Collateral at Fried Contemporary Art Gallery & Studio

©Fried Contemporary Art Gallery & Studio

Collateral attempts to reflect artists’ relationships with other artists, galleries, role models, designers, friends, the audience and a multitude of others, and to make manifest the idea that art is not produced and does not exist within a vacuum. In essence, the thematic focus of the exhibition is a response to French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s branding of a new term, ‘altermodernity’ in the Altermodern manifesto for Altermodern, the fourth Tate Triennial (2009) that he curated. Ushering in new perceptions about postmodernism and its tenets, the Altermodern manifesto reads as follows:

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
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. …
Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.

More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.

Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal.

The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.

If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.

We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today's art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The artist becomes 'homo viator', the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. 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 both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.

Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as 'time-specific', in response to the 'site-specific' work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space (Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern manifesto 2009).

In this manifesto Bourriaud suggests the end of the postmodern and the dawning of a new stylistic period characterised by relationist aesthetics. Already in a keynote speech to the 2005 Art Association of Australia & New Zealand Conference, Bourriaud coined the idea of the altermodern and explained that "Artists are looking for 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." The altermodern refers to hypermodern world with supermodern themes (Altermodern - Wikipedia 2009). Bourriaud's notion of altermodernity further proposes that globalisation and creolisation have induced new types of representation that emerge beyond the relativist scope of postmodermism. In an interview with Karen Moss, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programmes at the San Francisco Art Institute, Bourriaud comments: “What's an artwork? Any artwork materializes a relation to the world; if you see a Vermeer or a Mondrian, it's concretized, materialized, visible in relation to the world that they had. You can decode and interpret for yourself and use it for your own life. Or for your work if you're an artist. It's a chain of relations. History of art is about that — a chain of relations to the world. So, any artwork is a relation to the world made visible” (Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss 2002).

An artwork has no life sitting in the artist’s studio. It has to become public: be seen, experienced and discussed; it has to have a relation to the world existing outside the studio. Most galleries develop strategies not only to lure buyers but also students and art lovers into their space; they arrange walkabouts by the artists; invite speakers to open exhibitions; and solicit art reviews from the media in an attempt to get them involved in the total experience of the making and exhibiting of the artwork, that is, the holistic artistic practice proposed by relational aesthetics. And don’t forget the selling of the artwork, the exchange of hands, which is a significant part of the artwork’s life.

The relationship between the artist and audience is an important one. Artists mostly cannot wait for feedback – positive or negative – from newspapers, peers, academics and the public in general. Often they don’t hear anything back. According to Moss, “It's true for curators as well. You do have a certain voyeuristic opportunity when you are in a space and you can watch spectators viewing the work, or you receive response back if there's a publication. But often you don't get feedback” (Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss 2002).

The new interactivities that have emerged within the context of relational aesthetics can be viewed as the consequences of moving beyond the eclecticism and the multiculturality of the 1980s onwards to a liminal realm of global interfaces, diasporic identities and shared knowledge that has become the playground and point of exodus for artists. Concomitantly it could be viewed as a result of the development of interactive techniques in communication and information technologies. Our relationship with technology is a contentious one, speaking of dominance, dependency and losses of various kinds on the interpersonal and human levels, and one that has propelled us into a radical in-betweenness of ossicilating between the real and the virtual. Conversely, but not contradictorily so and supportive of the relationist premise, relations on the socio-cultural and the empathetic levels – mostly super-subjective in nature – have increasingly influenced artists’ subject matter and conceptual choices since the Nineties.

If everything is relationist, relative and connected to everything else, what is new? Have we done away with the idea of the avant-garde? Many writers nowadays find the idea of the avant-garde redundant and even ridiculous, arguing that ‘everything has been done.’ According to Bourriaud, it is the Modernist value attached to newness that is gone. Arguing that artists’ liberation from the need to be avant-garde has been mostly replaced by finding function, meaning and relevance in the conundrum of the present as well as in history, he states: “I think the most important thing is you don't have to be intimidated by knowledge and by history. Most people's relation to history can be summed up by this image of somebody trying to walk into a room with a lot of porcelain and fragile things and not wanting to break any of them. It's super-precious and it has to be kept exactly like it is. I think all these artists do exactly the opposite. Which is they don't care about any historical object, they just use it and try to understand what's in it. And these are two different ways of seeing history — first as a commodified history, doing nothing to change it - or revisiting it all the time and feeling totally free” (Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss 2002).

Today contemporary art seems to be more about issues and having applicability, relevance and utility value than about vanguardism. It makes sense that in the diasporic global ecumene, the notion of the avant-garde would imply a multiplicitous and therefore problematic understanding of its original meaning. Devaluing the notion of the ‘new’, though, does not mean that that the challenge to the status quo has disappeared or has been diminished in the light of coalition, reappropriation and revisitation strategies in artmaking. The artwork as essentially “post-production” (Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss 2002) and as not departing from the tabula rasa still demands technical virtuosity, relevancy and ingenuity from the artist – in short, maybe, the ability to touch a nerve.

Elfriede Dreyer

Sources quoted

Altermodern - Wikipedia. 2009. [O] Available:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altermodern

Altermodern manifesto. 2009. Tate modern. [O] Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss. 2002. Part I: Interview at the Walter McBean Gallery at SFAI, translated by Gabrielle Thormann [O] Available: http://www.stretcher.org/archives/i1_a/2003_02_25_i1_archive.php Accessed 12 January 2010.

Explore Altermodern. 2009. Tate modern. [O] Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/explore.shtm Accessed 1 March 2010.

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Website updated on 2012/01/16