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Review Feb 10 2009 « | »
Altermodern at the Tate Britain Triennial It is usually best not to spend a review labouring over the conceptual coat hanger that holds an......

Jon Openshaw

It is usually best not to spend a review labouring over the conceptual coat hanger that holds an exhibition together (that's what press releases are for), but in the case of the Altermodern it is such a Big Idea (with capitals) that the show would be hard to piece together without using it as a scaffold.

Nicolas Bourriaud, co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo and the man who gave us relational aesthetics, uses the Tate Triennial to explore a new idea - the Altermodern. Exploration is the emphasis here and although Bourriaud has been criticised for creating false coherency out of chaos, he is only really asking questions. As he puts it "when I have answers, I write a book, when I have questions, I put on a show".

His key question is what's the next step on the exhausted arch that is post/modernism - an arch that declared universality but was actually purely occidental in its outlook and excluded far more than it included? The modern has always created the 'primitive' as its counterbalance, a relationship brought into shocking relief at the 1984 MOMA show 'Primitive in 20th Century Art'. What was ostensibly an act of inclusion was actually an exercise in cherry picking 'artworks' that appeared to reflect a particular Western aesthetic. Bourriaud takes the recent financial collapse as an opportunity to challenge the totalising linear trajectory of modernism and instead asks questions about the contextualised clusters that make up the global.

So far, so good, so French. The problem is that an exhibition made up of incomplete questions feels a bit like logging on to Facebook or Stumbleupon.com only to check your watch and realise that two hours of your life have disappeared and you don't quite know how. This sounds like a criticism, and in some ways it is the big challenge of the exhibition, but it also seems to be its aim. This is the art of transit, based in and reacting to a ceaselessly connected and yet disjointed world.

Walead Beshty deals with this in his Fed Ex sculpture series, commissioned in 2005 and formed in the 'dead space' of international airspace as the glass boxes are smashed on route to each new stopping point (exhibition). Tacita Dean's 'The Russian Ending' takes time as a divergent and shifting object, building from the early 20th Century practice amongst Danish filmmakers of making two alternate endings - a happy one for the American market and a tragic one for the Russian. The resulting scribbled photographs are both amusing and absorbing.

London favourite Lindsay Seers is also in good form here, with 'Extramission 6 (Black Maria)' weaving a compelling factual-fictional narrative of her life through a DVD projection contained within a cardboard model of Edison's Black Maria. This pseudo-documentary is a powerful amalgamation of subverted flows - truth, travel, time etc. The multimedia instillations are amongst the most powerful works in the Triennial in fact, with Marcus Coates and Gustav Metzger providing equally encompassing works.

There are of course some duds. For me, Franz Ackermann's '-Getaway' was a sanitised nightmare of a neon-daubed '80's rave, whilst the bland obviousness of his theme did very little to carry the visual assault. And the less said about Simon Starling's 'Three White Desks' the better.

This is an exhibition to revisit however, and you do get the feeling that things are 'going on' here. It will open up ideas and prompt conversations, which is more than can be said for many exhibitions (not least the last Triennial).

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