journal of visual culture

Event

Returns of the Modern

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern’, in Nicolas Bourriaud (ed.) Altermodern: Tate

Triennial (London: Tate, 2009).

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, online at Tate website: http://www.

tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

‘Global Modernities’, Altermodern: Tate Triennial Symposium, Tate Britain,

London, Saturday 14 March 2009

As the term ‘postmodern’ disappears into the distance – not before time for
many of us, but rather more alarmingly for others – it leaves in its wake some
tricky questions. As a periodizing device, the naïve simplicity of the ‘post’ itself
was always likely to store up a few problems. One can’t keep adding ‘post’
to the front of things before a certain absurdity and desperation quickly sets
in. ‘Post-postmodern’, ‘post-post-postmodern’, anybody? So, ‘postmodernism is
dead’, begins Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, accompanying his
curation of the fourth Tate Triennial (3 February to 26 April 2009). Yet, for those
who once took it to be the very cultural logic of the contemporary, this leaves a
rather bald choice. Either disavow any serious claim it might ever have had upon
our attention – in order, belatedly, ‘to admit that modernity is inescapable and to
desist from speculations about [its] end’, as Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar has put
it – or produce some further terminological novelty that would assert that there
once was such a thing as postmodernity but that now it is no more. To borrow
an analogy from my friend Tim Bewes, this is the difference between declaring
something to be as dead as a doornail and as dead as a dodo. Both may be dead,
but the doornail was never actually ‘alive’ in the first place.
Bourriaud’s ‘genius’ is to attempt to combine the two. For, as it turns out, what
comes after the postmodern is a ‘new modernity’:

After 30 years into the ‘aftershock’ of modernism and its mourning, then
into the necessary post-colonial re-examination of our cultural frames,

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav
Vol 9(1): 1–9 DOI 10.1177/1470412909359364
2 journal of visual culture  9(1)

‘Altermodern’ is a word that intends to define the specific modernity

according to the specific context we live in – globalization, and its
economic, political and cultural conditions. The use of the prefix ‘alter’
means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an
end … The core of this new modernity is, according to me, the experience
of wandering – in time, space and mediums.

Notwithstanding its not entirely modest claims to grasp ‘our present’, the
periodization ventured here is a conventional one: ‘If early twentieth-century
Modernism is characterised as a broadly Western cultural phenomenon, and
Postmodernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity,
Altermodern is expressed in the language of a global culture.’ Such thoughts
are hardly new. As Andreas Huyssen pointed out in his contribution to the
documenta 12 Magazines Project:

Since the waning of the debate about ‘postmodernism’ and the rise of
‘globalization’ as master signifier of our time, the discourses of modernity
and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback ... There is much talk
these days of modernity at large, second modernity, liquid modernity,
alternative modernity, counter-modernity, and what not.

The modern is back in fashion, in the artworld as elsewhere. Bourriaud’s attempt

to give what he calls his new ‘periodizing tool’ some critical edge resides,
then, in little more than a rather basic pun – ‘altermodern’ is to art and culture
as ‘altermondialization’ is to politics – and what is, presumably, an intended
resonance with the specific concept of ‘alternative modernities’ as elaborated
by Gaonkar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. (Although it should be noted
that, while the latter does indeed emphasize a ‘globalization’ of modernity, it
does so precisely in the context of a conceptual challenge to – rather than of
a proposed successor to – the very notion of postmodernity itself.) And what
precisely is this ‘new’ modernity that contemporary artists are ‘looking for’? It
is, Bourriaud tells us, not unpredictably, ‘a new modernity that would be based
on translation’:

What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups

and to connect them to the world network. This ‘reloading process’ of
modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called
altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and
the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in
a more and more standardized world.

Hence, modernism is apparently ‘reloaded’, after postmodernism, as a form

of return that is also, all-too-familiarly, a new beginning: a reloading of the
very ‘possibility of producing singularities’ (which is presumably a rather
post-Deleuzian way of saying that it re-valorizes the new itself, as against the
supposed postmodern concern with pastiche and repetition). Nonetheless, one
might justifiably wonder, in this instance, just how new this modernity ‘based
on translation’ and ‘the creolisation of cultures’ – a pretty familiar idea from,
 Event 3

say, the work of Homi Bhabha, some 20 years ago now – actually is. Ever alert
to fashion, Bourriaud cites the writings of Sebald ‘as emblematic of a mutation
in our perception of space and time, in which history and geography operate
a cross-fertilisation, tracing out paths and weaving networks’. Yet, it is hard to
think of a recent writer who was more embedded in the cultural legacies of a
specifically European modernism of rootlessness and exile than was Sebald.
No doubt all this, then, has some very general sense in broad-brush terms, in a
manner that draws liberally upon a series of ideas already largely familiar from
the work of Arjun Appadurai, Paul Gilroy, Hardt and Negri, Manuel Castells,
and many others. But, as a dip into Bourriaud’s contribution to the exhibition
catalogue quickly reveals, when it gets to the details there is a fair amount
of intellectual vagueness, even incoherence, at work here. Most obviously,
Bourriaud simply seems to have no clue what to do, conceptually, with the key
term ‘modernity’ itself, nor, seemingly, much interest in unpacking the different
connotations of its associated terms: ‘modernism’, ‘modern’, ‘modernization’. As
a result, its presentation in the various, and invariably brief, texts accompanying
the Triennial is essentially impressionistic – a ragbag of bits of received art-
historical wisdom and imprecise socio-economic periodizations. Crucially, rather
than unpack the problems that were always already attendant on the very idea of
a postmodern, the ‘concept’ of the altermodern merely compounds and extends
them, insofar as it can only repeat the fundamental conceptual confusions
about the nature of the modern as a structure of time – rather than a ‘period’
per se – from which the former notion derived. (Rather bizarrely, Bourriaud’s
best attempt in his catalogue essay to explain the shifts in cultural logics from
modernism to postmodernism to altermodernism harks back to a good old bit
of socio-economic determinism, organised, on this occasion – though one can
easily imagine it being entirely different on another – around changing patterns
in ‘world energy consumption ...’) Bourriaud has always had a way with the
nifty soundbite – ‘We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised
dubbing’ – but, with little more to offer than this, altermodernism becomes less
a concept as such, and more a mere nickname, or indeed brandname, for some
vaguely identified feature of contemporary artistic culture as a whole.
No-one, I take it, would deny that the world has changed, and will probably go
on changing. This is of course the fundamental dynamic of the modern itself,
in which, as Marx put it, all ‘fixed, fast frozen relations’ have a tendency to be
‘swept away’. No doubt, too, like the postmodern before it (though hardly at the
same level of sophistication displayed by Jameson, Lyotard et al.), Bourriaud’s
altermodern contains some truth in its attempt to grasp the historical novelty of
the present. Yet the tendency to deal with such novelty merely by a conformity
to the logic of fashion and the market, here performed in the act of constantly
declaring the arrival of whole new epochs, merely confuses the real issues at stake
here; that is, the internally changing forms of capitalist modernity itself. ‘Our’
world is not the same as that of the 19th century, to be sure, but its difference is
not one of radical breaks but of intensification (of, say, the mediation of social
relations by relations of commodity exchange). If one must have a prefix to mark
such newness, then Augé’s ‘super-modernity’, to which Bourriaud’s descriptions
often allude, is considerably more plausible here.
4 journal of visual culture  9(1)

At the same time, and unlike the discourses of ‘alternative modernities’ or

‘modernity at large’, to which, for example, Huyssen refers, it is noticeable
that Bourriaud’s periodizing narrative fails in any way to ‘provincialize’ the
development of modernism or modernity as such. For Bourriaud, ‘early twentieth-
century modernism’ is ‘a broadly Western cultural phenomenon’. Yet the whole
thrust of recent arguments by Gaonkar, Chakrabarty, Appadurai et al. has been
in fact to open up geographically the question of modernism’s 20th-century
lineage as constituted by something more than merely an internal European
or transatlantic field of exchange. Hence, as Huyssen summarizes, the focus of
new research now encapsulates ‘the modernism of Shanghai or São Paulo in the
1920s, Borges’s Buenos Aires, the Caribbean of Aimé Césaire, the Mexico City
of Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Alfaro Siqueiros’, as well as the innumerable
diasporic Afro-modernisms of what Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic or the
various Indian modernisms traced by the likes of Geeta Kapur, in ways that, if
nothing else, provide for a renewed focus upon what might be denoted by the
very concept of modernism itself. It is precisely this that Bourriaud’s all-too-neat
‘periodizing tool’ effectively elides.

More interesting, then, than what might be signified by the term ‘altermodern’
are the kinds of symptomatic ambitions that lie behind its articulation. As Nick
Lambrianou put it in his exhibition review in Mute: ‘It’s as if Greenberg, not
content with bestowing on the world a grand definition of modernist painting,
then wanted to actually re-christen modernity too.’ Certainly, the movement
that has defined Bourriaud’s own institutional career, from the relatively
restricted identification and description of an artworld movement in Relational
Aesthetics, to the kind of dramatically totalizing form of cultural theory towards
which Altermodern gestures, may well tell us much about the changing role of
art institutions, exhibitions and curators today.

In fact, ‘altermodern’ is a term that Bourriaud has been touting around for a
while. It’s thus hard not to believe that the invitation to curate the fourth Tate
Triennial provided, more than anything else, a perfect opportunity for marketing
the ‘idea’ itself. The introduction to Altermodern’s catalogue begins: ‘A collective
exhibition, when based around a theoretical hypothesis, needs to establish a
balance between the artworks and the narrative that acts as a form of subtitling.’
Yet one of the most striking aspects of the exhibition was its very evident
imbalance between the implicit scale of the theoretical hypothesis ventured
and any identifiable curatorial programme running through the exhibition itself.
Themes of travel (Walead Beshty, Darren Almond), translation (Tacita Dean,
Shezad Dawood) and, at more of a stretch, global networking (Katie Paterson,
Navin Rawanchaikul) were duly present, but the question of why this art – at
best, a somewhat cobbled together snapshot of the contemporary, defined by
its need to include a certain quota of British and British-based artists along with
a few recent Bourriaud discoveries from around the world – should apparently
carry the weight of some would-be totalizing ‘hypothesis’ about global culture
tout court is scarcely one that the exhibition itself could hope to address. The
branding is inevitably somewhat stronger than the product it has to sell.
 Event 5

This is, however, perhaps not the point. In an important sense, the kinds of
art-theoretical concerns that Altermodern reflects are less focused on the
critical potentials of the individual artwork than on various broader networks
of cultural translation, communication and exchange internal to the institutional
operations of the artworld itself. The present pre-eminence accorded to the job
of the master curator over and above that of the individual artist or movement
would be, in part, a function of this. In this sense, Altermodern – with its
accompanying manifesto, book, website, events, symposia and film showings –
is best understood as a relatively small-scale version of what has become the
cutting-edge version of curating itself, for which such accompanying forms
are no mere add-on to the artworks displayed but a crucial element within the
exhibition’s expanded mode of address. As pioneered by the relatively venerable
documenta (particularly in its 10th and 11th incarnations), and taken up by the
roving biennial Manifesta, during the 1990s, the result is a new model of the
exhibition that has, as Vivian Rehberg put it in her introduction to the recent
journal of visual culture section on documenta 12, issue 7(2), August 2008:
‘further encroached on the territory once steadfastly occupied by the academy,
its journals, books and articles, as a site for positing theories [and] exploring
histories’. The kinds of talks and writings that are generated by such exhibitions
are thus quite different in kind from the traditional catalogue or accompanying
conference, which are essentially comprised of art historical contextualizations
or commentaries on the work. Instead, ‘art space’ is reconfigured here as a
peculiar (if limited) kind of general public space, in which the art itself – or,
rather, the ‘theoretical hypothesis’ behind its ‘narration’ – may function as the
alibi for discussing all manner of things (politics, philosophy, science, literature,
and so on, as well as art history or theory) which may not have anything
to do with the actual art displayed, or indeed with art in general. In such a
context, it’s not entirely surprising that Bourriaud might harbour ambitions to
be the new Fredric Jameson. The difficulty of course is that this then places an
enormous weight on the accompanying texts and events to provide ballast for
the considerably enlarged claims of the exhibition itself. This works well when
the ‘theoretical hypothesis’ at stake is a reasonably tight one – as in, say, the
celebrated Weibel and Latour shows, ‘Iconoclash’ and ‘Making Things Public’, at
ZKM in Karlsruhe, or Enwezor’s ‘The Short Century’ – but when it is as flabby as
Bourriaud’s ‘altermodern’ it can generate as much confusion as clarity.
This was certainly the case for what was undoubtedly the most intellectually
interesting of the events running alongside the Triennial: the one-day symposium
‘Global Modernities’, which brought together five internationally known speakers
representative of (at least) five different disciplines – with, appropriately, ‘roots’
in four different continents – alongside an artists’ panel and a short ‘virtual’
appearance from Bourriaud himself in the form of a videotaped interview.
The intention, presumably, was at some level to redeem the conceptual and
historical woolliness of Bourriaud’s own articulations of both the global and
the modern. Yet the actual result was that the symposium ended up mirroring
the form of the exhibition itself in that, while the individual contributions were
often very good (indeed, the hit rate was rather higher than in the case of the
6 journal of visual culture  9(1)

artworks themselves), exactly what common discourse, beyond a vaguely shared

contemporaneity, was supposed to ‘unite’ them remained far from clear.
Typical of the problem here was the day’s final panel on ‘Architectures of Global
Space’, which included papers from Saskia Sassen on the global city and from
AbdouMaliq Simone on new forms of social ‘intersection’ in the metropolises of
the so-called Global South. Both were fascinating in their own ways, but quite
what relation they bore to the idea of the ‘altermodern’ (or, indeed, to issues
surrounding the concept of ‘modernity’ per se) was less than obvious. Nor did
either have anything much to say about the specific conditions of art within
the globalizing forms of the 21st-century metropolis. (And, as sociologists, why
should they?) As such, their presence here, while far from unwelcome in itself,
seemed, in the context of Bourriaud’s altermodern ‘project’ as a whole, little
more than a bid for social relevance and contemporaneity on behalf of the latter,
which it was itself unable to cash out.
Coming from a quite different direction, the artists’ panel featured two
participants in the Altermodern exhibition – Bob and Roberta Smith and Katie
Patterson – neither of whom seemed, symptomatically, to have any real sense of
why exactly their art might actually have been included, or, indeed, to feel any
great compulsion to analyse their own work at all. By contrast, and while she had
little to say about ‘modernity’ either, Irit Rogoff’s paper, in the middle session
of the day, was an often fascinating, if at times meandering account of what
she termed new ‘relational geographies’ no longer anchored in the ‘cohering
imperative’ of the nation state’s monopoly over global mapping. As well as having
some clear resonances with Bourriaud’s own conceptions – although, like the
rest of the speakers, Rogoff showed little interest in taking terribly seriously the
term ‘altermodern’ itself – this has some obvious plausibility as a general analysis
of the changing spatializations of cultural exchange within the world today. And
it threw up some intriguing observations too – such as Rogoff’s emphasis on the
growing importance of forms of intercultural exchange taking place, not solely
between centre and periphery, but also between periphery and periphery, in
ways that might bypass the centre altogether.
Accompanying these claims was, however, a further, rather more contentious
argument that, in thinking such new ‘relational geographies’, we should also
move away from analyses of art as merely ‘reflective’ or ‘illustrative’ of global
processes and towards an analysis of the ways in which cultural practices may
inform such processes, and hence help to produce certain ‘new and unexpected
realities within circuits of globalization’. Such an idea is certainly appealing. But it
is not without its fair share of wishful thinking. Noticeably, Rogoff’s theorization
of the artworld as a good place to study (critically or otherwise) new globalized
forms of mobility or cultural translation – exemplified in the work of Rome’s
Stalker group and the Raqs Media Collective – was considerably more compelling
than her attempts to identify a form of art that would (in some ‘post-critical’
fashion) actually ‘invent’ new ‘regional imaginaries’ disjointed from the dominant
spatializations of colonialism or capital. This latter idea may concord nicely with
post-Deleuzian celebrations of creativity and pure affirmation currently prevalent
within much art theory (the ‘possibility of producing singularities’, perhaps?).
 Event 7

But, with the best will in the world, it’s hard to take seriously the notion that
Francis Alÿs pushing his iceblock through the streets of Mexico City is really
‘inventing new imaginative ways of inhabiting space’ at the level of some claim
for art’s capacity to produce ‘new and unexpected realities’ within the circuits
of globalization itself.
While Sassen and Simone had little to say about art at all, in their accounts
of new global processes, the inverse problem in Rogoff’s contribution was,
then, the unconvincing claims made for art’s significance with regard to such
processes, and for its own capacity to intervene within (rather than to register,
more or less critically) the actual production of a globalizing ‘modernity’. For as
Marx foresaw, more than a century and a half ago, it is, above all, capitalism’s
compulsion to ‘nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions
everywhere’ – powered by the universalization of the exchange value form –
that underpins the ‘circuits of globalization’; not least, of course, within the
contemporary artworld. A healthy dose of ‘optimism’ regarding art’s ‘generative
possibilities’ is one thing, but, if it is not to amount to yet another passage
through the consolations of a romantic anti-capitalism, it continues to require
a critical articulation of the violences of art’s own social condition, the larger
social divisions and inequalities that determine the division between art and
politics themselves.
The panel that came perhaps closest to engaging with any real critical force
some issues raised by Bourriaud’s brief and scattershot texts, or at least the body
of existing theory to which they apparently allude, was the opening one on
‘Genealogies of Global Modernity’, with papers by Peter Osborne and Walter
Mignolo. Set the question ‘How did we get here?’, both started out from a
questioning of this ‘we’ itself, and of altermodern’s claims to grasp ‘our present’.
In the case of Mignolo, this took the form of a straightforward refusal to join
any such articulation of the first person plural altogether. ‘I inhabit a different
tribe’, as he provocatively put it. To the ‘universalism’ posited by Bourriaud’s
supposed ‘globalised state of culture’, Mignolo thus offered his typical counter-
vision of the pluri-versality of a global de-coloniality to come. If this is global, it
is so in a form, Mignolo argued, that must be de-linked – at an epistemic as well
as political and cultural level – from the ‘eurocentric’ project and rhetoric of
‘modernity’, while being oriented by the struggles and ‘colonial histories of the
ex-third world and massive migrations in the US and Europe’. Although Mignolo
then tentatively identified Bourriaud’s articulation of the altermodern with the
emergence of a ‘polycentric capitalist system’, and hence of a certain process of
‘de-westernization’, such a system is, according to Mignolo, still one that cannot
escape the logic of coloniality itself; something, he suggested, the invasion of
Iraq confirms. Indeed, for Mignolo, modernity’s very reproduction requires that
it posit some ‘outside’ to itself in cultural, and often racial, terms.
Mignolo is clearly right to insist upon the inextricable links between modernity
and coloniality; something easily forgotten in debates surrounding the ‘project
of modernity’ inaugurated by the likes of Habermas. Certainly there is a sense in
which, as Peter Osborne also noted, coloniality has been internal to the dialectic
of modernity, rather than being merely one ‘attribute’ among others, insofar as
8 journal of visual culture  9(1)

it was the colonial relation that was historically crucial to the spatialization of
modernity’s division between the modern and pre- or non-modern, or between
the ‘present’ and the ‘past’. However, while this is historically the case, and
while modernity as a historical category can never operate without some ‘other’
or ‘outside’ so as to sustain its own immanently self-differentiating dynamic, it is
far less clear whether modernity intrinsically ‘needs the logic of coloniality’ in
quite the ways that Mignolo can sometimes appear to suggest. Given the essential
abstraction of its temporal form, what exactly modernity ‘needs’ to sustain itself,
in concrete terms, is somewhat opaque. Equally, one would certainly have to
negotiate here the evident importance that the ‘rhetoric of modernity’ has had,
historically, for a number of anti-colonial movements, as well as to face seriously
the question of what exactly a contemporary culture or society utterly de-linked
from ‘modernity’, and its associated forms of temporality, would actually look
like. These are complex issues, and their difficulties are evident in a certain
ambiguity within Mignolo’s own work regarding whether there is ‘something’ in
modernity that is ‘unavoidable’, but must be somehow severed from the logic of
coloniality, or whether de-colonization requires a de-linking from modernity per
se. Nonetheless, in this context, the polemical interest of Mignolo’s position was
to be found in its refusal of Bourriaud’s excitable affirmations of a ‘“globalised
state of culture” as already ‘a matter of fact’, where ‘artists now have access to
information, and they all use the same toolbox, from Stockholm to Bangkok’.
Despite Bourriaud’s own happy vision of the globetrotting artist as homo viator,
free of all ‘origins’ and ‘identities’, apparently not everyone is in fact using the
same toolbox, and not all of them want to play in the same global sandpit of
trans-national exchange.
For Mignolo, then, significantly, Altermodern took the paradoxical form of
a ‘eurocentric critique of eurocentrism’, a ‘nice’ and ‘generous’ repetition of
‘imperial design’ that could only ultimately promote the forms of an increasingly
polycentric, globalized capitalism itself – at best an ‘interesting provincial option’.
Peter Osborne similarly rejected Bourriaud’s conception of a ‘global culture’,
albeit on rather different premises and in a rather more directly critical fashion.
For any projection of a culture, in an either anthropological or nationalistic
sense, onto a single global space can, Osborne argued, only be, here and now, a
‘powerful fantasy of capital’, an extrapolation of ‘the abstractly unifying power
of the universalization of exchange relations at the level of the planet’. Relatively
speaking, of course, such universality and unity (of a world capitalist system),
and the de-nationalizing forms of new global networks of communication and
exchange, are very real developments, but this does not amount to anything
like the formation of a global culture as a ‘meaningfully whole “way of life”’ as
such. At the very least, what is meant by ‘culture’ needs to be re-conceptualized
here. As such, Osborne claimed, in a final, fascinating theoretical framing of
the discussion, the continuing ‘effective (or ineffective) cultural existence’
of nationalities, in the emergent planetary context of transnational capital,
increasingly takes the form of currencies. It is the money form, as naming the
variable material forms of mediation of universal comparison and equivalency,
which ‘is the clue to the structure of cultural forms today’ and of their circulation.
Nowhere, in fact, is this more apparent than in the globalized modernity of
 Event 9

art, and in the artworld’s developing and, at least partially, decentralized and
de-westernized network of bienniales and the suchlike. No doubt travel and
migrancy have become powerful and central themes in much contemporary
art – in more or less political, more or less romantic ways, which Altermodern,
up to a point, articulates. As Osborne has observed elsewhere, this reflects a
‘profoundly contradictory process in which art-institutional and market forms
negotiate the politics of regionalism, post-colonial nationalism and migration’.
But, as it also suggests, their significance and meaning is, in large part, determined
by the increasing transnationalization of the artworld itself and, in particular, of
the market, as that dominant institutional form which mediates the relations of
translation and connection that make up any such global network today.
Of course, this also begs the question of what precisely is at stake in the kinds of
intersection of this international artworld with a parallel ‘theoryworld’ that are
exemplified by an event such as ‘Global Modernities’ itself. The ‘positive’ view,
as articulated by Irit Rogoff, is that it testifies to the artworld’s creative capacity
to ‘host and initiate new kinds of educational initiatives’. The more ‘cynical’
view would no doubt be that it, at best, compensates for the progressive loss
of other sites for ‘positing theories [and] exploring histories’, in particular
specifically political forums such as were once sustained by the Left, and, at
worst, risks aiding the wider processes of de-politicization at work in advanced
capitalist societies today, reducing such theories and histories to so much
fodder for art’s own reproduction. This would be a little too cynical perhaps.
If new forms of social connectivity have transformed the possibilities and
conditions of politics, and generated new kinds of transnational subjectivities,
as Sassen rightly emphasized, there is no reason to think that art might not have
a role to play in aspects of this. Yet it will have to make productive the social
contradictions inherent in the formation of any putatively global public space
around it. It is far from clear that, whatever good intentions it may have, shows
like Altermodern – let alone the concept accompanying it – actually contribute
to such a process.
Unsurprisingly, much critical reaction to Bourriaud’s Tate Triennial, in both the
mainstream media and blogosphere, has been unremittingly hostile. Some of
this can be put down to a typically parochial and conservative reaction to this
Frenchman coming over here, stealing our artists and peddling his ‘theory’. The
problem, however, is not the ‘theory’ per se, but the failure of such theory in
this instance to come even close to meeting the demands made by the forms of
cultural analysis that Bourriaud seems determined now to pursue. The current
returns to the modern in art theory, and in particular its return to the presentation
of the present as modern, are to be welcomed, and constitute the fairly minimal
interest of the concept of the altermodern itself. Yet if such returns are to be
theoretically meaningful, they require a reconsideration of what ‘we’ mean by
the ‘modern’ itself, not the mere pretext for some novel re-branding of art’s
supposed contemporary.
David Cunningham
University of Westminster, London
[email: cunninda@wmin.ac.uk]