Wednesday, February 18, 2009

 

ALTERMODERN

A review of the Tate Triennial Exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud

It is widely accepted that post modernism has done it’s job of critiquing modernism. So where does that leave us? In the post-post-modern era? No academic has been brave enough to stand up and use such a silly turn of phrase.

French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud has decided to try and answer the question about exactly where art is now in Britain. He decided not use the silly term post-post-modernism. Instead he has come up with his own silly term Altermodernism. Forgive the man, anyone who has read his books will know English is not his first language.

The critique of post modernism was all about disbanding the grand isms projects. It laid the way for a more pluralist go-your-own-way approach. Trying to create any thread through the whole thing is counter intuitive. The critics have been quick to point out this flaw in Bourriaud’s plan.

However don’t let them throw the baby out with the bath water. This is still a good show featuring the best artist in the country and it is trying to explain to the general public what is going on the artworld today.

Most people in Briatin still associates the contemporary art scene with the YBAs. It is 12 years since the Sensation exhibition that made their name but the satirical cartoons about them still run every fortnight in Private Eye magazine. Damien Hirst is an old hack now.

If you go into Goldsmiths College today you will not find YBAs there anymore, you will find students from across the world. Asians and American artist will far out number the British students. The art world is an international place with artists jes-setting across the globe from biennale to biennale. This is why Franz Ackerman’s abstract painting installations look like they are inspired by an airport coffee lounge.

Chinese Art is the big thing at the moment and most Chinese artists are too familiar with the idea of working in exile from their home country. This exhibition tries to make British artist look like trendy exiles from the home country. The rye cynicism in Bob and Roberta Smith’s billboards is perfectly pitched. His descriptions of his conversations with international art curator Bourriaud reads like the kind of postcards your Dad might send from a fashionable holiday resort that is a bit too hot for him. Marcus Coates’ video of his attempt to resolve the Middle East crisis with a badger on his head is also an equally astute. You can also study Charles Avery’s maps and drawings from lands he has travelled to in his imagination without the need for him to leave Scotland. Walhead Beshty’s ‘Fedex’ are series of glass boxes that are sent by Fedex delivery from show to show and exhibited as they arrive, full of cracks and damage. It is like is a work by Donald Judd that has been lost in the post for 40 years.

Other highlights of the show include the absurd self-mythologizing documentary by the wonderful Lindsay Seer, a girl who wanted to be a camera. Hey, welcome to the twenty-first century where you can be whatever you want to be.

Spartacus Chatwynn’s video wall is also typically self-depreciating. Her theme is carnival and festival which means sanctioned chaos and allowing things to go wrong for a little while. In other countries this means Mardi Gras and gratuitous sex with strangers, but in England it means playing old Sex Pistols records on the BBC Radio 2.

The finale of the show is an ‘GiantBum’ by Nathanial Mellors. The installation leads you through series of videos featuring three thespians performing a play about a clergyman stuck in a giant bum hole (what could be more British?). You are then lead through to a room containing the amazing animatronic heads that you have probably seen in the Guardian Newspaper colour supplements. Though the animatronic heads cannot fail to impress, but the real pay off for the clever people is the psychoanalysis and philosophical thought (and good old fashioned clever swearing) delivered by the thespians in the videos.

Though it is easy to paint Bouriaud as the curatorial equivalent of Inspector Clouseau, I would like to suggest that he is perhaps a more Jacque Tatti figure. This show is shot through with a sense of British wit, irony and self-deprecation. Our international jetsetting had made us aware we certainly ain’t super cool international freedom fighting artists. As Bob Smiths states ‘I wish I had voted for Barack Obama’.

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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

 

New Website...

Once again this blog has become woefully out of date. I don’t think I am ever really going to get around to filling in the missing entries.

However I have updated my website which now has loads of documentation from some of thing I have been up to in the intervening months, including the Montague and Campbell and Morris Projects :

www.frogmorris.net

Here are an extra videos that isn’t on the new site because it is on YouTube...


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