The 'Altermodern' Fallacy

Apologies for the long delay in publishing this. The worries of the work world seem to pervade much of my time.

A dear friend of mine was kind enough to invite me to latest triennial show at the Tate Britain for an evening of ‘Late at the Tate.’ Wandering about the gallery trying to dodge the tipsy few, we stumbled upon a giant mushroom cloud composed of stainless steel pots and pans from China. Visually and conceptually striking, it seemed to indicate the end of meaning as we know it – the current state of capitalism, globalisation, consumption, and the nation-state are all metaphorically vaporised, but replaced by what? This seems to be one of the many questions ‘Altermodernism’, the new triennial show, attempts to answer, albeit in a seriously flawed manner.

Stepping just past Subodh Gupta’s mushroom cloud, you enter the exhibition and are presented with a ‘manifesto’. The altermodern manifesto alleges postmodernism is dead, that ‘multiculturalism and identity are being overtaken by creolisation’; that globalisation is reshaping our understanding and experience of the world we live in; that a new universalism based on these themes of travel, communication, and blurred identities is at hand. All of this from a French curator, no less, the provocative Nicolas Borriaud, formerly of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. How, you wonder, could a Frenchman misread so many of his country’s great philosophers and theorists of the 20th Century? He certainly managed to take-up the dense, convoluted, and circular style of Derrida, while missing the subtler points of Foucault and the not so subtle, but still interesting, ideas of Baudrillard. Is postmodernism really dead and, if not, what is this show really about?

The term ‘postmodern’ was first used in the context of architecture in the early 1960s as a repudiation of the almost cult-like devotion to High Modern aesthetics ascribed by Mies van der Rohe and the like. Ten years earlier there were a new breed of theorists and philosophers in France, labelled structuralists (or post-structuralists – the latter often intertwined with the former), drawing heavily on Nietzsche, linguistic theory, history, and the occasional dabbling of psychology. These writers, of whom Derrida is perhaps the most famous, shunned specific labels and were hardly a monochrome group. Foucault writing in the mid-1950s, but more famously in the 1960s, was often grouped in with these theorists and was perhaps the fiercest opponent of labelling. By sometime in the 1970s, however, postmodernism seemed to be the label applied to this Diaspora of thinkers who questioned the universalism espoused by Modernism and the Enlightenment. The suspicion of universals and absolutes – or at least human understanding of them was - and is - a very poor adhesive to an eclectic pool of ideas. Wherever a movement, whether art-theory, literary-theory, gender-theory, music, media-studies, or the practiced arts, seemed to reflect even the slightest hint of normative identities or understandings, the term postmodern was applied.

Much abused, postmoderism became a vague term, but one that people enjoyed sloshing about and applying to anything fashionably ambiguous. Herein lies the problem: postmodernism is ill understood and, to a lesser degree, ill defined. The suspicion of universals and absolutes are key, as are the importance of social constructs shaped by history and language. Postmodernism often views technology as transforming agent that blurred identities and effaced meaning via a network of reproduction, leading to a culture of recycling. Baudrillard postulated that the global spread electronic communication would end meaning as we know it, whereby the original and the copy would be indistinguishable from each other – a world of “simulacra and simulation.” The implication is one of rampant globalisation that is both stratified and meaningless by language, history, and technological simulacra.

Borriaud’s altermodern manifesto uses a conceptually postmodern framework – that of electronic communication, globalisation, and ‘effaced’ identities. It is a postmodern world that has fostered ‘creolisation’. Of course identities haven’t been effaced for the vast majority of the world’s population. Outside of the global simulacra, history, identity, and language still hold great power over most of the world’s citizens. To suggest that identities mean less in contemporary society is elitist: the ability to transcend borders and freely adopt facets of other cultures – which ultimately is multicultural – is not universal. There is indeed a growing elite class that has a global identity, that travels internationally at regular intervals, that speaks more than one language, that has family and friends from other nations, but this is not the norm. This elite ‘global class’ composes much of the art-world’s exhibition institutions – the commercial gallery, the museum, the art media – and to a lesser extent the academy. Thus the posturing of an ‘altermodern’ art is within the framework of an isolated reality for the privileged art elite, themselves shaped by history, language, and identity, now slowly being destroyed by electronic simulacra.

If altermodernism is nothing more than postmodernism with a new wrapping, then why the name change? The aforementioned exhibition institutions have themselves been enslaved by the condition of globalisation. New customers and artists are needed throughout the world to sustain differentiation and consumption, feeding a simulacrum that recycles images and ideas at a rate that shames any ecological recycler of physical objects. In essence it is about money and fads – a need to create something ‘new’ in Galbraithian fashion to sustain business. Just as transmodernism, a term applied to certain ‘neo-Modernist’ architects, was essentially recycled and reconfigured High Modern architecture, a very postmodern idea indeed, altermodernism seeks to recycle the universalism of Modernism via creolisation in the decidedly postmodern framework of globalisation.

Postmodernism is not dead. Rather, its expression has changed and evolved. I hesitate to say there is a ‘next-step’ as this implies a false linearity that killed Modernism. It cannot be denied, however, that there have been some stylistic changes since the late 1980s when postmodern was the catch-all word applied to conceptual works that drew on myriad sources from a framework of identity. Identities change and shift, tastes come and ago, but these are all postmodern concepts. Altermodernism, though I detest the term, might be best thought of another postmodern movement, just as Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism were all Modernist movements. I would argue that most visual art movements since the late 1950s could be pulled under the postmodern umbrella. Postmodernism is misunderstood – it is not a style or movement. It is way of viewing the world, of constructing and understanding epistemes. It is likely another theory, condition, or approach will replace postmodernism – my guess is artificial-intelligence will play a role, but that itself is a postmodern paradox – but who can say when. In the meantime postmodernism is very much alive despite what the Tate Britain asserts in its melange of 21st Century works on display for the triennial.

Greg Lowe Copyright 2008