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Echoes: Contemporary Art at the Age of Endless Conclusions

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Consider the words of Italian writer Umberto Eco, the contemporary of New York based curator, Francesco Bonami:

"I think of the post-modern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution.

He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, 'I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.

These are the same post-modern paradoxes which the globe-trotting Bonami attempts to reconcile in a fascinating parody of - as it were - Flash Art. Like Foucault ("Do you know why one writes?... To be loved.") Bonami illustrates the subtle otherness of creation, through collaborations with an international band of artists - and curators - to ask the same question as Foucault: What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? (Foucault 1982a p.216)

All in all an extraordinary house of cards, the author balances like Harry Lime on the Ferris wheel in Carol Reed's much loved peaen to the free market, The Third Man.

Bonami/The Third Man explore the very biggest questions of modern art and culture, paralleling the restless rhythmical nature of the author with the endless conclusions and closures of conceptual art. As Foucault said: "How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order?"

Exaclty.

Most of this book is a bunch of bologna, art-world hubaloo that means nothing to anyone but the people who wrote it. However, the book does have great illustrations.

Also the essay by Seward is pretty good. What he writes about Martin Heidegger is ignorant (obviously he hasn't read Being & Time), but the section titled "Analytic of the Shocking" is a must-read. The essay has a good title, too: "Atomic Bicycle." Apparently Seward is the only author in the book with a sense of humor.

Overall, I would counsel not to buy the book, but to get a copy from the library, xerox two pages of Seward's essay, and maybe scan your favorite pictures to keep on your hard drive. (Like those by that Lamsweerde woman.)

In Echoes, the New York based, but firmly European - Bonami is nothing less than a Romantic Italian pluralist - critic argues convincingly for the end of art.

Bonami does not seek its true closure, of course. He looks instead to reveal what lies beneath "art". While he is a critic and curator, Bonami makes his money and travels the world through buying for rich collectors; so too in the grander scheme, just as art finds its truest manifestation these days in publically funded festivals or Bienales it is still the collectors' money that talks in the end.

Bonami is clearly uncomfortable with the paradoxes of his chosen career. He has written previously in the magazine, Flash Art, that there is something rotten, dead, about institutional art, yet he himself works within this space (his next project, which he has researched extensively, is a study of sexuality and travel that will show at the Walker in the year 2000.

Bonami's is a simple thesis: in a sense he - and art - wants it all. There is not pleasure in discovering a new artist in Soweto, if it is not balanced by deluxe hotels in Venice or Berlin; there is not pleasure in familial life if there is not excitements outside it. There is not pleasure in the profundity of art, in the end, unless there is an Other, a Shock of the Superficial.

In many senses, Echoes is the project and product of middle-aged exile; like a character in Nabokov, Bonami spreads his waning European potency ever more thinly when confronted with the virility of the global art market - its cheque-books and hotel bills; its cool rhetoric and lofty ideals. This is manifest in Echoes where he allows many artists to put their point, creating a melange of ideas, rather than attempting anything close to an Idea. There is no such idea as an Idea, he seems to say, only pleasure.

Bonami's vision of the art world perhaps reflects a reflexive self-questioning, and doubt. A questioning that we should all undertake at least once in our lives. But no more than once.