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Altermodern Manifesto: POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic,
political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture
Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live
Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe
Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a
globalised state of culture
This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing
Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves
Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated
with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.
The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that
postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global
altermodernity.
Nicolas Bourriaud
3 Feb 2009
Tate Britain
Altermodern
Until Tue May 26 2009 at Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG
It could have been supramodern, ultramodern, megamodern or even mutant-modern. Instead,
French curator Nicolas Bourriaud has decided that what comes after postmodern should be known
as the ‘altermodern’, an idea he is debuting for the wonderfully ambitious fourth Tate Triennial. Not
to belabour his definition, but this altermodern era apparently carries on from the freeform spirit of
the last half century’s mix-and-match culture, but is largely removed from the traditional centres of
artistic production, taking numerous meandering paths around the world that will hopefully arrive at
a truly universal progression of art. Globo-modern, maybe?
A new movement, whatever it’s called, should always start with the annihilation of the old. And so it
is with Subodh Gupta’s giant silver mushroom cloud that explodes up into Tate Britain’s Duveen
galleries. What rains down is not the skulls and bones of previous artists, but a cascade of steel
Indian tiffin boxes and kitchen utensils, suggesting a shower of positivity and possibility, rather than
doom-laden destruction. Yet, by opening his show with such a flashy, big-name sculpture, surely
Bourriaud is merely perpetuating the obsession for wham-bam signature statements that has
blighted almost all the recent international surveys of art. These annual, biennial and triennial
festivals and fairs are symptomatic of how art has been floundering in its own postmodern mess;
how can another sprawling group show be the solution?
It was with this concern, and the worry that altermodern would be simply another linguistic exercise
in the kind of art double-speak that produced my last least favourite term; ‘glocal’ (a horrid,
meaningless hybrid of global and local), that I approached the exhibition proper. Thankfully, not
only did the upbeat atmosphere continue with a gaudy pink, green and yellow entranceway by
Matthew Darbyshire and with Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Japanese toy masks embedded in
archaeological artefacts from the future, but theoretics and semantics were soon diffused by one of
the best contemporary shows staged in London for years. It’s still a triennial, then, but not as we
know it.
‘Altermodern’ actually gets quieter and more serious the further you explore. Some of this city’s
most inventive artists – Mike Nelson, Charles Avery, Olivia Plender, Lindsay Seers and Tris Vonna-
Michell – invite you into their labyrinthine headspaces of fiction, faction, history and misdirection
through some uniformly impressive installations. Despite not having quite enough work by each to
become fully paid-up members of their fan clubs, this is a great opportunity to get into their work
before seeking out their regular showing habits in the wilds of our Shoreditch or Hackney listings.
Of course, this is the first Tate Triennial not to focus solely on Brits, so there are other nationalities
and scenes represented (the real ‘alter’ crowd), who here are described as exiles, nomads or
passers-by. The best of these is LA-based Walead Beshty’s transportation art, involving spectral
photographs developed as they pass through airport X-ray machines and his Fed-Exed glass
boxes, which are slowly being smashed to pieces while in transit to their next place of exhibition.
Parisian Loris Gréaud’s white-out rumble room of his own brainwaves played out as sub-bass
frequencies is hardly as detaining, but is a successful palate cleanser about halfway through.
With so much to see and learn – including the relevance of the radical youth group Kibbo Kift to
today’s recession, as well as the Danish film industry’s habit of making alternative, tragic endings
for Russian audiences, in addition to the all’s-well American versions – many of these rich back
stories get lost, which is a pity because each discovery is worth making. It’s as though the creative
lifeblood that first flowed through the main arteries of early modernism and then split off into the
tributary veins of postmodernism is now finally being eked out further into the tiny capillaries of
altermodernism. In other words, it’s now possible to find art with far-reaching influence in far-flung
places.
Not everything feels new and now. It seems that ’70s psychedelia is so long out of fashion that’s it’s
in again, man, with much to enjoy in a typically liberated performance by a naked Spartacus
Chetwynd and friends, as well as in the chill-out room of hydrochloric acid trips by Polish old-boy
Gustav Metzger. The real duds are Simon Starling’s lame game of design by Chinese whispers in
which he picture-messages a desk to different manufacturers with diluted results (MFI-modern?)
and, in the same room, Seth Price’s rehashing of internet imagery (www.modern, perhaps?).
Of course, it’s an oxymoron to present this alternative, globalised route out of contemporary art’s
cul-de-sac here in London, even more so in a breast-beatingly named nationalist institution such as
Tate Britain. But, when most of the world’s best artists inevitably come through the capital at some
point, to work or exhibit, where better than our global centre to plant the flag for a new non-
centralised tenet of art?
Ossian Ward
9 Feb 2009
Time Out, London