Land and sea: 'in the beginning all the world was America'

Art - contemporary, but to what? The notion of contemporary art continues the temporal ordering characteristic of art history as it paradoxically tries to define a definite period as one that, logically, has neither beginning nor end. As if in response to this aporia, many recent art works may be described as elemental, geopolitical and, to use a word, 'topological: These works help us to understand topos, place, not in its general and abstract geometry but as a particular kind of place with a singular orientation for human communities. Topoi are places of particular orientation and discourses and arts of rhetoric: the lectern, the television interview desk, the judge's bench, and the town hall meeting are places which must be understood in this sense. Perhaps the institution of the contemporary art biennale aspires to such a status. My suggestion - hardly a thesis - is that contemporary art should be understood in relation to an unparalleled event. That event is the widespread, even hegemonic, perception that humans have dispensed with their orientation in space and to place. What is supposed to have 'dis-placed' this orientation is the great liberal utopia of globalisation, an ordering of the earth and its beings which claims to do away with our orientation