Post-Historical Art

Institutional theory is an intriguing notion, but what interests me about it is the way it validates relational or littoral art, practices which are rooted in a certain 'presentness' and 'conviviality', as well as community and self awareness.

Arthur Danto suggests that Hegel's 1820 's claim that the history of art had ended was pre-emptive, that it had in fact ended with Warhol's Brillo Boxes. With the Brillo Boxes came a certain self-awareness, an explicit articulation of the art's essence as something which both "(is) about something, and embody(ies) its meaning".(Arthur Danto, 1995) "Once the nature of art had been discovered, the history of art had ended. Henceforth we live in a post-historical ear."(David Carrier, 2007)

So it follows that having discovered its true nature, and the dependancy of that nature on institutional(i use this word cautiously) constructs and situations, that the attention of art would turn towards these relationships and making them 'discernible'. An act which is at times indiscernible in its own right, unless considered through a new syntax of post-historical art. This new (once again, a term deployed cautiously) art does not speak to utopian, imagined or transcendent spaces, rather it looks to the Here and Now, a world of hybridity and multiplicity (although often to the detriment of genuine diversity), oscillating between the represented and the representations, presence and alienation, clarity and sublimity, here and there.