CRS (The Key); The Game (1997/2015), GCGCA(i)

The Game

'Presentness is grace'

Filoli, California

23 Sep - 21 Dec 2015

‘Our’ time, ‘our’ epoch, ‘our’ present - are so many equivalent expressions for the idea of modernity.

The modern designates the valorisation of the present 'as new' over the past, splitting the present itself from within and 'antiquating' aspects of the present that are not new. It is a self-transcending temporal structure. The affirmation of the new as such, in its transitoriness, across the totality of its manifestations, reveals the new to have become 'ever-same’. The new represses duration, by repressing the very temporality it affirms, and instituting a temporal structure of differentiated repetition. ‘The new’ becomes the permanent demand of an absolute, self-transcending present. The new becomes ever-same.

One lives time. One is not 'in' time. Time is not a container for our lives that we live through. ‘Time’ is a misleading short-hand. What matters are temporal structures. Different ways of relating past, present and future. Time is produced, coterminously with our subjectivity, as an active production of unity through differential relations.

The present cannot be some kind of object of experience, since it only exists experientially as the fractured togetherness of two other two temporal modes (past and future). Our experience of our present is always a relation between our past and our future (in our future-directedness). All social practises produce their own temporalizations - their own way of figuring the relation between past, present and future.

The concept of the contemporary renders present the absent time of a unity of present times. It refers to a bringing together of times within the present of a particular subject - and hence a unity of times, or a 'making' contemporary, as an ongoing process of temporal production and construction, through which time is lived by those participating in this conjunction, as an actively self-differentiating set of relations of unification.

Modernity involves the construction of 'the subject', as such, as the action of the contradictory temporal structure of 'the new’. The question of the contemporary in 'contemporary art' is the question of the definition of the qualitative novelty of this historical present - the question of the new, and its constant reforming, reframing and reconfiguration of the political meaning and possibilities of social subjects.

CRS (Consumer Recreations Services) is a practise or active construction of ‘the contemporary’ in the service of ‘individuals’, since it spatializes novelty, making co-presence the condition of the conjunction of the times that it holds together, at each moment, in the service of the desire of the consumer (for recreation).

Arriving at the Airport (The Key); The Game (1997/2015), GCGCA(i)