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Altermodern and the Death of Postmodernism
Diana Damian
‘Postmodernism is Dead’, says Nicholas Bourriaud. ‘A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture’. Through expanding means of communication and travel, immigration and a new social flexibility, the everyday is being transformed into ‘journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe’. The presence of multiculturalism has changed the meaning of identity, merged cultures together in a global state. We are no longer interested in describing and exploring states of being, but in translating the semiology of this new culture, exploring ‘the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves’.
What lies at the basis of Altermodern is a new perspective, the proposition not that an system has expired, but that it is changing. Particularly in Western cultures, the influx of global cultural landscapes, and migration and fluctuation of population that is taking place is affecting the art scene. Altermodern is not the first presentation of its kind. As any developing perception and discussion, it has been articulated by more than one theorist. But Bourriaud has opened the debate through his curated exhibition.
How will this translation be taking place? How will this new relationship with time, space and image reflect unto the forms and dialogues emergent in the arts? And most of all, should we not regard criticism in this transformation, allow for a new perspective to govern mouldy, expired principles that no longer apply to art criticism? These are some of the many questions that will take time to be explored, their answers hidden away in established methodologies.
Nicholas Bourriaud was born in France. He has been working as a curator and art critic both in France and the UK. He was director of Palais de Tokyo until 2006 and is curating the forth Triennal Exhibition at Tate Britain entitled Altermodern. He has written for several journals including FlashArt and, under his own direction, Documents Sur L’Art. One of his most important books, Relational Aesthetics, written in 2001, discusses the relational form of art, regarding it as a game whose forms evolve in relation to its socio-political context. He points out the importance of understanding, through interdisciplinarity, the current cultural climate in order to analyze the art that is being made, and the art that will be emerging. In his book Postproduction, he discusses culture as screenplay, culture as inundated by media, where artists have become ‘postpolitical producers of cultural services’. Evolving from the technological art that was taking place in the 1990s, Postproduction and Relational Aesthetics deny the existence of national models, and, instead, underline the importance of discussing art in relation to its social context rather than its private sphere of existence. Audience and artwork become a community with interdisciplinary encounters.
Palais de Tokyo is a contemporary art museum in Paris, France. Bourriaud was involved in its curation and direction until three years ago. He regarded it not as a museum or gallery space, but as a community space for creation, more a laboratory rather than a museum. It does not work, for example, with the same opening hours as any other institution. It is a flexible space of performative occurrences and varying forms, and a playground for experimentation. In 2008 an installation with the name of Cellar Door took over Palais de Tokyo, created by artists Loris Gréaud. The New York Times called it ‘The Taste of Nothing, the Smell of Mars.’ Audience members entered through an Alice In Wonderland hole, only it opened automatically and, once passed to the other side, one could find ‘bubbles’ of environments, interactions and happenings. These ‘bubbles’ were divisions of the whole space, dark, quirky and highly conceptual. One of the passageways was modeled from the Earth, ‘after a subterranean fireworks explosion’, as a ‘celebration and manifestation of underground activity’. There was a vending machine with sweets that had not taste (that now lives in the foyer of the ICA), and paintball militants shooting at each other in blue, what Yves Klein called the ‘color of the immaterial’. And the installation travelled, taking different forms and shapes, a great example of the emerging translations and a true concoction of disciplines in an adapted, conceptual and sensory environment.
Bourriaud seeks to engage the audience into a polemic of ’looking and thinking’, building upon the interest of postmodern art to include the viewer into the work. He is taking it a step further, but in a different direction. Reading his Altermodern Manifesto is an indulgence of opinion and fact, a debate worth raising at the dawn of what he calls the death of postmodernism. Singularity amongst a world of available communication, of globalization and negotiation of cultural values. This is how Bourriaud challenges the current artistic climate, anticipating, as he did in mid-nineties, the new form of art
We are moving from the universal and subversive to the international, a dialogue of folklores and identities looped in a constantly evolving system of communication. Art is developing in its translation of this new language. Artists are to link these multiple forms of expression and communication, break and reconfigure their boundaries. Moving away from a threatening semiology, art is to re-confess its values