The first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred H. Barr Jr. once described its collection as a ‘torpedo moving through time.’ I keep thinking about this strange, somehow very 20th-century image. There is a direction: some things move forward, others are left behind. I am not interested in returning to this idea of art history, of course. But I think it says something about an idea of art itself. The new appeared partly through this movement, and a certain understanding of what came before it.

Now the situation is very different. Histories left outside the story of Modern art have been recovered. Museums, artists, writers, and others make an enormous effort to bring back things that were ignored, excluded, or simply forgotten. Instead of one history, many now exist at the same time.

Plurality isn’t always meaningful

I think this is a very important development. But it also creates a strange problem: plurality does not automatically produce meaning. We can make more things visible, include more artists and histories, but at some point, there is the question of what all these things mean together.

This matters for the future of art because artists do not invent things from nowhere. What can be made also depends on what is around, can be remembered, has disappeared, or suddenly comes back. Sometimes a work made 50 or 500 years ago becomes more important for an artist than something made last year. When our understanding of the past changes, what can be done in the present changes too.

History itself can change

Hilma af Klint is an obvious example. She started making abstract paintings in 1906, before Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian made the works that became part of Abstraction’s familiar history. When, in recent years, her overlooked contribution became widely known, it was not simply a matter of adding one more important artist to the canon. The history itself started to look different. Spiritualism, diagrams, automatic drawing, invisible forces, and other things that did not fit very comfortably into the usual story of Modern Abstraction suddenly seemed less peripheral.

Furthermore, her work became useful for artists working now: R. H. Quaytman made a whole group of paintings in direct response to af Klint; Amy Sillman has discussed what af Klint has changed in our understanding of Abstraction; and exhibitions have connected Carsten Höller’s work to the visionary tradition around her. Something that had almost disappeared became contemporary again. I am sure we will see further generations of younger artists responding to af Klint’s art.

It’s not always about discovery

There is another story I have always liked. A long time ago, Rirkrit Tiravanija told me that when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, he spent a lot of time looking at Thai objects in its Asian collection, including Buddhas and bowls displayed behind glass. For the museum they were art or historical objects, but for him they were also things that had a use: you ate from a bowl; you cooked in a pot.

Tiravanija started thinking about what happens when these objects enter a museum and become separated from their use. Eventually this connected to his own work with cooking. Instead of putting another object in a gallery, he prepared and served food there. Nothing had to be rediscovered. What changed was how Tiravanija understood them. He found another possibility inside something that was already there, and this became part of a completely different kind of art.

Yesterday’s news is today’s archive

I have been thinking about this a lot in relation to e-flux, which I founded in 1998. Then, it was basically a way to circulate information about small exhibitions that didn’t have much budget for promotion. An announcement was sent out, people read it, some went to see the show, and usually, after a few days, it was old information. But we kept everything. Almost 30 years later, all these announcements, texts, exhibitions, artists, institutions, and ideas have accumulated into a very large archive, and also a record of exhibitions from an important period of contemporary art.

For me, what’s interesting is not simply that all this material is still there. It is what can happen to it. Something published 20 years ago can appear next to a text about something happening today, somewhere completely different, and acquire another meaning. They can start to speak to each other.

Maybe this is what I mean when I talk about a ‘living archive’. Instead of only preserving the past, such an archive reconfigures the past in relation to the present. Of course, the more material there is, the more difficult this becomes. If everything is equally available, it can also become a kind of noise. Selection and judgment do not disappear with plurality. Probably they become even more important, but they can no longer work like Barr’s torpedo.

The future of now

When I think about the future of art, I am not so interested in predicting the next medium or style. Rather, I keep coming back to certain questions: Out of all the art and history now available to us, what will become meaningful enough to change what artists can do? What will be brought back, what will remain dormant, and what connections are already in front of us that we still don’t know how to see?