Contemporary art appeared as a spontaneous term of Roger Fry in 1906. Using “contemporary,” he manually labelled crates with the most recent French paintings in his storage. Contemporary was a substitute of NOT CATEGORISED YET, waiting for isms. Contemporary mechanically reappeared at the end of isms after 1989 as an expression of NOT CATEGORISED ANYMORE / THE SECOND CONTEMPORARY. Not categorised YET and not categorized ANYMORE are opposite demands. Since then, artworks have been without substantial categories on a provisional and improvisational AD HOC basis. Our fields are ADHOCISTIC. THE SECOND CONTEMPORARY means levigation (or even cataclysm) of “we”.
Following Gramsci’s “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”, today “crisi” and thus “fenomeni morbosi” don't work at all anymore. There is no “interregnum” because even if we know where we are coming from, we do not know where we go to. The way is the goal - half-line. New cannot be born - THE SECOND CONTEMPORARY welcomes it and negates any classification. If the crisis is major (and unchangeable), then it is “normal”. We have already learned to live in it productively.
From THE SECOND CONTEMPORARY perspective, identity, or better identific[ ]tion (following Metzinger’s “being no one”), can be seen not as in crisis but as in the most (even anti-manifestative, ADHOCISTIC) hedonistic expansion.
Boris Ondreička (*1969) is a freelance curator and occasional artist based in Bratislava, SK, and Vienna, AT. He is the former artistic director viennacontemporary (Vienna, AT), director of tranzit_sk (Bratislava, SK), co-curator of Class of Interpretation (Prague, CZ), and curator at TBA21 (Vienna, AT). Amongst many he co/curated Rare Earth, Olafur Eliasson „Green light—An Artistic Workshop“, Ephemeropteræ, Supper Club (all at TBA21), Manifesta 8 (Murcia, Cartagena, ES), The Question of Will, OSF (Bratislava), Empire of the Senseless, Meetfactory (Prague); Being The Future, Palast der Republik (Berlin)... His artistic projects were part of Bergen Assembly 2019, Manifesta 2, Venice- (Roma and Czecho-slovak pavilions), Tai-Pei-, Athens-, Kyiv-, Jakarta- biennales; MoMA PS1 and New Museum (NYC), BAK (Utrecht), W139 (Amsterdam), Smak (Gent), Tramway (Glasgow), Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo (Turin), Le Plateau, Air de Paris (Paris), Badischer Kunstverein (Karslruhe), Würtembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), HMKV (Dortmund); Kiasma (Helsinki); HKW (Berlin); Steirische Herbst (Graz); Secession, Mumok, Kunsthalle, Belvedere (Vienna)... Amongst many, his texts were published in Sogni / Dreams (Castelvecchi, 2003, Francesco Bonami and Hans Ulrich Obrist eds); Now What? Artists Write! (Revolver, 2004, Mark Kremer, Maria Hlavajova, and Annie Fletcher eds.); One Second | Out of Time (Revolver, 2004); The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist (e-flux and Revolver, 2004, Jens Hoffmann eds.); Hi! Lo. (JRP Ringier, 2011); Lecture Performance (Revolver, 2009); Studio Olafur Eliasson: Open House, TYT (Take Your Time) (Walther König, 2017); Spevník / Songbook (Brak, 2018). He lectured at CalArts (Los Angeles), Royal College of Arts (London), DAI (Enschede and Arnhem), ACAF (Alexandria), CUNY Brooklyn College and New Center for Reasearch & Practice (both NYC), HKW (Berlin), De Appel (Amsterdam), and at academies in Bratislava, Brno, Prague, Vienna, Linz, Budapest, amongst others.
