FIRST THINGS FIRST

The avant-garde: "a band of soldiers preparing for general advance"

[Vladimir Tatlin's Tower: A Ukrainian crack-piper with his eyes on the future]

The Thing Consensus' primary impulse is one shared by many: that the current world climate of global, economic downturn and uncertainty will, through its destruction of old ideologies and status quos, create a clearing in space to usher in a new age of ideas, arts and approaches to living. 

At the start of the 20th Century the Russo-European avant-garde was shaking things up and giving form to the conflicting ideas that would race into shaping the next one hundred years. Today the European tradition of fin de siècle degeneration and hope has been superseded by a world united by modern infrastructure, politics, technology and communication in a perpetual present we now know is too complex to even try to weave into a handful of coherent narratives. We may take cues from the last great avant-garde, but what we advance into is unknown. 

In the spirit of the focal shift uniting the East with the West, The Thing Consensus acknowledges the world today in the Japanese katoki no kaisha - the start of the transition. In this transition The Thing Consensus exists to posit ideas to thread throughlines through the myriad maze of symbolic markers that define the contemporary experience. Through earnest eyes The Thing Consensus would like to see a new avant-garde of the twenty-first century marching through the hole that has been torn through the world's socio-economic fabric, instigating reforms through cultural disciplines and the arts in order for us to cope with the fresh demands made by our aesthetic reality.

[Japanese Architect Tadao Ando designed 'temporary' offices in Tokyo. Photo by Necasa & Partners Inc®] 

The Thing Consensus is an online sandbox of speculation and attitudes that aims to contribute in bringing young people to an agreement on what it is we have around us. In the relative stability of the last 25 years (The Thing Consensus' average age), social, political, artistic and intellectual activism has been by turns a a fashion, a cliché, a pretense and a punch line. Yet for the first time in many of our lives, urgent creative activity has been rid of its impotence and from Iceland to Indonesia a new class of young artisans shall push forth in the face of global roll-back.

Our world is a broken scattering of things we've lost sense of. Let's put things back together.