Beyond Specificity
by Katherine Carl

(this essay first appeared in the catalog for Now:Here:This, 2004)

What do you want to tell the world? Right now, here’s your chance. Artist, designer, curator and communicator Peter Ferko establishes a platform for this expression, making a virtual speaker’s corner of sorts that highlights and sets aside precious space and time for artists to contribute in an online public forum and connect to a worldwide audience. Utilizing the medium of the internet, the artists form a community determined not by locale but by shared expression. Now:Here:This is a title of ultimate specificity, but the undertaking engages and surpasses the limits of these terms.

Now:
As philosopher Henri Bergson has famously waxed, memory is central to the makeup of our identity because it provides continuity. Without this link to our past we would have no way to experience our present moment. Each individual present moment is emptied the instant it is created because it is always already part of the past by the time we are conscious of it. Actualization of our identity for the future is forged through the continuity created by the piling up of the past—which is collapsed with and therefore, crucially, becomes the present and future—rather than waiting in the hope of some idealized unrealized potential. The artists contributing to Now:Here:This palpably delve into their response to the present moment each Friday at 11 am, and as they form representations they point out the sometimes impossible task of instantaneous response and the need to have time and space in which to step back and look from a distance.

Here:
Although Bergson asserts that continuity is primary to our being, the artworld always wants to hear something new. The avant-garde is before, ahead of the guard. They are trailblazers and are sometimes sacrificed by mainstream culture. New biennials pop up in unexpected places and are quickly, probably happily, absorbed by the culture machine. New York City is certainly no longer the center (even in the imagination) of the artworld, though it is a hub and alternately a launching pad for activity in many places. As much as people engaged in art find it vital pass through this city, New Yorkers are traveling elsewhere more than ever to stay informed. As architectural theorist Brian Massumi has stressed, boundaries are instantiated by the process of passage and so boundaries are more malleable than we are led to think. In Now:Here:This Washington Heights is not the new site of cultural tourism, but it is a generator and distributor of creative activity from a wider world community. The work in Now:Here:This is predominantly expression from the artists’ personal interior, which is directly individual and interpretive. The individual psyche and body is the primary “here” that we have.

This:
But even that “here” changes at every second. Specificity does not result in stasis. Instead the generative drive of individual expression persists as naturally as the continuity of the single breath to every next one that follows. Individual investment on the part of the artist and viewer is at the fore of Now:Here:This in a medium that promises ultimate public access and engagement. This meeting of individual expression and diverse community creates a new specificity. Each of the artworks have their own mobility beyond the limitations of space and time and this particular project. Online, each artwork leaves digital traces that connect through the network and communicate with viewers and other bits of information. This may become a new project with its own specific wholeness to be uncovered sometime in the future.

Katherine Carl is a curator at The Drawing Center. Her independent projects include Flipside ArtsLink at Artists Space, the School of Missing Studies, and her dissertation on art of the 60’s and 70’s in Southeast Europe.