The world is changing culturally as well as economically. Just as we are returning to formerly discredited economic values and models—like nationalisation and pump-priming—older aesthetic values and models are also coming back into vogue. An early sign of this is the title of this year's Tate Triennial, Altermodern. That's a neologism, coined by the show's celebrated and imaginative French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud, and it contains big implications for how our view of art might change.
Altermodern is nothing less than an attempt to define a new "ism," and thereby to rehabilitate the 19th-century art historical concept that each age has its own distinctive style or small group of styles—mannerism, romanticism, expressionism and so on. Such words went right out of fashion in the last quarter of the 20th century. Artists were individuals, we were told, and there was far too much diversity and complexity in the world for it to be subsumed into grand narratives. The result, however, has been two decades of art whose direction and significance has been unclear: something that has benefited galleries that, in the absence of any definition, sell anything at all as "contemporary." As Bourriaud pointedly says in his catalogue essay, "We have an ethical duty to find words to animate signs and images as something other than products destined for financial speculation or mere amusement." A bit pretentious, admittedly, but you get the point: we've been sold a lot of crap recently.
Altermodernism is actually Bourriaud's second grand definition. In the 1990s, he coined the term "relational art," meaning art in which the spectator played a part. His new definition focuses on "three sorts of nomadism: in space, time and among the 'signs'." What he means by this is artists who travel a lot, come from all over the world, and who collage all kinds of elements from different cultures together. It is an art where "trajectories have become forms," giving "the impression of being uplifted by an immense wave of displacements, voyages, translations, migrations of objects and beings."
Bourriaud has a poetic turn of phrase. Yet exhibition visitors with some knowledge of history, art history and literature may struggle to identify what is truly new. Certainly, much of this art conveys the incessant travel and intermingling of globalisation. The German painter Franz Ackerman, for instance, has contributed an evocative installation with bright paintings (one revolving like an advertising sign), a large floor-standing minimalist geometric grid and piles of jars and plastic flowers. This seems to synthesise abstractly the colours and shapes of commercial design, airports and shopping malls, as if passed through at speed. Yet its lurid style is firmly rooted in 1960s pop art.
So what's new about Altermodern? The revivalism itself is the key. Alongside the sensations of a flattening of hierarchies and a compression of geography, there is the pervading sense that we have gone back to the spirit of 19th century symbolism and history painting—armed with all the technologies and forms of conceptual art. The novelty thus resides in the new ways thatforms and ideas are syncretised. The gallery conveys, for instance, the fresh sensation of the "globalised sublime": the awe we get from experiencing many far-flung cultures being pressed together in one space. "All the Dead Stars" (2009) by Katie Paterson, meanwhile, demonstrates a new kind of fission: her work is literally a map of the universe's dead stars—sparkling white dots on a black ground. It is astronomy crossed with abstraction, compressing infinite space into a modest canvas.
And there is something else that should help Bourriaud. Traditionally, defining an "ism" has been more successful at prodding artists in one direction than at describing what already exists. Judging by the deluge of relational art that followed the publication of his Relational Aesthetics in 1998, we may see much more altermodern art in the years to come.
