In Southwest Contemporary Vol. 10: Radical Futures, curator and conceptual artist Ian Breidenbach ruminates on creative agency and utopian praxis as the guest juror of this issue.
“Perhaps the humility of failure is the only ground for being in opposition since success depends on a very complex knowledge of and ability to manipulate determinative politics, discourses, and institutions…”
— Paul Bové, “The Foucault Phenomenon”1
I lived with the artist submissions for this issue for weeks—to the point that I came to recognize the inherent paradox of jurying “a selection” for an issue themed Radical Futures. As a curator, I started to feel like an art world cop, upholding some systemic law I had no hand in ratifying. It seemed disingenuous to promote a few voices over all voices when the most radical—and perfect—future that I, as an artist, could imagine was the possibility of all these works communing together within the unending productive potentiality of the submission site. (“Agggghhhh, The Master’s Tools! The Master’s Tools!”2)
Southwest Contemporary’s database of submissions was something between a Pandora’s box of dystopian nightmares and Schrödinger’s unverifiable utopia: “…the future becomes something to be prevented as much as achieved.”3
As a utopian, action is terrifying. There is only one totalizing perfection, and it is surrounded by a nearly infinite number of imperfect dystopian missteps. Look around, you live in the ideological ruins of Western modernity’s greatest attempt! A utopia of the one way!
It was only when I started thinking like the skeptical post-post-modern multi-hyphenate that I am that I realized potentiality must become probability if a project is to ever see the light of day; for theory to become praxis, eventually, the box has to open, and you have to do something with what’s inside. Utopia can only become by going through dystopia. It’s not one—it’s both, entangled and inseparable.
The works in this issue highlight a playful reclamation of creative agency, defensively centering systems of assemblage for the rearranging or recycling of contemporary forms, modes, and contents of capitalistic culture into the prima materia of its own demise. Woodcut prints, colored pencil drawings, and scissors-and-glue collage (a child’s methods) alongside extruded aluminum gutters, Ikea plants raised on LEDs from China, and surveillance video (an adult’s materials) are exhumed from the midden heap of “progress” and combined to produce works that hold us accountable to a past (while also acknowledging it as a still-vital contributor), and make us responsible for an imagined future—but one full of affirmed contradictions. More than anything, these works offer an accidental view of the radical present populated by an expertise of play, a success in failure, assemblage as unity, science as ritual, fiction as monumental fact, and fact as a foundational fiction, proving that art is and always has been the revolutionary misuse of the Master’s Tools in the pursuit, by sheer force of the artists’ will, to bring into existence that which if it wanted to… would already exist.
The ten artists featured in Radical Futures are:
Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado
