An essay-length book arguing for the autonomy of art in the present

PhD and postdoc supervisors from Europe and beyond interrogate the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research. 

This book could have been called “The Contemporary Condition of Sleeping and Reading in the Heart of (and in Spite of) the Logosphere and Various Media Streams,” but frankly, “I Can’t Sleep” sounds better, plus it’s true.

How do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more importantly, how do these machines themselves understand, know, and sense time?

In Exhibition-ism, theorist and artist Mieke Bal develops the idea that exhibiting is a significant form of the contemporary. In an exhibition, visitors are in the actual company of artworks that can perform. Looking at art as process, Bal makes the case that the being-together-in-time of an exhibition visit encourages and, if the curation is well thought-out, can heighten the sense of the contemporaneity—art being more capable of this than anything else.

In the form of a conversation with the filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, this book sets out to explore how his work with montage can be understood to articulate contemporaneity in sensuous ways.

Taking its point of departure in an “anachronic” exhibition, “Soulèvements” (2016–18), this book is a theoretical exploration of how the notion of contemporaneity—understood as the coming together of different times in the same historical present—relates to the end of a certain history of art.

Hardly a gray matter of catching the spirit of our present. From the sun-drenched-ness of the Dubaian atmosphere, to the feathery encounter in a secret printing workshop, words and materials are discreetly—spectrally, outspokenly—put forward: a bunch of residents cruising the seas of nine temporary realities, the result of an ongoing swapping of facts and speculations from the earthly realm.

Curatorial projects are increasingly understood as research projects with extended time frames and complex interactions across diverse sectors. This book presents “100 Years of Now,” a research project taking place at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2015–19), as a critical investigation into the temporality of contemporaneity—both in terms of its structure and content.

Contemporary Research Intensive was an event organized in the context of the 57th Venice Art Biennale to investigate the concept of “contemporaneity.” The book is both part and result of the intensive sharing of ideas to produce something that captures the spirit of both discussions at that time and the publication process as a temporal form.

Hegel after Occupy is a Western Marxist analysis of different attempts to understand the present historical situation and the way theories of postmodernity, globalization, and contemporaneity implicitly or explicitly conceptualize the relationship between the historical present and political action.

“The contemporary” is an established term in a range of scholarly and disciplinary discourses, but what does it mean? Margaret-Anne Hutton sets out to expose the inconsistencies and ambiguities in its terminological usage, and to unpick some of the knots which bind the substantive and adjective.

Drawing together discourses on contemporaneity and new materialisms, this book examines a material conception of temporality that makes it possible to develop a critique of the philosophical discourse on presence. Claiming that “there is no now,” Ebeling develops an archaeology of contemporaneity according to which the traces of the contemporary can only be secured through visual or material operations, not historical ones.

Three interconnected palimpsest essays recount (1) the backstory of a “meta” font recently updated by Dexter Sinister and used to typeset the Contemporary Condition book series, (2) a broad history of the rationalization of letterforms that considers the same typeface from “a higher point of disinterest,” and (3) a pending proposal for a sundial designed to operate in parallel physical and digital realms. Notes on the Time, Time, Letters & Spirits is the sixth volume of the Contemporary Condition.

Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

In the media theater of contemporary culture, a drama unfolds: While the human sense of “the present” is challenged by the immediacy of analog signal transmission and the delays of digital data processing, a different (non-)sense of time unfolds within technologies themselves.

A central theme of this book concerns slowness instead of acceleration. This is approached through art and design practices that unfold this multiplicity of time, closely entwined with contemporary concerns in aesthetic theory, to understand and engage with the planetary time scales of slow environmental violence.

Revising his well-known histories of contemporary art, Terry Smith argues that we must respond to the compelling need for coeval composition at a time defined by the contemporaneity of divisive difference. This book traces how—despite many obstacles—visual artists across the globe are rising to this challenge.

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator “contemporary art” refer to? An immediate response would be that contemporary art is an art of the present, that it somehow addresses and expresses the present. But what is this present? This first book in the Contemporary Condition series introduces some of the key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present.