[23a] Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 1, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 12-285 (pp. 115-117).

Modernity (and we might add, fragmenting-modernity-become-business-become-some-form-of-postmodernity) is not simply a matter of spatial relations or structures. It has a dynamic principle, a teleological motor. The crude pressure exerted by this motor might be abbreviated in the cliché of invention, the competitive principle that one should strive ever more to out-do one's predecessors in radicalness and extremity ... the What next, Next Season, Next,

Next, Next, psychosis. Our thought was to paint the museum of the future, to displace ourselves and others somehow in time.

Not only were the Incidents in a Museum allegories of containment, they also touched the matter of cultural inclusion and exclusion. These were paintings of the Whitney Museum, a place to which we could not go artistically, somewhere from which we were excluded. (We are excluded in an ordinary sense by nationality.) But we were concerned to depict the place as excluding in a much wider sense, as closed almost biologically, a place entered only in the wilder sense of fiction, a place entered with special clothing not yet invented ... and yet a place both containing and contained, literally and figuratively, yet accessible only in the imagination as fiction ... or text…

The fetishism of ‘next’, the motor of transformed and untransformed commercial modernism, effectively denies the artist (and in a sense the consumer) access to his work. His (or her) work of now is no work of now. It is temporally excluded from his sight, dislocated not by what it follows, but by what might follow it.

How might we bring out this exclusion, how might we literally produce something which was not yet dislocated from our power to produce, let alone to see ... what figure could we make of this sense of loss?

A painting tied to something concrete, but somehow incapable of predication with the definitive article: A painting; not the painting, something possible (perhaps), and therefore necessarily general.

Most people will be familiar with that illustrative genre much associated with publications for the young and encapsulated in the title of a popular science and technology programme on BBC TV: ‘Tomorrow's World’.

These are pictures reduced to the equivalent of imagining, illustrations of texts perhaps, but the relation is not a normally illustrative one.

They are usually wonderfully funny, obsessive, monomaniac and, of course improbable ...
Predictive images are like forgeries, always illustrative of the preoccupations of the time of their production ... these are images of the future and although they are intact portraits of the present, including present fashions in predictive thinking, they and their captions are non-disconfirmable except in and by future events. As pictures alone, one might say that they are immune to disconfirmation at any time ... And this is no matter how ridiculous they may be.

One very tempting possibility (tempting because of the laughs) was an Incident in a Museum showing visitors in rocket-powered shoes and so on.

We even tried to find some sort of pictorial proposal ... but they’re killers, these conventions of illustrative futurology.

We tried obscure mystery, shadows and allusion, we even asked our children for a few ideas ... but whatever we tried it took on the appearance of late vernacular School of Paris. Why?

Needless to say these masterpieces have not even made it to Charles Harrison’s slide collection ... Various partial and marginally textual solutions were essayed... recalling the metrical sense of the epoch which seems to be shared by both dealers and curators. We tried lettering The Decade: 2000-2010 on a large blue canvas. The study may be thought of as a glimpse into the museum of that now less distant future. These and other items of the same time have that extraordinarily auratic character which is shared by embarrassing and fairly large work. Like some of the more excellent items of (T.V.) popular culture, they test one’s capacity to remain in the room, tormented, cringing and fascinated.