29/01/2018

What is the expression of "contemporary" in art works?:

Yuki Saiki
33568845
What is the expression of "contemporary" in art work?:
A case study of Mika Rottenberg

In this essay, from a viewpoint of contemporary art work, I will talk about the difficult question "What is
modern?" First of all, this essay explains the typical concept about the modern world using Abamben 's
theory. Agamen 's Contemporary thought is mainly discussed from two perspectives, and it turns out that
there are theorists who add different perspectives to that idea. Next, I will clarify the problems exhibition
of Agamben's thought. This content can be pointed out by referring to Bishop's Radical Museology.
Finally, I will specifically refer to Mika Rottenberg's contemporary art work. Her work includes several
significant features, which can be highly appreciated from the perspective of contemporary practice and
visualization.

In parallel with the rapid progress of modern times, the definition of "contemporary" has become the
fastest growing theme since the turn of the millennium. Here, the definition of "contemporary " has
become a target of movement in particular. Until the latter half of the 1990s, it was thought that it was
synonymous with "postwar", that means after 1945. About ten years ago, it was rearranged to start
somewhere in the 1960s, and now the 1960s and 1970s tend to be generally considered high modern 1.
Firstly, this paragraph refers to the opinion of Giorgio Agamben(1942-). When discussing "contemporary",
Agamben's theory is effective as the first material to be referred to at first. Agamben is the Italian
philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of contemporary politics. His theory cites
Nietzsche’s opinion: especially The Birth of Tragedy. Agamben points the contemporary as an experience
of profound dissonance: ‘Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which
adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with
time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism.’ 2
Agamben defines contemporary as follows. A modern person is a person who can see things not known
to the world, a person who does not blind the viewpoint of the era and century that it belongs to.
In addition, Agamben gives an example of poet and essayist Osip Mandelshtam:

The poet, who must pay for his contemporariness with his life, is he who must firmly lock his gaze
onto the eyes of his century-beast (…) The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his
own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. 3

Moreover, Agamben asks why people of the same age are interested in darkness. Because it is a matter to
keep an eye on either side: light and darkness. Likewise, he will then take an example of a nebula like the
paradox of the darkness of the night sky and state the analogy of the darkness. The light of the star which
is leaving at the speed of light is heading to the earth at the same speed. But the light does not reach
eventually. People in the contemporary age feel urgency like ‘Untimeless’ somewhere (Agamben 2009,
45). Agamben states that it is an era that makes it possible to grasp the times.
Subsequently, Agamben uses an example of fashion. Here are the two situations that constitute
discontinuity of fashion: "being-in-fashion" and "no-longer-being-in-fashion". According to him, fashion is
constitutively predictable of itself. However, as a result, it is always too late 4. The time of the fashion is
unknowable. Agamben states that other characteristics of the temporal nature of fashion can make
relationships with past and future other times (era).
At the same time, the contemporary has a special relationship with the past. He wrote that ‘Only he who
perceives the indices and signatures of the archaic in the most modern and recent can be contemporary.’ 5.
Archaic has a close meaning to its origin, and there is a close relationship between present and modern.
Also, Agamben treats the subject of ‘Avant-
garde’: new and very modern ideas that are sometimes surprising or shocking.

1
Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art?
(London: Walther Konig, 2014), 16–17.
2
Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 2009), 44.
3
Agamben, 44.
4
Agamben, 49.
5
Agamben, 50.
 The avant-garde, which has lost itself over time, also pursues the primitive and the archaic. It is in
this sense that one can say that the (‘Olivier Zahm : Une Avant-Garde sans Avant-Garde – Les
Presses Du Réel (Livre)’ n.d.)entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an
archeology; an archeology that does not, however, regress to a historical past, but returns to that
part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living. (Agamben 2009, 51)

This idea will be closer to reading archetype and original form in the present. One of the characteristics of
Agamben is that it tried to define Contemporary by making connections with other times (mostly this is
somewhat anecdotal). Some of his originality can be traced to the way he brings together Heidegger and
Benjamin, along with other major figures such as Michel Foucault.

This means that the contemporary is not only one the who, perceiving the darkness of the present,
grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; he is also the one who, dividing and interpolating
time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. He is able to a
necessity that does not arise in any way from his will, but from an exigency to which he cannot
respond. 6

Concisely, Agamben reconsider Nietzsche, and those who live in the same age are those who do not
perfectly agree with that era. This shift, a sense lagging behind this time is that people are more likely to
catch up with their era and follow along. Based on this view, Agamben defines contemporacy as follows.
A modern person is a person who can see through things unknown to the world, a person who does not
blind the viewpoint of the era and century it belongs to. Interestingly, this viewpoint also leads to the
importance of astrophysics that tells about the validity of unknown objects in the same era. The seemingly
unclear thing that strikes the sky is the light going to the earth at full speed. However, since the galaxy that
is the source of light is constantly moving away from the earth at a speed that is superior to the speed of
light, that light never reaches the earth. I believe that some kind of resistance to the Internet and its
presentity is a manifestation of craving for being contemporary. To be contemporary means continuing to
constantly visit the "now" place where no one has ever been to. To be contemporary is to resist the
direction of homogenizing the times while repeating breaks and breaks.Therefore, it can be said that there
are two stages in contemporary. Firstly, discarding "contemporary", the beginning time and the present
time are divided. As it were, it is non-modern, old-fashioned, conflicts or intrusion with the beginning of
reality. Next, what happens is encounter and friction with a diverse, divided and heterogeneous era in the
works of art. In other words, a contemporary artist is a person who creates chunks of time and also revives
chunks of time in the past, and collides, conflicts or harmonizes each other in present creation. In that
sense, the contemporary is not just metaphysics of the origin rediscovered in the darkness of the present, it
is rather a creation of the times. According to Agamben, art brings inharmony, cracks, and contradiction to
"present", which is exactly the split between modern and non-modern times. This disconnection: From the
darkness, art creates new relationships with "contemporary" and creates different time characteristics for us
in the information and communication world, and in a broader sense, we are in the midst of what is
happening now. After Agamben, Olivier Zahm: French art critic add his interpretation to Agamben’s
theory. He mentions that it is the construction of new time property starting from cracks and friction,
which is unique to art creation. Contemporary is the existence that separates itself from the "present" orbit,
flow, disappearance, homogeneity, transparency, and releases itself from "present", thereby causing its
origin and friction with the past, we will reveal ourselves. 7
Agamben's theory claims contemporary as a question of time separation. In fact, his argument can be
regarded as a matter of course. On the other hand, it is also true that his point of view is regarded as a kind
of "Western-centered". Bishop points out this as well. According to Bishop:

In China, contemporary art tends to be dated from the late 1970s (the official end of the Cultural
Revolution and the beginning of the democracy movement); in India, from the 1990s onwards; in
Latin America, there is no real division of the modern and the contemporary, because this would
mean conforming to hegemonic Western categories—indeed, a prevalent discussion there still

6
Agamben, 53.
7
Olivier Zahm and Donatien Grau, Une avant-garde sans avant-garde (Dijon : Zurich: Les Presses du réel,
2017), 14–15.
 revolves around whether or not modernity has actually been realized. In Africa, contemporary art
dates variously from the end of colonialism (the late 1950s/1960s in Anglophone and Francophone
countries; the 1970s in the case of former Portuguese colonies), or as late as the 1990s 8.

For example, regarding Japanese contemporary art, it is generally agreed today that the 1960s is one of the
turning points. In the 1960s in Japan, the society and culture as a whole evolved swiftly, reflecting the
rapid development of telecommunications transportation, science and technology innovation, social
urbanization phenomena, and so on. Even in Japanese art, new phases corresponding to international art
trends appeared one after another, and it was a time when there was a big change in the established art
concept itself. It can also be said that the trends and elements of this era have given decisive influence and
direction to the development of Japanese contemporary art after that. For example, High-Red-Center, a
contemporary art group consisting of three people Jiro Takamatsu, Junpei Akasegawa, and Natsuyuki
Nakanishi, was formed in 1963. However, some critics suggest other opinions. Noe Sawaragi points out
that the postwar art in Japan, it is difficult to summarize its history as history because the same problem is
constantly recurring. After the war, Japan's economic growth and peace have been incorporated into the
Cold War structure after the defeat of World War II, but it is derived from being isolated from the world
history. Contemporary art in Japan is based on an introverted, closed feeling9.
What is the contemporary? To answer this question, it is inappropriate to simply define it according to the
time classification. Agamben's theory is often useful, but it can not be applied to everything. In this paper,
it will continue to consider contemporary. Helpful hints at that time is a work of art which is
representations of the same era. In the next chapter, it will mainly focus on Mika Rottenberg's artworks and
discuss the expression of contemporary in the artwork. In her works, while referring to the body of a
modern woman, mention is made about the mechanisms of modern society, movement of times and places.
Referencing Rottenberg is useful for thinking about how "contemporary" is understood and visualized in
art practice.

Mika Rottenberg (1976-) was born in Buenos Aires, and she is based on New York, United States of
America. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2000 and a Master of
Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2004. She has participated in major international exhibitions
including the 2015 Venice Biennale and Documenta 14 in Athens 2017. Her artworks are known for her
multimedia installations presenting video works in site-specific sculptural environments. One of the
important features of her Artworks is the fact that the relationship between a woman's body and labors and
production is represented. A woman with a unique body often appears in her work. For instance, Mary’s
Cherries (Rottenberg, 2019), the amply endowed wrestler Rock Rose rides a stationary bike that is part of
a factory where women’s long red tips are harvested and turned into red cherries. The artist describes her
art as trying to capture the abstract experience of being alive and to transform it into a tangible object. Her
nails: they extended long, painted red manicure naturally departs from the function as "part of the human
body". They looks as if it were a piece of something ― one of the modern tools produced in the factory.
Barbara Pollack: the editor of Artnews analyses this work ‘Humorous and surreal, video is the an astute
observation of the mind-numbing tasks often performed by women employed in manufacturing consumer
goods or, more pointedly, in the service of other women in nail salons’ .10
Additionally, another her artwork Ponytail (2016) uses women’s long hair. Clearly, in the background of
this work, Man Ray's Emak Bakia (1926) is lying. It remade 1970, consists of an upright wooden part that
resembles the neck of a cello but which has had its strings replaced by horsehair. But Rottenberg replaced
horsehair to women’s long hair. Also, she replaced this artwork from an immovable instrument to an
actively moving installation. The long hair of a woman stretching from the wall, which, like a woman in
town, has its root tied with rubber, is constantly moved by a motorized device. Again, the female hair was
cut off from its original physical function. Women’s hair which is also a sexual enthrallment that fascinates
men appears before the viewer like an electric toy. In this way, Rottenberg's work always captures the

8
Bishop, Radical Museology, 17.
9
Carl Cassegard, ‘Japan’s Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neo-Pop and Anti-
War Activism’, Perversion and Modern Japan, 21 January 2010, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203880425-10.
10
The Editors of ARTnews, ‘Fingernails, Sweat, and Tears: Mika Rottenberg on Her Surreal Videos, in 2008’,
ARTnews (blog), 2 September 2016, http://www.artnews.com/2016/09/02/fingernails-sweat-and-tears-mika-
rottenberg-on-her-surreal-videos-in-2008/.
relationship between women and men, the relationship between body and production with
contemporaneous gaze.
Especially, this paper focuses on two her recent video works: NoNoseKnows (2015) and Cosmic
Generator (2017). Both of these works were announced at the International Art Festival (Venice Biennale
and Skulptur Projekte Münster). Because, in these two works, new perspectives of times and places are
supposed to be added in addition to existing themes.
In NoNoseKnows, it depicts two contrasting objects. In this artwork, the workers who perform the sorting
work of pearls in the factory in Asia, and the appearance of women who sneeze in with pollen in the office
and take out pasta from the nose appear alternately. It can be said that the view of the world is absurd and
eerie. In this work, the division and connection between the two regions of the same era are represented at
the same time. According to the interview, over a year ago she seems to have been interested in the pearl
farming industry China is catching the market in nowadays. 11 Rottenberg's point of view is directed
towards the mass production system in the Oriental society, and she reflects her interpretation in a surreal
way in this artwork. She also said in an interview:

―Production is a prominent theme in your work. What about the subject interests you?
I think of objects in terms of the processes behind them and the idea that humankind is captured in
everything around us. I want to make these processes more visual. If art has any power, it is in
making things visible.
―Female labour also comes up a lot.
It used to be hidden in the domestic sphere, and it’s still hidden in the mass production industry in
some parts of the world. I explored this in NoNoseKnows with pearl production. Because women’s
hands are smaller, they sort the pearls. Again, it is labour you don’t see. I’m interested in exposing
that, making it visible.
But I also love movement and the magic of making stuff as an artist. You could put a Marxist,
feminist read on it, which is something I’m definitely interested in, but I think of it on more of an
abstract or visual level without attaching an ideology to it. It is about many things… saying what it
is about kills nuance and flattens it. Like life, it’s sometimes this and sometimes that…12

In Cosmic Generator, Rottenberg looks at society in an area different from the previous work. This work
was an installation that shows images in a room of a shop set in a shop dealing with Chinese food that has
already closed in Munster. However, through this Chinese restaurant, the world inside the work will travel
between China factory and Mexico City. Mika also uses the motif of a female worker again, dealing with
the way of capitalism crossing the border, and the relationship of the completely different regions of the
East and South America. It is on the extension of the Venice Biennale in 2015, but it is consistent in
showing an orbital violence of production. She is speaking in an interview on this work as follows:

I was interested in, on one hand, how certain objects are allowed to circulate the world very freely,
and how, on the other hand, some other objects, or products, or people, are very restricted […] Art
is always political in a way, and not, at the same time. I think maybe it’s free from making clear
statements. I hope it’s more nuanced than a political statement.13

Reuse of the place that used to be, and female labor and connection to a strange body seem fantasy. It is
responsible for her video to use intense colors and extreme images. For example, men who appear in the
Cosmic Generator (they are like dumplings on a dish) give cheeks to the images. Also, women who
produce spaghetti appearing in NoNoseknows spit out intense looking food: it makes us think of some sort
of Jan Švankmajer. However, do not forget that there is a strong approach to modern society as
background of the work. Reuse of obsolete the Chinese shop, depiction of the relationship between two
regions of the same era: these mean the division and connection of the era and region in a dual sense. In

11
Randy Kennedy, ‘Venice Biennale Features Mika Rottenberg’s “NoNoseKnows”’, The New York Times, 21
December 2017, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/design/venice-biennale-features-mika-
rottenbergs-nonoseknows.html.
12
‘Mika Rottenberg: Capitalism as You’ve Never Seen It before’, accessed 18 January 2019,
http://theartnewspaper.com/interview/mika-rottenberg-capitalism-as-you-ve-never-seen-it-before.
13
Mika Rottenberg What Is the Connection, 2017, http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/mika-rottenberg-what-
connection.
Cosmic Generator, the Chinese restaurant of the abandoned shop is a symbol of the past era, it is also a
symbol of other areas. Surrealism that is repeated in it is an illusion and reality. The viewer sees the reality
of "real" that can occur in the space divided as "past". In this "reality" it is depicted in two areas that were
forgotten in Asian and South America, the former artistic theory.
According to one researcher, the political meaning of Rottenberg's work can be thought of in connection
with some contemporary thought.

To the extent that they participate voluntarily, the women in Rottenberg’s videos solicit the
viewer’s gaze and actively challenge traditional canons of femininity and beauty. Nevertheless, as
Michel Foucault has shown, social control need not be harsh to be effective, and power can function
by fostering and harnessing, rather than threatening, human life. If Rottenberg’s no-objectifying
practice of voyeurism has a stake in “the body in all its possibilities,” so does “biopower”—
Foucault’s term for the modern form of power grounded in the optimization and management of
human life.27 If immaterial labor and the commodification of nonnormative body image liberate
Rottenberg’s women from the brutalizing drudgery of industrial production, her videos also explore
a further, more nefarious, aspect of contemporary capitalism: its capacity for extracting value from
life itself.14

At the beginning of this essay, two stages of Agamben's "contemporary" were explained. It is an
encounter between division of time and diverse and heterogeneous era in art work. In Rottenberg 's work,
they are considered to be indeed practiced. She expressed the division of time by reusing the Chinese
restaurant which became a scrapped building to art: Cosmic Generator. In these works, this paper focused
on the contemporary behavior of mass production at the factory. The paper by Husan showed that the work
of Rottenberg could be related to Foucault 's theory. The ideological relationship between Agamben and
Foucault is not mentioned in detail here, but its relation is guaranteed by several papers.15 The theory of
Agamben mentioned at the beginning of this paper has inherited the theory of Foucault. Rottenberg's work
exists as a visualization of the update of Agamben's theory based on Foucault's theory, provided that the
relationships of these three people emerge in chronological order. Also, the expression of the various eras
that she practiced transcends that recalled by Agamben - from the perspective of gazing towards Asia and
South America. It can be pointed out that she captures "Contemporary" not only from Western society but
from contemporary perspectives through works involving Asia and the continent of South America.
In conclusion, three points were pointed out.
The first is analysis of the idea of Agamben. However, in Bishop's paper, the lack of Agamben's thought
was revealed by leading two stages while referring to his text. : It is a regional prejudice centered on the
west. Based on these stages, contemporary art work by Mika Rottenberg was examined. In her work,
reference to the division of the era was made in a clear form. Having responded to the attention to Asia and
the South American continent is an innovative point of her work. Rottenberg's work was shown to be
significant as an example of visualization of "contemporary" in art practice. On the other hand, similarly
important points for Rottenberg's works: Gender and body problems lie. In this essay, I could not mention
this in detail. But this is also one of the very important topics to discuss the concept of 'contemporary'.
From now on, it is desirable to study this issue more deeply.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays. Stanford University Press, 2009.
Bishop, Claire. Radical Museology: Or What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art?
London: Walther Konig, 2014.
Cassegard, Carl. ‘Japan’s Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neo-Pop and
Anti-War Activism’. Perversion and Modern Japan, 21 January 2010.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203880425-10.

14
Hsuan L. Hsu, ‘Mika Rottenberg’s Productive Bodies’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media
Studies 25, no. 2 (74) (1 September 2010): 54, https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2010-002.
15
Mika Ojakangas, ‘Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Pwer: Agamben and Foucault’, Foucault Studies 0, no. 2 (1
May 2005): 5–28, https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i2.856.
Hsu, Hsuan L. ‘Mika Rottenberg’s Productive Bodies’. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media
Studies 25, no. 2 (74) (1 September 2010): 41–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2010-002.
Kennedy, Randy. ‘Venice Biennale Features Mika Rottenberg’s “NoNoseKnows”’. The New York Times,
21 December 2017, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/design/venice-biennale-
features-mika-rottenbergs-nonoseknows.html.
Mika Rottenberg<br>What Is the Connection, 2017. http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/mika-rottenberg-
what-connection.
Ojakangas, Mika. ‘Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault’. Foucault Studies 0, no. 2
(1 May 2005): 5–28. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i2.856.
The Editors of ARTnews. ‘Fingernails, Sweat, and Tears: Mika Rottenberg on Her Surreal Videos, in
2008’. ARTnews (blog), 2 September 2016. http://www.artnews.com/2016/09/02/fingernails-
sweat-and-tears-mika-rottenberg-on-her-surreal-videos-in-2008/.
Zahm, Olivier, and Donatien Grau. Une avant-garde sans avant-garde. Dijon : Zurich: Les Presses du réel,
2017.

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