Roll Call: CMU School of Art Senior Exhibition

The Dilemma of the Now

The great modernist thinker and architect Adolf Loos stated in his defining essay, Ornament and Crime, that “[t]he speed of cultural development is hampered by the stragglers.” In this pithy observation, Loos points to the truth that the future is made by those who live most in the present, and although we may imagine that we all share the same time period, we do not. This could not be more palpable than in art school, where propositions are perpetually arising and the future is in a continual cycle of germination and formation. However, this process no longer entails the creation of the new, because that idea’s very nature has been corrupted by capitalism’s desire to remake, remarket, and resell. Instead, what is occurring is the now—art’s counterpoint to progress: a formlessness that has no polish, no promise, and no utopian ideals. The now is the real that exposes the artifice of the new by sharing conceptual conclusions in advance of any form or figure. Art is no longer charged with solving problems, as much as it is driven to present them within and to contemporary culture. In this position, art can refuse to be either product or brand, resigning itself instead to mapping a trajectory of ideas and expressions across time. Art is thinking and theorizing manifest; it is a cousin of philosophy and a sibling to science, whose threads have exceeded the body and body politic to confront change through a series of radical proposals that have mapped humankind’s progression from the caves of Lascaux to contemporary conditions of post-humanism. With all of this in mind, I invite you to take part in the now, as this exhibition is a testament— a Roll Call—to the vision and voices of those who bear witness to the present and offer us a brief glimpse of tomorrow.                 

- Charlie White Regina and Marlin Miller Head of the School of Art.

Co-organized by CMU School of Art