Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Altermodern
Having brought the blogscape and the Appleyard Adjustment triumphantly into the world, I take condescending pleasure in the neologising attempts of others. Take, for example, the Tate Triennial exhibition. Inventing labels for exciting new movements is, of course, the primary function of the mandarins of contemporary art. Indeed, the label is all that matters. This is where Charles Moore goes wrong. He actually went to see the show. This is quite pointless. Once you know the name - Altermodern - you know all that is essential. You can, of course, deepen your knowledge by reading the manifesto, but this is so dumb, so facile and so weirdly dated that you might be put off. It's as if M Bourriaud went to the dentist, picked up a twenty-year-old copy of The Economist and misunderstood it. With this infirm foundation, I doubt that Altermodern is going to become a household word.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
looks like this show is going to get a hammering! Waldemar Januscek was pouring scorn on altermodern and its silly title last week. Perhaps this show will mark the beginning of the current art world's gotterdamerung? One can only hope that british art moves away from the shallow one-trick sensationalism it is mired in at the moment towards a more durable approach of substance over style!
ReplyDeleteTaking the piss out of contemporary art speak is too much like shooting fish in a barrel.
ReplyDeleteI used to be a patron of the Arnolfini gallery, Bristol. Down by the waterfront, lovely bar. They were always forcing me to challenge my preconceptions. This got tiring eventually so I've taken a few years off to allow my preconceptions to lie fallow. They've almost grown back again now.
"Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation".
ReplyDeleteIs this another way of saying oils and acrylic are out, creosote's in.
Upon reflection having 300 good British miles between us and the Tate is advantageous.
Someone should have a quiet word in that bloke's ear, creosote is banned.
'is'being overtaken - I didn't see that. You are so right about creosote, Mystic
ReplyDeleteBrit,
ReplyDeleteI sympathise. I've had my expectations subverted so often, I no longer know which way's up.
'up' is such an outdated concept
ReplyDeleteIt did occur to me, whilst on the subject of art, that as the country is now on a (financial)war footing, a war artist's position needs to be created. We need someone who will be at least as cranky as the last one, Sir Stan, sketches on bogroll, gets the kicks from sniffing around toilet rims in public bogs etc.
ReplyDeleteAny prospective candidates ?
What is 'up'? In her new show, Upside Down: Myth, Gender and The Quantum Flux, Kirstine Schwartzkartoffeln's baroque photo-montages combine magazine cut-outs, pasta shapes and video installations to challenge preconceptions about the concept of 'upness'.
ReplyDeleteTo be 'up' presupposes a heirarchical structure that begins in geometry but extends across all human constructs into global politics and indeed the very basis of society. In works such as Down Boy! (2007) Schwartzkartoffeln argues that 'up' is a fundamentally male concept, steeped in phallic mythology and contrasting with more feminine directions such as 'left', 'across' and 'beside'. In a thrilling conclusion, the artist goes beyond mere reflection and into the more dynamic arena of the manifesto, calling for a complete overhaul of 'up'-based preconceptions and replacing outmoded male-dominated vertices with new directions along the more nurturing, horizontal axis.
See what I mean? Fish in a barrel.
"Taking the piss out of contemporary art speak is too much like shooting fish in a barrel."
ReplyDeleteBrit, Just because a target is easy doesn't mean you shouldn't hit it.
What is 'in'? Alongside his daring new show, Barrel in a Fish, grumpy contortionist Brit subverts performance art in a miasma of egregious buttocks ...
ReplyDeleteNo, I give up, I'm not up to the job. In the strictly non-phallic sense of the term.
The more I think of it, blogscape is good, the first and most fundamental of the Appleyard Adjustments. Blogosphere was always too much; though in some sense valid we cannot really conceive it and it can be unhealthy to try. Blogscape is the stunning vista we can make out on a particular day - educative, variegated and frightening enough.
Or as you do, Nick, hit it, hit it, pulverise it, bury it beneath a blizzard of bellicose prose, dig up the corpse, set fire to the corpse, smash the ashes into a ball and fire the ball into the heart of the sun.
ReplyDeleteI mean that as a compliment, btw.
ReplyDeleteAnd it was taken as such Brit, all I want to do is put a stop to people going around saying 'you can't hit easy targets'. If this terrible idea catches on, my work would collapse, I would be unable to pay yet more taxes to that prudent Mr Brown and my family would be reduced to stumbling around in rags and living in caves.
ReplyDeleteIm going to make a video installation of an endless loop of me running up to a man wearing a t-shirt that says 'easy target' and punching him really hard in the face in slow motion.
ReplyDelete