Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?

"This little book is my bible: a philosophical text about what it means to be contemporary. Of course, if one works in the field of contemporary art this is unbelievably interesting. It is term which one uses every day, a word with which one is confronted every day. Agamben is one of the key philosophers of our time, and it is interesting the way that philosophy has migrated into art criticism as well as into many other fields. Agamben’s book is really about his idea that when we are contemporary it is not so much to do with being in sync with our time. Maybe instead it is that we have a certain distance, there is a certain shift or dislocation there. Agamben tells us that to be contemporary means to come back to a present where we have never been – to resist the homogenisation of time, to go through ruptures and discontinuities. Agamben in this little book argues that the one who belongs to his or her own time is the one who does not coincide psychologically with it. It’s somehow because when we are not completely in sync with the time then maybe we are more apt to perceive, to actually catch or capture our own time. He follows this up by saying that the contemporary is the one who is not blinded by the lights of his own time or century. And that is a great danger. The internet has brought us, our thinking, more into the present tense and so that raises more questions about what it means to be contemporary. A certain resistance to the present tense made me increasingly see there is an urgent need to be contemporary. This is what books can do and what exhibitions can do."