Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the writer of Relational Aesthetics, and the co-founder and co-director of Palaise de Tokyo art space, one the Paris' most pioneering contemporary art galleries. For this Triennial, a representation of contemporary British art, Bourriaud has focussed his attention specifically on the Global Culture of our society and sees it as the entering of a new era beyond the post modernist state we have been used to and enters into a new discourse of art engagement where we look back to modernist discourse in order to look forward. A new Modernism is created on which is not informed by western cultures abstract language, but a new globalised Modernism. Stimulated by the economic meltdown as a turning point in world society and a time to reassess, we now look at the world from a Global community and not towards one. In this sense the merging of world cultures and our awareness of them leads to the need for a new thinking about the perception of Art and its relevant meaning in our new era. Journey form is the way Bourriaud describes it, the viewer taking a journey through time and space, approaching many 'scrambled' old regimes and established practice, but the works are made in a new way, interrelating beyond our previous readings of works. The reading of the work is more about the journey than the destination. Bourriaud's main and most sweeping statement is not only that Post-modernism is now obsolete but that its relevance at all was an anomaly, just an error in Modernism's grand design.
I find this a great misgiving, not only a reactionary opportunist and sensationalist statement to make with little to support it in the short timeframe since the economic downturn, but also a greatly arrogant one. Given the chance to curate possibly the biggest gig in contemporary British art, Bourriaud decides that Arts entire meaning should be reassessed to be in keeping with his rather spurious view of the world. It's not even as if this is in keeping with the rest of his writing, after Post-Production and Relational aesthetics which were very good and original views on where Art is heading, he seems to suddenly have changed tack and blurted out a whole new manifesto, to be in keeping with Zizek and Ranciere on the politics of aesthetics but at the same time extend and contradict their writings to a point that the last 80 or so years of art discourse never happened.
If you look not only at the current policisation of contemporary art and art criticism, but at the past few years since the height of post-modern thinking in the 80's, then I think of the most prominent writers at that time; Baudrillard, Eco, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari I still see their writing as incredibly relevant to today's society and how art practice is developed. Looking specifically at Baudrillard in relation to many of Bourriaud's chosen artists, Baudrillard's ideas of a loss of the real and the existence of only the simulation which has no original are easily related to those artists. David Noonan's Ritualistic and fictitious collage spaces, Simon Starling's Desk series, Nathaniel Mellors' Giant Bum installation with the cybernetic heads at its centre, and not to mention Charles Avery's completely fictitious society in which reality is a hidden other world, and the art he creates is relevant mainly to the fictitious world and not ours could not be more of a hyperreality. Many artists work that interests me, as I have mentioned previously deals with fictitious narrative and alternate, alien view points from which to perceive and comment on our world. Having said that, Bourriauds exhibition aims to that, also, but that doesn't make me any less of a Post Modernist or the triennial ant more Alter Modernist.
