Dan Smith (Chelsea): ‘Overlooking Bloch: Contemporary Art and Utopia’

Within Hal Foster’s article ‘An Archival Impulse’ can be found a compelling yet tentative manifestation of utopia in contemporary art. It is upon this that the very force of argument pivots, towards a critical engagement in the present with unrealised futures and their remains in the past. Utopian and archival forces are bound by wishful, perhaps paranoiac, responses to failure and a wish to recoup what has been lost, to move beyond pure nostalgia towards something that may be future orientated in its temporality. However, there is a fixed emphasis on ‘failed futuristic visions’—it still seems necessary to orientate utopia around failure and an inability to be realised. Whereas it seems that Ernst Bloch offers concrete examples of how best to navigate away from such  preconceptions, his presence within this particular text is limited to a single footnote referencing  Heritage of Our Times, a collection of early essays, and the statement ‘Bloch might also be an instructive reference here for his concepts of the nonsynchronous and the utopian’. The absence of a substantial engagement with Bloch, particularly the failure to address The Principle of Hope, is a lacuna within ‘An Archival Impulse’, but one that can be attributed to a general inconspicuousness of Bloch within discussions around contemporary art, which needs to be re-addressed. Just as Foster emphasises the archival impulse of his article as something that moves beyond notions of traumatic failure and winsome nostalgia, Bloch’s Principle of Hope is founded upon a complex and eruptive temporality: the past holds both what is to be avoided, and what must be redeemed­—a three dimensional temporality, in which analysis of the past illuminates the present in order to direct the future.