Digicult Essays - What Now? Future Practices / Contemporary Modes of Making

What Now?
Future Practices / Contemporary Modes of Making

by Rosa Nussbaum

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I went to IKEA about a week ago. It was getting dark and I was on foot. Those tall brick chimneys with their illuminated yellow and blue plastic halos, that mark the car park at the Swedish superstore’s Croydon branch, shone like strange sentinels over the local congregation of skateboarding juveniles. I stepped in through the doors and on into the light and the smell of pine and food and new things.

I’ve been wondering in the aisles of the storeroom section for a while, when I realise that I am not looking at the fifty dishcloths called VÅRLIGT as household items. I am reading them as art and wondering why the curators left them so little white space to breathe in (they were a little cramped next to TEKLA).

Postmodernism deals with structural critique, with subversion and appropriation. Structures are to be mistrusted, we embrace a plurality of narratives. The entirety of (art) history is there to be referenced and disassembled. Everything is valid. From every perspective. Everything is equal ­ flattened in order to prevent discrimination. All art points beyond itself in wildly eclectic spatters of meaning. The hierarchy between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture ­ between all experience in fact ­ has been collapsed. Thus my mind no longer has the capacity to elevate my experience in an art gallery over that of IKEA. They read the same. That is not a bad thing. (How could it be?) It is, however, a thing.

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