kagablog

Third Text has come to its 100th issue. This marks our 22 years of publishing history since Third Text’s foundation in 1987. It also amounts to a considerable body of work achieved by the scholarly efforts of our collaborators on an international scale. Third Text has been fortunate in eliciting and encouraging all these responses across the world whose critical reflections might otherwise have been neglected or altogether excluded. Third Text’s brief remains, as it always has, to provide an international platform for those artistic and critical practices, and in general for the production of knowledge beyond Eurocentric confines, that are constantly at risk of being marginalised. An archive of impressive benefit to anyone interested in the narratives of modern art history and visual culture has accumulated over this long and consistent process.

The point of this ‘special centenary’ issue is not to rest on self-congratulation. On the contrary, and mindful of this new century’s global troubles, it is incumbent on Third Text to take critical stock of itself, to review its shortcomings, and even, why not, to consider its failure. There can be no success in advancing a critical examination of the world if one is not prepared to confront failure.

Two questions need urgently to be addressed. What good is criticism? What knowledge does art have? These are the questions in simple words, but not simple in fact, posed to self-examination in this special issue for the 21st century. How best to approach them? These questions must be asked with even greater rigour than before, now as we face a legacy of failures in modern history that endangers the future prospects of humanity. Aspirations and hopes at the dawn of the 20th century were dashed by the slaughter of the First ‘Great’ War. Bourgeois ideology was revealed bankrupt and art had no choice but to turn to anti-art in a bid to liberate itself from the emptiness of bourgeois aesthetics and integrate with everyday life. But did it succeed? Is there not a failure of the avant-garde due to a persistent delusion that art can still reflect the world and change it merely by the self-centred enterprise of exceptional individuals? Has art now not become part of the bankruptcy it sought to confront by adopting complicit sensationalism and mass media celebrity tactics in its efforts to thrive on the global market? Its failure of vision is the dark lens in which we see trapped the aspirations of working people, the formerly colonised and feminist ideals, now debased and become no more than the desire to take part in the very system that they once struggled against.

This failure is not an absolute closure. The merits and deficits of the historical avant-garde are in need of reconsideration if we are to understand the present and plan for a better future. Art must again take its place, as it once hoped to do, in and not against the interests of the collective. The avant-garde’s radical ideas failed, inasmuch as these were contained within aesthetic individualism and legitimated within mainstream institutions, and inasmuch as they were appropriated and their true significance aborted by turning them into institutionally manageable objects frozen in their temporalities. But the ideas themselves are still there to be recuperated from their institutional closures. Ideas in the course of productions of knowledge can never be frozen or trapped, either as the absolute property of any individual or any institution. They can always be salvaged and given impetus in keeping with the dynamic of new times and spaces. They can indeed be made to perform a radically transformative function in dealing with the problems of humanity today in the 21st century.

In order to perform this function, the very concept of art will have to liberate itself from the two historical limits of containment and legitimation. One is the containment in the artist’s own narcissist ego; the other is institutional legitimation which facilitates and promotes art only as reified commodities placed in its museum showcases.

This special centenary issue of Third Text invites its contributors to offer their views on the knowledge there is in art, beyond its prevailing containment, and to consider the interrelated function of criticism, in the widest remit of critical theory and history, and thereby deliver that knowledge from the bonds of institutional legitimation so that humanity can move forward.

contact richard dyer, thirdtext@btconnect.com