I was really surprised when I finished reading Radical Museology because it was not what I expected at all. Sometimes, I found myself immensely interested in what Claire Bishop was saying and aggressively taking notes and nodding my head in agreement. Then, I would struggle to find her point in the very next sentence, to sift through the intense words and come up with a meaning. In the end, while I walked away from the book with a lot of understanding of contemporary art, I can’t help but feel that I missed out on a lot of what she was trying to say as well. And, as I write this essay, trying to define “contemporary” by using her book, I will miss the mark.

Do not get me wrong, I want to use Bishop’s book, because despite the fact that it is complicated and wordy and elitist at points, I found it extremely interesting. So, here I go. I will attempt to make sense of Bishop’s words and Dan Perjovschi’s drawings and I will attempt to do something that seems almost impossible; I will define contemporary.

A contemporary piece of art does not mean that the work was created in the past year or decade or any time recent. Contemporary does not refer to the style or the work, or when they were made, but the approach that the artist took in creating the art. While there are many approaches an artist can take, the contemporary artist comes from behind, from the past. Contemporary art is an approach to the past. As art historian Christine Ross stated, “contemporary artists look backwards in order to ‘presentify’ the modernist regime of historicity”(Bishop) On the other hand, Dieter Roelstraete believed “contemporary art’s turn towards history-telling and historicizing for its ‘inability to grasp or even look as the present’”(Bishop).

This can be seen in the two of the examples Bishop uses in the book. The Van Abbemuseum “places continual emphasis on the legacy of communism and the possibilities for its reactivation; the social value of retelling histories that lead to other imagined futures, by revisiting marginal or repressed histories in order to open up new vistas” (Bishop). This makes the museum a “partisan historical narrator.” The work in the museum looks at the past in a new way to discuss the future.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía has a similar goal. They work to expand “historical contextualization,” but to be more global in doing so, looking at multiple demographics to expand the view of history. This allows the museum to except multiple modernities, and in doing so, reject the avant-garde and its derivatives as those “prioritize the European center”(Bishop). Instead, the museum embraces an archive of the commons, promoting the fact that “culture is not a question of national property, but a universal resource” that everyone should be able to enjoy and connect to (Bishop).

What makes it contemporary is that it interacts with the past and builds upon it. In doing so, the experience results in a collection as Walter Benjamin puts it; the experience of “bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and properties”(Bishop). The deconstruction of tradition to see history differently. To do this, the museum must keep “history mobile in order to allow its objects to become historical agents once again”(Bishop). To create the contemporary.

 

So, contemporary art must interact with the past in someway, but like all art, the rules are loose. What is the past? Five minutes ago? Yesterday? Last century? It is up for the artist and the viewer to decide.