I have been thinking a lot about the concept of a “dialectical contemporary” since reading Radical Museology by Claire Bishop. After following her on a flighty journey through three “contemporary” museums and discussing the benefits and drawbacks of their methods, I found myself drawn to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Solid. Lion-adorned. Established 1879.

As problematic as the place may be, I wanted to return to this ground rich with art historical roots. But because I took some time to enjoy the beautiful weather with my roommates in Millennium Park ahead of time, I ended up entering the museum through the Modern Wing. I was confronted not with the dim, stately environment I was guiltily craving, but rather with bright skylight courtesy of Renzo Piano. Further, the first exhibition I happened upon was In all my wildest dreams by Kemang Wa Lehulere, born 1984.

I had to laugh.

This artist’s mission is dialectical contemporaneity to a T. Wa Lehulere is a Cape Town artist who, in the words of the exhibition pamphlet, “reimagines what he calls ‘deleted scenes’ from South African history.” His goal is to put in conversation delicate individual memories and the “too-solid” historical conventions that society constructs. His work “insists on the production and apprehension of history and memory as always necessarily in process, in the present, and thus ongoing, into the future.” Based on this didactic information, nothing could sound more like temporalities in dialogue.

But what did it look like? I had to take the art objects into account, as well as the exhibition design. Even if the art itself successfully produced inter-temporal dialogue, much of Bishop’s point lay in the presentation of works in the museums. And the presentation of this work did not feel groundbreaking. In fact, it felt very much out of the past. The works were labeled on the walls only with basic information: artist, title, date, and medium. Additional didactics could be picked up in brochure form by the door, but one could easily ignore them. This would not have bothered me as much if the labels on the walls seemed to achieve their basic purpose. For example, there were two artworks side by side labeled Spatial Poem Reply 1 and Spatial Poem Reply 2, and they looked like this:

The labels looked like this:

The labels list only “instant color photographs” as the medium, but I would be willing to bet that the artist laid out the photos and designed the gaps with the mounting putty. The exploration of these gaps parallels Wa Lehulere’s exploration of other omissions from the historical record. That makes the frame and putty part of the artwork, but the Art Institute appears to have passed up the opportunity to question museum standards. They continue to ignore the frame.

As much as I wanted to escape the esoteric notion of the contemporary posed by Bishop, this exhibition, oddly, made me agree with her more. I wasn’t satisfied with the artist’s living status or the recently made works. The display and interaction did not feel aligned with a dialectical contemporary.

The Moholy-Nagy exhibition, Future Present, felt counterintuitively more contemporary by this definition. In the final gallery of this exhibition, the display attempts to connect the viewer’s temporality to Moholy’s by using the artist’s own design. Moholy “lived intensely in the present,” and so the viewer is supposed to be transported to his moment due to the setting of his artwork he would have devised.

It’s a clever trick, but ultimately it lacks something just as the Wa Lehulere exhibition does. Both exhibitions are mired in the past in terms of exhibition design; one method (Moholy-Nagy’s) was just novel more recently. But Future Present additionally feels the lack of a living artist, which I still think means something in terms of contemporaneity.

So, that was just a few of my reflections on the dialectical contemporary in the most surprising (read: ancient) of places. I think I will increasingly be looking at exhibitions and broader culture in terms of intersecting temporalities moving forward. It’s a fascinating way of connecting to otherwise inaccessible art, and now this form of contemporary is appearing to me everywhere, though it’s still a very tall order to do it right by Bishop.

Featured Image: Future Present didactic wall at the Art Institute.