The In-Between

A basic understanding of what constitutes advanced art is a repositioning of limits. ‘Pushing the boundaries’ is the exhausted expression. From static to performative, tactile to immaterial, sole artist to collaborative anonymous, something there to everywhere and nowhere, contemporary art is not really “art” anymore. I’m picturing my flatmate after one of my art-ramblings, who responds, with her ‘intellectual’ face on, with that cliché (but what she probably thinks is still a challenging and loaded) question: “but is it really art?…” Sometimes I initiate a debate with her, but more often than not, I just shrug, because I never really know the answer.

But through this course I now realise that the idea itself is exhausted. The question fails because it demands a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, and assumes that anything else is unsubstantial. Yet what artists’ are playing with now more than anything else is precisely what this question evades: the ‘in-between’.

Theorizing on site-specificity, James Meyer introduces the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Guattari to demonstrate this new authority of the ‘in-between.’ They propose: “Every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is only between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.”

However, no matter how absurdly ‘in-between’, interruptive, controversial or activist a work may be, it will eventually be absorbed by the art world, and increasingly by the world outside the art world too. As Miwon Kwon describes, “vanguardist, socially conscious and politically committed art practices always become domesticated by their assimilation into the dominant culture.” I find her word choice of ‘domesticated’ particularly compelling as it alludes to the traditional cushioning of art in the neat, wholesome gallery space: where this whole topic began.