Other spaces in the visual arts

Abstract

The article initially characterizes the concept of temporality that prevailed in the imaginary of the artistic avant-gardes of the years 1910 to the years 1930: the idea of a linear time, successive, cumulative, homogeneous and "empty", because to be conquered. It was this conception of prospective time, teleological, in which the télos is the Utopia, which guided the constructive vanguards until the Second World War. After the Holocaust (or the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the ideas of progress, or improvement, proper to this prospective conception of time, collapsed. The future is no longer considered the realm of hope, of the projection of desire, to become dark or threatening. Since then, the notion of dystopia, or negative utopia, has prevailed in the artistic-cultural imaginary, understood as the figuration of an oppressive society projected in the near or distant future, applies to the artistic-cultural imaginary, which will be reached if the course of history is not changed. This is what we see in the visual works of the German Harun Farocki, the Chinese Ai Weiwei and the Spanish Antoni Muntadas, carried out over the last three decades, in which dystopia is presented as a control society. Finally, we believe that several art critics have been mobilizing since the 1990s the notion of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia to characterize the power of negativity of certain contemporary art. We recall that heterotopias are, for the author, "contrapositions in real places", "effective places"; that is, "places" that  is, "places" that, in apparent paradox, "are out of all places, although they are effectively localizable", as would occur, in our view, in artistic installations of Rirkrit Tiravanija (or, more remotely, Lygia Clark, and Helio Oiticica).

Keywords: contemporary art; utopia; dystopia; heterotopia; resistance.