The 1990s: Turn to the Contemporary

It is often said that the 1990s marks a turn to the contemporary, the period we are still in. The 1990s is a time of transition from an artworld dominated by Western institutions and a gallery system primarily located in the West to a global art economy and exhibition circuit marked by the Second Johannesburg Biennial (1997) and other presentations. The decade ushered in aesthetic practices that reflected the new itineracy and cosmopolitan subjectivity of an artist-traveler who is perpetually on the move (Renée Green’s Secret (1993) and Francis Alys’s Loop (1997); site-based interventions and “relational” installations that expanded the definition and locations of art practice (Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992) and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Free) (1993); and works developed in response to resurgent nationalisms in Europe after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (Christian Philipp Müller’s Green Borders (1993) and Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque (1997). The rising influence of multiculturalism marked by the 1993 Whitney Biennial; Black aesthetics, by David Hammons’s 1990 retrospective at PS1 and Thelma Golden’s 1994 Black Male exhibition; Third Wave feminism; and the new prominence of queer representation, catalyzed by the AIDS epidemic, anticipated the identity-based curatorial and museological models of the 2010s and 2020s. At the same time, the establishment of the Web and expansion of the internet dramatically transformed the making, reception, and business of art. Contributors are invited to explore the aesthetic tendencies and exhibition histories of this transitional era, whose reverberations continue to be felt.