Postmodern is not dead: Altermodern

Tate Britain's Altermodern is a mixed bag. Some of it is great. Darren Almond's full-moon long-exposures in China are beautiful (he's always good), and Tacita Dean's photogravures of shipwrecks and war landscapes reportage are lovely novelistic storyboards.

Mike Nelson's The Projection Room (Triple Bluff Canyon) (2004) installation slowly draws you in by presenting an obsessive's study, every detail placed precisely. Gustav Metzger's Liquid Crystal Environment is a remake of a 1965 piece that uses liquid crystals and rotating polarising filters to create a mesmeric/brain-washing kaleidoscope. For a moment it looked like we'd lost Antimega to a chroma-coma.

The find of the show is an excellent draughtsman, Charles Avery - his drawings have the confident graphic line of comics, and his island world is an interesting story machine. He's like a cross between Paul Noble and Barry McGee. One to watch much more closely.

Some of it is very poor: Franz Ackermann, Spartacus Chetwynd, Marcus Coates, Rachel Harrison... tiresome. And some of it is in between: Simon Starling's second- to fourth-generation copies of a desk Francis Bacon made - ok, but as with antiques you get only so far with repro furniture. Nathaniel Mellors's excremental installation raises a chuckle. Subodh Gupta has a striking borderland mushroom cloud of stainless steel domestic implements.

The theoretical underpinning is confusing though. Here are three of Bourriaud's descriptions of "altermodern". On the show's website, behind a friendly EXPLAIN button, is a 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.

Second, altermodern as translation and trajectory:

characterised by translation, unlike modernism of the twentieth century, which spoke the abstract language of the colonial West, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities [...] This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn in time and space, materialising trajectories rather than destinations.

Thirdly, as post-historicist era:

Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible for us to produce something that made sense starting from an assumed heterochrony, that is, from a vision of human history as constituted of multiple temporalities, disdaining the nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any kind of era - a positive vision of chaos and complexity.

(Oh and there are some more here, critiqued.) So Bourriaud proclaims that the post-modern era has ended, and been replaced by a post- (or is it hyper-?)globalisation, anti-commercial, post-geographic, post-historic ("heterochronic"), rootless, nomadic altermodernism. And this is the bit that confuses me: if the theoretical positioning is an attempt to confidently stake out a new territory and era, wouldn't that gesture immediately undermine the claim that the altermodern sweeps aside specificities of space and history? But perhaps I don't understand it - my art-theory synapses are atrophied. Maybe I should read Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics or his new book Radicant (whose organising metaphor is surely a rhizomous echo of D&G?).

Most of the show doesn't look like a new new thing, which is the other thing complicating the claim to a different trajectory.

Afterwards, we nipped around the Drawing show. Some lovely stuff: Blake's Flea, a tiny Cozens landscape, this Tyson facing three Nobles in a room, a lovely Bill Jacklin.... great stuff.

Comments

[Paul Murphy]

I agree that overall as a show it's a very mixed bag and I figure that half the stuff will have died a death in ten years time. I did like the Marcus Coates piece though which undercut the overly portentous roots of some of the other things that were going on.