Berlin Biennial, organized by Artur Żmijewski revealed a lot of contradictions around this specific topic. The intention of the Biennale was to overpass the art autonomy. But even in this case this intention was not properly fulfilled. Misiano thinks that whole issue of art autonomy and its relation to society should be redefined, re-discussed, re-proposed. According to Misiano, today crucially important is becoming the subjectivity itself, artists him/herself, meant as an individual, as something that bears a subjectivity which is the main resource of the artistic production. It has always been like that, but in previous decades we seemed to mix subjectivity with something which is external to it: institutional world, discourses, economical power, social context.
According to Misiano, today the intimacy of the artistic subject is becoming crucially interesting.