The paintings of Juan Ford
How is it possible for an artist to be contemporary? Since being ‘contemporary’ has a necessary temporal reference—nothing can be absolutely new—artists must tweak or transfigure variables in such a way as to introduce a little element of novelty into what already exists. So artists tamper with materials, techniques, forms, contents, media, institutions—rendering even these distinctions unstable in the process—in an open, ceaselessly mutating field of cut-throat aesthetic competition. Add to that the present exhaustion of the avant-garde, the proliferation of arts, the infinite variety of objects and images, the dispersion of markets—being a contemporary artist is an impossible task.
Impossibility, in other words, is at the centre of the contemporary art world or at least that division of the art world that aims at being contemporary. More paradoxically still, achieving the impossible is perhaps more difficult depending on the medium—one imagines that impossibility is differently distributed in different arts. Impossibility in painting, for instance, is not the same impossibility as that demanded by installation or new media art. And any success with impossibility ties an artist to an old contemporaneity: having once been recognised this very success means that artists are forced to repeat it. One is new, yet perhaps not even for an instant; to continue in the same vein is to be caught by one’s own past, to no longer be contemporary. But to change what once worked is to abandon oneself. Having achieved the impossible, contemporary artists are required to do it, impossibly, again.
It is no wonder, then, that contemporary art so often thematises impossibility. Juan Ford’s work is a case in point. In shows such as ‘AΩ’, ‘Clone’, and ‘Night and Day’ (the first... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline