ABSTRACT
In its dominant sense, contemporary refers to now – in strong opposition to a moment in some recognised past (which is over) or future (yet to come) time – but the term also contains within it the undertow of a late-nineteenth-century usage meaning^ modern or ultramodern. This inheritance is at the root of the difficulty with the term: it has come to mean, confusingly, both now and modern, even though in art history modern has become, in some important ways, a distinctly historical notion. ‘Modern art’ usually refers to art from the time of E´douard Manet (the 1860s) to the ‘end of modernism’, a point located in the later 1960s – just prior to, that is, the emergence of postmodernism. Difficulties, however, equally plague the term ‘now’: it cannot mean simply the ‘immediate present’ (literally this second) and therefore is ambiguously open itself – perhaps meaning anything from ‘this year’ to ‘the last ten years’. Several further elements of confusion over contemporary involve
significant issues to do with the nature of art historical research, and the relations between this activity and the study of art and art institutions in the present. In one way, the resort to this phrase – ‘in the present’ – valuably indicates that the term actually has no neutral or clear meaning though it is often used precisely with that intention. For instance, it became common about thirty years ago for new galleries and museums of art, wishing to show artworks made ‘now’ or ‘in the present’, to call themselves ‘Museums of Contemporary Art’ (e.g.: the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art). This usage created a deliberate contrast with ‘museums of modern art’, whose collections were clearly associated with what was believed now to be an ended past history: the modernist art, that is, of the twentieth century (roughly from, say, cubism up to the work of the pop^ artists of the early 1960s). The exemplary curatorial institution concerned with this history is the Museum of Modern Art, New York, whose nickname ‘MoMA’ indicates its founding – metaphorically maternal – status, as the first such named museum, established in 1929. Contemporary in this recent usage – since the 1970s – means more
or less the same as ‘now’ or ‘in the present’, and, although the contrast with a past (completed, finished) modern moment is clear, the term remains itself ambiguous. In this ambiguity contemporary shares a vagueness with that other term mentioned above and used to describe art ‘after modernism’: postmodernism. The ‘after’ certainly suggests the ‘overness’, but also the influence or legacy, of that which
came before. For example, a drawing or painting or sculpture^ identified in conventional art historical terms as ‘after’ an earlier artist is believed to demonstrate some observable connection to a work, or works, by that former artist. In the same way, contemporary art, though clearly different from past modernist art, will be, in virtually all cases, shown to bear some important relation to preceding works. A good example is the bronze sculpture Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp) (1991), by Sherrie Levine, a postmodernist artist known for her systematic and highly self-conscious appropriations of earlier works – in this case Duchamp’s readymade Urinal (1917).
