A professor of mine recently encouraged me to read a section from the e-flux journal double issue about the nature of contemporary art.

Some very interesting questions are raised, and answers are sought out (if not always directly found). The term itself, “contemporary”, is a slippery one. The introduction, written by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle raises some interesting (and some scathing) points.

“When there are no longer any artistic movements, it seems that we are all working under the auspices of this singular ‘-ism’ that is deliberately (and literally) not one at all.” For them, contemporary is “…a term we know well enough through its use as a de facto standard by museums, which denote their currency through an apparently modest temporal signifier.” The seeming meaninglessness of the term contemporary becomes evident. “With this shift,” they continue, “out go the grand narratives and ideals of modernism, replaced by a soft consensus on the immanence of the present, the empiricism of now.” The entirety of the introduction is not so bleak, however. They finish by saying that even though it is a meaningless signifier, its use in everyday art vocabulary means it must have some kind of significance.

There is also an article in this book, written by Cuauhtemoc Medina, that expounds eleven theses on the subject of “contemporary art.” Some noteworthy points include the idea that the contemporary exists to mark the end of the modernist movement. The term itself, contemporary, is an absolutely oxymoronic term that signifies a point in time, when time continues to move. “The hunger to be part of the global art calendar has more to do with the hope of keeping up with the frenzy of time than with any actual aesthetic pursuit or interest.” The arts are no longer separate disciplines, but rather “a single multifarious and nomadic kind of practice that forbids any attempt at specification.” And, finally, that the goal of contemporary art is to protect cultural critique and social radicalism from the “banality of the present.”

I recently took a trip down to Long Island City to see the infamous 5Pointz graffiti haven. I was lucky enough, while I was there, to meet the man behind the location: Meres One. It was a morning well-spent, and I have a lot of great photos to show for it.

It’s just a reminder that art doesn’t need much in order to flourish. A blank wall, a backpack full of spray-paint. Some of these mural pieces were more impactful and colorful than anything you could see in a museum. I think that there is a very good reason for that, also. Sure, graffiti comes from a tradition of being egotistical and having attitude; but the art-form itself comes from very humble beginnings. You don’t need an MFA to make art. Hell, you don’t even need to graduate High School.

Check out the whole album here.

I’m not exactly sure what Matteo Pugliese had in mind when sculpting these figures, but I know how they they make me feel. Pugliese calls these his Extra Moenia, which I believe is Italian for ‘outside the walls’. There are no complete figures here, the forms emerge from the wall as if breaking free from what’s holding them back.

Pugliese is not a classically trained sculptor, although you wouldn’t know it from looking at his work. He has a remarkable grasp on the human form. The surfaces themselves are scratched and pockmarked with scars and defects, tributes to the imperfections of man and the fallibility of the human experience.

As I said earlier, I do not know if my explanation of the purpose of these pieces coincides with Pugliese’s, but I do not think it matters. Such is the beauty of art-making and art-appreciation, there is rarely a correct (or incorrect) answer. These sculptures speak of escape, of breaking away from, of deliverance and liberation.

Barlow uses oils to explore the behavior of light on different surfaces. Abstracted and blurred, in an out-of-focus kind of way, his work is far more about light than it is about form.

Which poses an interesting question? What is painting, if not the exploration of different kinds of light rendered on different kinds of surface. What is sight, if not light reacting with the color cones in our eyes? Is it the moment our cones react with incoming light, or is it when the signals reach our brain, that we truly see?

Philip lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where he used to be known for his large public murals. These, however, feel more like Impressionism than anything else. We get hints, not facts. Everything else is left up to us to figure out. What is going on in the scenes? What’s the stories behind the subjects? What are they in the process of doing?