Altermodernism: A Primer

Having not been to the Tate Britain’s Triennial yet, I’m just picking up snippets of what altermodern means. I’m going to collect them here with some notes.

From the official Tate website:

• “Designate the field of “what comes next” after postmodernism
  • Next question: when exactly did this happen? I would say postmodernism stopped a while ago
• Cultural answer to alter-globalisation
  • alter-globalisation, according to wikipedia, is globalisation with greater importance given to human rights, fair trade and ecological awareness. So, globalisation with moral principles. Gilles Lipovetsky defined this as “Global liberal democracy” in his book “Hypermodern Times”, which came about as there were no other viable world systems after Communism collapsed.
• Cluster of singular and local answers to globalisation in political field
  • I call this “Individualism” and has been going on/developing since the Age of Enlightenment.
• An archipelago of different answers
  • Individualism again. Lots of answer, no single “correct” answer, but people are choosing that they want.

From the official Tate website, weirdly, a manifesto

• Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe
  • Very Marc Augé sentiment from his book “Supermodernism”
• Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live 
  • Augé, Lipovetsky again. Changing world means changing people/culture
• 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.
  • Seriously, a manifesto?? Talking about “different answers” and “new energy”, and then try to restrict it with a set of rules/explanations? Talk about putting a shelf-life on it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this very short manifesto has not just put Altermodern into a rather dated category.

Just to make the point insulting simple, there a cartoon.

From wikipedia entry.

• an attempt at branding art made in today’s global context as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.
  • With a manifesto, HA! I’m not sure its “reacting against” in entirety. Some may be, some may be celebrating it. Some may just reflect it. I get the idea the anti-commercialism isn’t suppose to be there.
• Based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network
  • A sort of new multi-culturalism then? Just without the extremes? Some world cultures don’t have westen human rights, or even gender equality etc. So “connect”/”standardise”? Again, I don’t think this sentence was thought through.  
• “reloading process” of modernism
  • Dear lord, I hope not. I also don’t see any evidence of it apart from positive energy.
• four main facets of Altermodern: the end of postmodernism; cultural hybridization; traveling as a new way to produce forms; and the expanding formats of art.
  • Fair enough. But just  to point out this wikipedia entry is not very well written. It’s early days

From the Times

• 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
  • Translation: This is a comment about history. No longer “British history” or “American history”, but no all history are smashed together to make a “world history” that we’re struggling to make sense of as out-dated notions such as “nations” and “continents” still dwell in our understanding. And the big mix up is a good source of new ideas where “making sense” isn’t the primary focus.
• The Altermodern, it would seem, is essentially about global culture. The starting point of Post-Modernism, curators suggest, is the question “where am I from?” But now, thanks to such innovations as the internet, we need no longer define ourselves within traditional boundaries. The artist is a wanderer, drifting about in space and time, drawing from a vast, fluid fund of collective ideas.
  • Otherwise know as “flexibility” in everything, in our ways of thinking, in our locations but also in our political/philosophical reasoning. We change or minds, we change our place etc.
• It’s less a question of “what’s next”, Bourriard explains, than a question of “what if”. I can’t help thinking that for many it will be a question of “what’s that?”
  • People said that about postmodernism too. Hence why I wonder if this Altermodernism is correct yet.

From the Telegraph

• Walking through the show is like spending a few hours aimlessly surfing the net. A seemingly endless stream of politics, porn, science fiction, history, culture and science flows past you so fast that when you leave it is hard to say where you’ve been.

From Art Daily

• 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. Altermodern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world.
  • I predict a lot of issues/arguments/debates coming up over “when” this all happened. As modernism, postmodernism and whatever-modernism have some very blurry edges.

From the Guardian

• Modern art believed in the inevitability of progress. Postmodernism expressed the death of this belief. Altermodernism insists on a new radical possibility for modernity: it is a Good Thing.
  • So, newness, experimentalism etc. Is this Altermodern saying “This is art and we’re not screwing with you anymore”? 
• A new generation finding various ways to resist the standardisation of culture, while also rejecting narrow identities. They cherish the freedom of the global economy, but challenge its homo-genising effects.
  • Not happy with this use of standardisation. It sound too dated anti-capitalist rhetoric. I would say it more a celebration of variety and to resist things getting dull. “Rejecting narrow identities” is probably the most important thing said so far (I still call it Individualism)

From The Guardian review of the exhibition

• “Altermodern”, an “other” modern – a rootless modernism for the 21st century, a synthesis of modernism and post-colonialism, in which the artist “turns cultural nomad”.
  • Wasn’t Modernism already “rootless”? Didn’t it reject “traditions” entirely apart from what it took as its spiritual ancestors? Artist as cultural nomad? I would say that Erza Pound did that in Modernism, borrowing from Oriental traditions for his English poetry whilst living in Italy. Isn’t post-colonialism a postmodern ideal?

It seems there is a lot of confusion about what-is-what, and definition being less than consistant. The themes seem to be around the position of globalisation as a landscape, not as a source of anxiety. The anxiety seems to appear in not knowing exactly where this is going, or what it means (as show from the contradictions I’ve found).

What I think: This feels like Augé’s Supermodern (1995) and Lipovetsky’s Hypermodernism (2005), but with a lot more people projecting. What I will accept is that Augé Supermodernism is the ethnographic/scientific aspect, Lipovetsky’s Hypermodernism is the philosophical/sociological/economical (maybe) aspect and Bourriaud’s Altermodernism is the artistic response and reflection aspect. They all do boil down the same principle: The world of Globalisation (meaning more travel, new communications, individual nations becoming less important economically/politically), but all three took it into different directions. 

I just feel that Altermodernism as a definition may already have been hijacked.