‘Postmodernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity, Altermodern is expressed in the language of a global culture. Altermodern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world.’
For me Bourriaud’s distinction between the post and alter-modern is sophistic and the justification for its existence as a genuine movement seems unconvincing. On the evidence of the works at the 2009 Triennial Altermodernism seems more like a continuation of postmodernisms semantic fragmentation than a cogent ideological successor.
The 28 artists exhibited pursue widely divergent lines of inquiry but only a handful seemed to break new conceptual ground. For some the decaying corpus the post modernity seemed to inspire deviation and not a move forwards.
Charles Avery’s work for instance side-steps ideological inertia through regression into the past. Expelled from Central St Martins after only six months Avery spent the decade enacting the fate of a 19th century explorer who maps an imaginary island occupied a people addicted to gin-pickled egg and suffused by Greek myth. Whilst the concept of his work sounds arduous it is in fact redeemed by its visual intricacy and beauty.
Of all work in the Triennial Wallead Beshty and Simon Starling’s works seem most central to the concept of polyglotic, displaced art forecasted by Bourriaud in the exhibition’s manifesto.
Beshty FedEx damaged glass cubes and airport x-ray photographic papers are objects scratched and dented in a synthetic hinterland. There is something simultaneously sublime and audacious in the way he completely sidesteps the command to create art objects. Instead the articles he introduces to the space are conspicuous through their absence of expression – the vapid ghosts of global transit and nothing more.
Simon Starling presents contiguous form of displacement in ‘Three White Desks 2008 – 09.’ The desks which are obviously loose replicas of the same design descend in size – the third left as unvarnished timber. All are based on a photograph of a desk designed by Francis Bacon – but the mounting levels of inaccuracy in each successive replica are a result of the photographs given to three different furniture joiners. The increasing digital compression of each photograph results in a less faithful reproduction of the original.
2 comments:
'Bourriaud’s distinction between the post and alter-modern is sophistic and the justification for its existence as a genuine movement seems unconvincing'... I'm not sure I agree.
Bourriaud's coinage of 'altermodern' is a little pretentious - it's an intellectual landgrab - but it *is* pretty helpful. It's not supposed to denote a 'movement' - which is a modernist idea - that you could empirically discern.
Instead, it's supposed to be a framework that allows a particular tendency to be understood: a move away from ironic re-presentations of capitalist consumer culture as some sort of unpleasant, all-pervasive, deadening system (which is still a kind of common-wisdom perspective, despite the fact that countless ethnographic accounts of production + consumption show it's simply not true), towards experimentation with new systems of living.
Self-lablled 'postmodernist' accounts tend to focus on 'the end' of all sorts of things - post-political, post-ideological, post-industrial, post-human, etc. The idea of 'altermodern' is to consider what we're *pre-*. Because clearly we *are* 'still' ideological, political etc. (what's saying 'we're post-political' if it's not a political statement?)
It's a pretty broad category, and I think it gets a bit nebulous when you include in it the intensely psychological landscapes created Mike Nelson, Charles Avery, etc. But the way Bourriaud uses it, as a *conceptualisation* rather than a *definition*, I think it does earmark a certain visible tendency in what artists are getting up to these days.
That's my two cents, anyway! :0)
Thank for your comment Ben.
I like 'Intellectual landgrab' as a description of the Altermodernist concept and I suppose that from a curatorial perspective it delivers all that could reasonably asked in providing a broad intellectual holding pen for the work in the exhibition whilst maintaining accessibility for a casual audience. I did feel that the exhibitions headline spiel played directly to the work of Simon Starling, Wallead Beshty and Franz Ackermann (and a few others) quite directly, but neglected a number clearly present and interesting thematic threads in the artists exhibited.
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