The Tate Triennial is opening in London this spring, put together this time by the French curator Nicolas Bourrioud who became renowned for conceiving the term 'relational aesthetics'. He has seized the exhibition as an opportunity to further explore his newest art historical concept: altermodernity.
Charles Avery, Untitled, (Traveller, 2008, (portret Nicolas Bourriaud)
Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition you are preparing for the Tate Triennial is articulated around a term you coined, the “altermodern.” You present this concept as a rereading of the notion of modernity through the specifics of the context we’re evolving in today. Could you elaborate on the characteristics of the contemporary world that led you to rethink the notion of modernity?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that the principal new element is the stage of cultural globalization to which we’ve come today, which entails two phenomena. The first is uniformity, under the aegis of mass production, a process of worldwide standardization dominated by the leisure industries, which treats local cultures as so many folklores to preserve. The second, in contrast to the first, is the cultural retreat into fundamentalism, into essentialist positions that are purely about identity. These two contradictory tendencies function like two ends of a vice that’s tightening upon us: on one side, the assertion of roots and idiosyncrasies as absolute values, and on the other, the tacit acceptance of a standardized culture that destroys every singularity.’
Christophe Gallois:
The zone that you explore with ‘altermodern’ then would position itself as an alternative to these two directions…
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘Absolutely, there is a third path that avoids both of these obstacles. And, given this new element of globalization, it merges with the need to return to the modern gesture. In my opinion, the essence of modernity is exodus, the uprooting from any identifying definition of the individual. This exodus is furthermore encouraged today by the very thing it’s fighting: globalization. The “Altermodern” functions in culture in the way that alterglobalism, the term that inspired it, functions in the political sphere. In fact, alterglobalism isn’t the opposite of globalism; it proposes an alternative that isn’t singular and all-embracing, but rather is a set of responses to specific situations, an archipelago of local responses.’
Christophe Gallois:
The altermodernity you’re describing is characterized by a dimension that is at once spatial and temporal: you speak in particular of time as the last continent left to explore. One of the underlying questions in your project is that of contemporaneity. In your introductory text, you also ask, ‘What does modernity mean today?’
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘What defines our era is that we live, for the first time in the history of humankind, on a planet that no longer has a terra incognita. A planet that is “Google-earthed,” covered by the satellite grid, in which even the remotest corner is known. For the first time we have an absolute totality. This revolution corresponds to economic globalization: “one world, one system.” Time, the past, history all become driving forces today because they correspond, as you just said, to the last continent left to explore. This dynamic corresponds to the idea that when traveling in space, one also travels in time. For contemporary artists, this particular situation produces a spatialized vision of time. Today, artists climb the steep slopes of history like so many geographical territories. In a certain way, time was reabsorbed by geography, and ever since, artists have been working on a map in four dimensions, which includes history. That’s why genealogy and archeology are significant in contemporary work: the more we can track the present, the less we need roots, because time is then composed of infinite strata without origin.’
Christophe Gallois:
On many levels, this idea of the altermodern seems to situate itself in the continuity of your previous work, notably crystallized around the terms relational aesthetics and postproduction. It seems that there are shared points between this earlier work and what you’re developing here—for example, around artistic practices that are conceived of as displacements or navigations in a universe of signs, practices of appropriation and usage—but also differences. Altermodern is characterized perhaps by an approach that is more directly tied to the social and political context. How do you locate the altermodern in relation to relational aesthetics and postproduction?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘You could say that it’s the same reality shot from different angles. The first point of view—which I group under the term of relational aesthetics—corresponded to the desire to define an imaginary collective horizon for a group of artist with whom I developed in the early 1990s. This horizon was the interhuman sphere, in the same way that the imaginary horizon of the Pop Art generation was the sphere of consumption. Postproduction detailed a theory of the production of works starting from a certain relationship to history, which I defined as a relationship to usage: art history as a toolbox. The ideas that I develop around the term “altermodern” do in fact illustrate more political, and geopolitical, concerns. It’s no longer about determining a formal horizion nor theorizing processes of production, but about establishing the emergence of a state of mind, which cannot be reduced to a particular style. This term conveys a particular relationship to the present, the here and now. It comes directly from the political sphere: what is our position? Does this position require or generate an affirmative response? Do we need modernity, and, if so, what are the characteristics of this modernity? This exhibition is, above all, a debate.’
Christophe Gallois:
In the introductory text to your project, you note a distinction between postmodernism, based on a linear vision of time, and altermodernism, whose model would be the labyrinth.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘This notion of the labyrinth echoes an anecdote from Claudio Magris’s Danube, which compares history to the idea of being in a train, riding the rails of time: a train comes toward us from the opposite direction, and for a few moments while runs along side us, we cannot tell if the train is going forward or backward. There are things that return; there are temporal loops. This notion is also very present in Borges, who describes time as a garden whose paths are forever forking. We’re not in the presence of a linear vision of time, but more of a sort of labyrinth. Postmodernism is the period where we didn’t know what to do with this labyrinth. I have the sense that today, wandering through the labyrinth has a positive value. This wandering seems to be the altermodern gesture par excellence: to finally find not what you’re looking for, but something else.’
Christophe Gallois:
The term ‘altermodern’ inscribes itself in the continuity of the notions of modernism and postmodernism that have defined the twentieth century, often to the greatest confusion. Recently, many have called into doubt the pertinence of these two notions. I’m thinking, for example, of Jacques Rancière, who questions the traditionally accepted trajectory of modernism to postmodernism. Modernism, according to him, was merely a way to simplify what he calls the ‘modern disorder’, while postmodernism failed by marking an artificial temporary rupture. Where do you situate yourself in this debate?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I would put myself more in the wake of Bruno Latour, when he says that we were never modern, at least in epistemological terms. We are still yet to arrive at a real relativism, which would no longer be indexed on a dominant culture, while ceasing to float in the postmodern “anything goes.” The relativism proposed by postmodernism is based on a sort of freezing of time. This was a period of resetting, equalizing and homogenizing different cultural hierarchies. How does one proceed, if not by re-ranking things through a new division, this time between altermodern and postmodern?’
Christophe Gallois:
An important aspect of your project is the reconsideration of multiculturalism. Taking a step back from the multiplication of cultural specificities and the accumulation of identities, you detect a more precise interest in contemporary practices for the formulation of what Edouard Glissant defined as processes of creolization, based on the association of different cultures, on the dynamics of translation, appropriation, and so on.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that we are arriving at a historical moment where artists no longer start with their specific culture, but with a culture that is already globalized. The work is more about starting from this globalized culture and arriving at the specifics than working from one’s identity or origins, which leads the artist to become the logo for his or her own culture. Many artists, whose work doesn’t interest me very much, are content to simply present their culture, their roots or their identity as content in itself. I think that the attitude that consists in presenting oneself as above all “different” no longer works. Difference is something that has to arise; it can’t declare itself.’
Christophe Gallois:
Could you say a bit about the curatorial directions that you took for the Tate Triennial? What, according to you, are the type of artistic practices and exhibition formats that correspond to the ideas you are developing?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘An exhibition is a question asked, never the answers that one brings to it. The exhibition Altermodern is the product of a series of meetings and discussions with artists and different art professionals. Since I’m currently based in London, I started with the uniqueness of London as a global city, a city where people from all over the world pass through for longer or shorter stays.The exhibition is also characterized by a certain generational homogeneity in the choice of artists, a little like Traffic, the exhibition I made around relational aesthetics in 1996 in Bordeaux. One exception is the participation of Gustav Metzger, who I wanted to include in the project as an epigraph, in the sense that, in the context of Modernism in the 60s, he is the great thinker of ecological catastrophe and sustainable development, two notions with very strong echoes in the new generation of artist. Finally, there are common inquiries that emerged in the relationships between the works, almost after the fact: there is, for instance, a propensity to manipulate signs coming from very different horizons, and a broad use of black and white.’
Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition will also coincide with the publication of your new book. Could you say a few words about it?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘The book is called The Radicant. It’s somewhat like the theoretical log of this exhibition. In most dictionaries, the term “radicant” comes right after “radical.” “Radicant” is the opposite of “radical,” meaning what belongs to the root; “radicant” means an organism that takes root as it moves along the ground. This image perfectly illustrates the modernity that I see emerging. We are no longer dealing with the concept of the tabula rasa. The modernity that is coming is based on this globalized state of the imagination, on the individual’s ability to exist not in a form of being but in permanent becoming, on the artist’s capacity to invent forms that aren’t indexed on an identity but on displacement, on the permanent rotation of signs and on the formation of paths within a quasi-infinite landscape of signs and available forms, on a planetary scale.’
Altermodern, Tate Triennial 2009
TATE Britain
3 februari t/m 26 april
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, Sternberg Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9
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