This text is a transcription of a lecture Bourriaud gave during his visit in Israel in December 2012. The lecture was organized by the MFA program of Bezalel Academy of Arts.
I will try today to address the question of time in contemporary art, how our vision of time evolves – due to technological, economic and social reasons. This evolution is actually affecting the way we see art and the way art is produced.
I want to start with a gesture which is quite rare in the field of art in the 20thcentury, but is used by some artists that I’m interested in, which is the act of digging. Digging has never been a modernist gesture, because it’s a practice directed towards the past – you’re digging to find something from the past, excavation is the archeological gesture par excellence – and it doesn’t really belong to the story of the avant-garde and the modernist art of the 20thcentury.