Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009.

ALTERMODERN: TATE TRIENNIAL 2009

Franz Ackermann, Darren Almond, Charles Avery, Walead Beshty, Spartacus Chetwynd, Marcus Coates, Peter Coffin, Matthew Darbyshire, Shezad Dawood, Tacita Dean, Ruth Ewan, Loris Greaud, Subodh Gupta, Rachel Harrison, Joachim Koester, Nathaniel Mellors, Gustav Metzger, Mike Nelson, David Noonan, Katie Paterson, Olivia Plender, Seth Price, Navin Rawanchaikul, Lindsay Seers, Bob and Roberta Smith, Simon Starling, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Tris Vonna-Michell, Tate Britain, London.

The man who fostered the regular use of the artspeak term relational aesthetics" to describe the near end of postmodernism now brings us another term: "Altermodern" While many people are hesitant to put labels on things, Nicholas Bourriaud is an exception. An unabashed taxonomist, he has put the kibosh on the "one thing followed by another" exercise that has been plaguing modernism and its descendents. Altermodernism attempts to free itself of postmodernism's stranglehold, classifying the unclassifiable whilst trying to tame the conformingly nonconformist ways of artists. It seems Bourriaud is pandering to a grander stage for this neologism to be recognized on a greater cultural scale. Case in point, a look at the exhibition's website reveals that there is a lot of didactic material: a cartoon based on a french fry named "Chipiski the Altermodernist," short videos with Bourriaud explaining the term and a manifesto proclaiming that postmodernism is dead and breaking down the basic themes of altermodernism. There is even a Facebook application attuned to the teenaged girl in all of us: a quiz to determine to what extent one is altermodern.

Bourriaud says that "alter" is equivalent to otherness. It appears he is suggesting some post-colonial form of art for everyone, but I can't help but think of Said and wonder what he would say to this, especially since Bourriaud is a white, French male. Are artists and their art cultural others? He also states that history is the new continent, but it sounds to me like these statements are all leftovers from postmodernism. Has he lost his way a little, forgetting that his job as curator is to reveal how this art addresses and describes a new cultural moment, not necessarily to manufacture a overarching historical exegesis? It seems that in this sense the exhibit fails, as Bourriaud stretches to arrange art to serve his context, rather than have his curatorial framework emerge from the art. However, this observation should not detract from the art itself.

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Among the 28 artists, there are the usual impressive names: Franz Ackermann, Tacita Dean, Bob and Roberta Smith and Simon Starling. More importantly, there are strong presentations from young upstarts. Some hits, some misses, but overall, a notable and huge overview of what is happening in contemporary art today. According to Bourriaud, altermodern art features themes of travel, borders and exile, all part of today's reality in the advent of globalization and the increased frequency by which issues of displacement and expanding boundaries appear. While still relevant today, these themes are not new, having prevailed within modernism. Many of these artists are dislocated from their birthplaces, superficially supporting the international tone of altermodernism; however, upon closer inspection, the exhibition belies localization and reinforces centralized cultural production. With 26 of the 28 artists either being of European descent or residing in Europe or America, the premise breaks down.

Set in the north Duveen Gallery, the front hall of the exhibition has a hush-hush museum atmosphere. It could not be a more perfect space for Ruth Ewan's best-in-show Squeezebox Jukebox (2009), a giant built-to-scale sparkly accordion. Made in Castelfidardo, Italy, the international capital of accordion builders, it is the world's largest working accordion. Every day, two people standing on stools play protest songs from Ewan's collection that is titled "A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World." It is a clever instrument (pun intended) of leftist ideology, illustrating its struggle for social change with an oversized, clumsy and inelegant object.

Franz Ackermann's <<Gateway>>Getaway (2008-09) is a jarring, visually confrontational installation featuring a psychedelic painting, a video and a large metal cage. < <Gateway> >-Getaway provides a big splash that makes the art after it appear grey and boring, which is exactly what I experienced when I walked into a room of Tacita Dean's melancholic series of photogravures on paper entitled The Russian Ending (2002). My eyes were too busy recovering from Ackermann's visual assault to care about what I initially thought were stodgy old black-and-white photographs. Dean's work suffers from its poor contextual placement, not from its content, for she crafts tragic endings to imagined films that are based on the visual narratives of historical images.

Aside from this misstep, the rest of the show manages to regain balance. There is a strong showing from super-multidisciplinarian Loris Greaud, who elegantly transforms the interior gallery spaces in Tremors Where Forever (Frequency of an Image, White Edit) (2008). Using a series of futuristic and all white "micro vibrators" Greaud communicates his brainwaves, having converted them into electrical frequencies. The result: viewers experience the now physical brainwaves through their feet as pulsating bass is broadcasted through the vibrators. It is an aesthetic, technological, conceptually and technically dense installation. Also noteworthy are Walead Beshty's FedExed shatterproof glass boxes (seen previously at the 2008 Whitney Biennial) paired with photographs. Printed from negatives sent through an airport X-ray machine, these images and the FedEx boxes reveal his process as recorded by international transit.

Just as the show is about to recover from motion sickness, Nathaniel Mellors' video/ animatronic installation, Giantbum (2009) revives the sick as a nightmarish nuisance. Housed in a partially covered, foul-smelling maze-like environment, the visitor is led through a dark tunnel containing videos of actors rehearsing and performing a play (written by Mellors), which is staged inside a giant and his bowels. In the play, coprophilia and cannibalism are presented as a method of cultural regeneration. At the end of the tunnel is a white room featuring three animatronic heads groaning and moaning with their eyes rolling about. It is ridiculous, with no apparent reason for using coprophilia as subject matter, except that it is taboo.

Luckily, the exhibition redeems itself with Subodh Gupta's Line of Control (2008), a phrase used to describe disputed territories from Bosnia to Kashmir. Not to be missed, the towering mushroom cloud of stainless steel kitchen accessories gleams and threatens to engulf the viewer in all its marketplace majesty. It symbolizes the explosive point where the mundane everyday clashes with political reality in the chasm between tension and resolution. To me, this work is an apt reflection of what is happening now in art--artists struggling to define a new position of global being through an aesthetic language--regardless of whatever framework Bourriaud is attempting to construct. The curator tries a little too hard here to provide an answer to art's ongoing existential nightmare and the show suffers at the hands of Bourriaud because he overasserts his ideology of altermodernism. Let the art speak and leave it at that.