Ben Eastham - The Imaginary Museum

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by TLS Books in 2020

Copyright Ben Eastham 2020

Cover image: Labyrinth #63 Embankment by Mark Wallinger Mark Wallinger/DACS 2020. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Ben Eastham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008375423

Ebook Edition August 2020 ISBN: 9780008375430

Version: 2020-07-14

Just as we should view art not as an accumulation of so-called art objects, but as a way of approaching knowledge, we should also view knowledge not as an accumulation of data, but as a flexible mechanism for reorganizing reality

Luis Camnitzer

Museums are just a lot of lies

Pablo Picasso

Introduction

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, wrote John Ruskin, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Which begs the question: what does the book of contemporary art tell us about the society in which we live today? How should you read it and who gets to write it?

These questions came to mind when, on my first assignment as an art critic, I watched a naked man climb slowly onto a jet engine. Once he had reached his perch and assumed the pose of Rodins The Thinker, a curator explained to the press gathered around the jet that this performance signified Englands retreat into post-industrial nostalgia. The nude redoubled his attempts to look nostalgic while, beneath him, several critics nodded to signal that this only confirmed what they had already intuited. I raised my pen to announce to my competitors the imminent arrival of a brilliant critical insight and, when it failed to appear, was reduced to sketching a cartoon penis into my notebook.

There was more of this in the exhibition: a stack of tightly rolled hotel towels alluding, we were told, to the international art worlds fantastically high carbon footprint; battered computer hard drives highlighting Chinas exploitation of Africas natural resources. I had no idea what to make of all this and so, when the press preview came to an end, was eager to dodge the mingling over coffee and pastries for fear of being caught out in conversation by someone who did. Having pocketed a miniature croissant, my escape was thwarted when I bumped into the arts correspondent of a national newspaper rolling a cigarette at the door.

I said sorry and then, in the hope of gleaning some idea I could plagiarize for my own review, asked him what he made of the show.

No fucking idea, he replied. Who are you?

I told him my name.

He patted his pockets for a lighter, found it, cupped the flame to his lips. I liked it, though, he said. Then, after a pause, You?

Ruskins quote continues: Not one of these books [of a nations deeds, words, art] can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last. You dont have to like what it says, the Victorian art critic tells us, but the book of art does not lie. If it seems that art strayed a few decades ago into illegibility, then it might be that the book doesnt only document the state of nations but predicts them.

Because the stories that have shaped western societies since the fall of the Berlin Wall seem recently to have broken down: it is no longer possible to assume the end of history through the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy, free-market capitalism and human rights-based law. Financial crises, mass migrations, global pandemics and environmental catastrophes have, whats more, revealed the systems governing our lives to be complicated beyond the comprehension of even those tasked with managing them. From the ex-chairman of the US Federal Reserve conceding that the subprime mortgage crisis had undermined his basic faith in the way the world works, to scientists reiterating that the global ecosystem is so entangled that the local effects of climate change cannot accurately be foreseen, or world leaders being forced by an unruly strand of ribonucleic acid to incarcerate whole populations, the old authorities appear to have lost control of the narrative.

The effects are exacerbated by our access to unprecedented amounts of data while remaining unschooled in how to filter it. We are drowning in information that we are no longer able to organize into easily comprehensible stories. Disbarred from conversations we are told are beyond us, it's not surprising that so many succumb to scapegoating and the seductions of populists who abuse plain speech and appeal to simpler pasts. There is a prevailing sense, in the west, of the thread that binds communities together having unravelled.

It is a staple criticism of contemporary art that it, too, has lost the plot. In the past couple of years I have attended a seven-hour-recital of a looping two-and-half-minute passage from Franz Schuberts An die Musik; travelled via virtual reality simulation to the surface of the moon not once but twice; watched an opera about climate change set on an artificial beach in an Italian military complex; taken a lesson in Sinhalese at a Manchester museum; and chaired a discussion about a video set in a Silicon Valley dystopia featuring a transgender dancer who brings Ayn Rand to climax. That all of these events have been framed as art could be taken as evidence that the term has lost all meaning, or that it has become so highly coded as to be indecipherable to anyone without a specialist education. Its easy to imagine eyes rolling, but I found all of the above experiences in some way moving, memorable or enlightening. New forms of art going back to Impressionism and beyond have routinely been dismissed as absurd, the speculation of chancers or the ravings of the deranged. So it is worth asking: what binds together these and other works of contemporary art? And how do they reflect on a complex and chaotic world?