Art practices today are subject to time primarily in the form of a demand for contemporaneity.
There is, I believe, something exemplary about The Atlas Group’s works combination of contemporaneity and fiction with regard to the construction of a critical category of contemporary art. The Atlas Group Project is exemplary as an artistic construction and expression – a construction and thereby an expression – of the fiction of the contemporary itself. More particularly, it will be argued, the art of The Atlas Group is most productively understood as a construction/expression of the fiction of the contemporary in the specific form of the speculative collectivity of the globally transnational.
This claim has five main conceptual components:
1. the contemporary as idea, problem and fiction
2. the globally transnational character of the contemporary today
3. art as construction/expression of the contemporary
4. the fictionalization of artistic authority
5. the collectivization of artistic fictions.
What follows outlines these theoretical coordinates before returning to The Atlas Group project. As such, it aspires to something like the status of a case study in critical canon formation in contemporary art.
(excerpt from "The Fiction of Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and the Global Transnational", Peter Osborne, 2010)
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000), Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002), Marx (Granta, 2005) and (ed.) Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (3 Volumes, Routledge, 2005). His writing on contemporary art includes contributions to Afterall, Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal, and catalogues for Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian, 2004), Time Zones (Tate Modern, 2004), Zones of Contact (2006 Biennale of Sydney), The Quick and the Dead (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2009) and Matias Faldbakken: The Shock of Abstraction (National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo/Ikon, Birmingham 2009). A Spanish edition of his recent essays, El arte más allá de la estética: Ensayos filosóficos sobre el arte contemporáneo, is forthcoming from CENDEAC, Murcia, January 2010.
