School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Empire

GREEN, CHARLES (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002)

Meridian’s importance lies not in the affirmation of the vitality of artists’ careers, nor in the demolition of the ‘next wave’ syndrome, nor even in the revelation of cross-generational continuity through a major exhibition of senior artists in a museum program usually dedicated to the new. Rather, it consists of the opportunity to test absence: that of emerging, not established, contemporary artists. If the present moment (the one represented by emerging artists) is on this occasion not on the museum’s walls, then it stalks the exhibition as its always-present doppelganger, like a transparent overlay. What do I mean? As I’ve noted before, the drive to rethink art is not the property of any one period, even one as productively unstable as the present. As we look at older artists’ work, we are able to see if younger artists are bound by genetic coding to return to conservative certainties, or if the productivist revolution of the early 1970s was a trajectory and a true sea change.