I remembered recently that Contemporary Art is coming to an end. I don’t mean art is coming to an end. And I don’t mean that we are no longer in the present, although as an artist in an artist statement I am obliged to say that “I am interested in the non-synchronous qualities of materials.” I only mean that Contemporary Art was a phase we were going through, like an elongated mood. Or maybe it was more like a space we were passing through, like an automated car wash. It is nobody’s fault that Contemporary Art is ending, just as it is nobody’s victory. It is our choice to decide whether to mourn, or to celebrate, or simply to remain still, like the numbers on a clock as the ticking hands move by. Remember, exactly 100 years ago Gertrude Stein published a book called The Making of Americans. She began writing that book in 1903, which was so fucking early in the dawn of Modernism that very, very few people thought to call it Modernism. Now the vintage on Modern Art is at least 80 years old. What we will continue to call Contemporary Art means everything before now, but certainly not much afterward. If you look, you will feel it ending, because you can see an abundance of simultaneous role play necessary to hang on to the past. It is right there in the “non-synchronous qualities of materials.”

Ian Page (born 1903) is a contemporary artist.