Altermodernism: An Economic Misadventure

Tom Trevatt on Altermodern at the Tate Britain

Marcus Coates Firebird, Rhebok, Badger and Hare 2008 © Copyright the artist, 2008. Photo: Photo by Jo Ramirez

Nicholas Bourriaud, currently Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art at Tate Britain, and curator of this year's Tate Triennial, Altermodern, has developed not only an exhibition under this title but a concept. The above extract from the Tate website summarizes his position, which is expanded in the catalogue for the triennial. Whilst an overview of the exhibition in relation to the concept is an important task, one which has been carried out by various reviewers to date, I have chosen to take seriously the claims made in the catalogue essay in relation to a more general idea of contemporary art practice.

Bourriaud suggests that Altermodernism disassociates itself from what we might have termed the West, and instead formulates a global creolisation - the focus is not on origins, but on the current state of multiplicitous cultural positions, as heterotopic, globally networked. It is not an essentialism of genre, ethnicity, sexual orientation or nationality, as was multicultural postmodernism, which, as Bourriaud points out, was a reduction of an individual's being to identity and the stripping of significance back to their origins. Instead, it is the consideration of the subject free from those originatory moments, taking in common instead a globalised position. The Altermodernist focuses not on origins but on the freedom to travel, explore and move.

Bourraiud's claim is an ethical one. He suggests we have an "ethical duty not to let signs and images vanish into the abyss of indifference or commercial oblivion", he sees the position of the 'artist as nomad' as a response to this demand. His suggestion is that the altermodernist sees the world as a 'horizontalised’ base from which to build.

Charles Avery Aleph Null Head and Installation of drawings 2008 Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tate Photography

What is at stake in Bourriaud's claim, is a re-distribution of signs in relation, not to a discourse of multiculturalism, but to one of heterotopic ethics. This political statement of 'horizontalisation' or equalisation at the level of the cultural, as described by Bourriaud, is admirable. However, what is occluded in this project, what Bourriaud's altermodernism lacks for all its ethical posturing, is a real understanding of what problems confront us in this globalised aesthetics. In relation to the real inequalities present today altermodernism seems to have no answer. What contemporary crises show is that inequality is more clearly drawn across an economic register than a cultural one. The great divide between the rich and the poor marks out a territory of political discourse that the altermodern seems to make no claims for in Bourriaud's writing. In fact the homo viator of the curator's introductory text to the exhibition occupies a privileged position not afforded to either those lacking the resources to travel, or those so economically destitute as to be forced to travel. The formation of global actors is developed around the accumulation of capital, still the poor have no access to the arrangement of the common modern. Yes, it is a migratory and lingua franca populous that now confronts us, yet this has been formed in part due to vast economic differences and not just a cultural predisposition to travel, or an ethical determination to promote a horizontal world. Yes, the contemporary is defined by a nomadic flux, but still the lines of agency in this flux are drawn around a very particular modern subject. Artists, curators and regular biennialists, as well as dealers, gallerists and auctioneers, and even, we might add, artworks, operate peripatetically, but at what cost?

This has to be the exigent criticism of Bourriaud's new term; his telling of it focuses only on the cohesive potential of improved mobility, freedom for the few to determine their cultural experience through tourism (of whatever kind) without a coherent rendering of the cost to and restriction of the many. Bourriaud's Altermodernism disassociates culture from economics. Claiming that the altermodernist operates on a horizontalised field presupposes an engagement with culture outside of economic restrictions. This replaces eurocentricism (altermodernism's proposed enemy) with its historical counterpart, economic elitism, and denies the very possibility that Bourriaud’s writing could take a radical position in relation to the West. Within altermodernism, then, the viatorisation of forms and the archipelago-isation or networking of distinct elements, produces an excluded economic 'refugee' out of those economically incapable to enjoy the privilege of free travel. The discourse of altermodernity not only rejects a vocalisation of economic difference, but radically distracts attention away from it. The result is a valorisation of the artist as a nomadic producer, which superficially attempts an equalisation. Yet in its formation, this position misunderstands and, crucially, veils the importance of a critique of the effects of this globalised aesthetic, and indeed makes no attempt at a political assessment of globalisation in general.

Subodh Gupta Line of Control 2008 Courtesy the artist, Arario Gallery and Hauser & Wirth Zurich London. Photo: Tate Photography

What Bourriaud does not stretch to in his writing is a commitment to his term that would allow a radically different ethics to emerge. What could emerge from an understanding of the altermodern, but a position that Bourriaud himself does not occupy, is that it contains in it a revolutionary potential. That the verb form of alter, to change, could allow a radically democratic politics to determine the common ground of the modern. In fact, if we were to analyse the term altermodern the proposition would be significantly different.

If read as a demand to alter modernism, the altermodern is less description and more radical democracy. Jacques Rancière, writing on the subject of political emancipation, suggests that any politics worthy of the name concerns equality. An equality that arises only when traditional modes of operating are put into question. "Politics only occurs", he writes, in Disagreement,  "when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone". This presupposition of equality is the rub, it is an active determination by the less fortunate to change their situation by acting as though they are equal, rather than a passive demand for equality. For Rancière radical democracy can only extend from a presupposition of equality and the activity based on that presupposition. The excluded economic 'refugee' reveals the lacunae in Bourriaud's altermodernism; that it cannot account for an economic understanding of the movement of contemporary art. However, to shift Bourriaud's claim, to propose its political potential, we can read it as follows. The excluded 'refugee' must read the alter of altermodernism in verb form, as a rallying call, and presuppose their agency in the constitution of modernity.

Bob and Roberta Smith Off Voice Fly Tip 2009 Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery. Photo: Tate Photography

Bourriaud's Altermodernism, for all its claims of shifts of global perception and ethical refiguring, necessarily favours nomadic figures that have the resources available to maintain that lifestyle, to say nothing of the correct visas. What his theory excludes however is the artist, curator or spectator unable, for whatever reason (usually economic), to partake in the same global pantomime. This excluded element in his theory reveals the unthought gap that makes altermodernism just a modernism by another name. What, however, the very word allows us to construct is its own internal critique, by suggesting a revolutionary potential in the idea of altermodernism. In this way, and only in this way can we rescue Bourriaud's claims from their paradoxically unethical position.