Pretend to be concerned about the world
Other works are more worthy and bland at heart but they make up for lack of menace with handsomeness. An accordion that is very big and looks rather amazing — "gosh, how on earth did the artist make that?" — is actually industrially made. Anyone could buy it if they had the money. The point of it in the show is that every day the artist, Ruth Ewan, puts the musical score of a different protest song on a music stand near the enormous instrument. The art lover scratches his or her head and gradually gets the message that correcting injustice is a big, big project. Subodh Gupta’s enormous mushroom cloud made of shiny Indian cooking pots is called Line of Control. This is also the name given to the India-Pakistan border. Both countries have nuclear weapons. (Yawn.) One set of works makes me laugh and another makes me cross or bores me. The reality is that artists today make up a new breed that is moronic and pseudo-intellectual and doesn’t know that it doesn’t know anything; but at the same time it can be genuinely quite creative.

The fundament
Mellors’s Giantbum — the film in "Altermodern" that seems a bit like Alfred Jarry — manages to be perfectly pitched and a comment on chaos. God mentally tortures his captives, who cannot escape from his bum. They wonder who on earth put them there in the first place. A woman’s voice calls out, "God is behind this behind!" The film is on different screens: you can’t be sure why. Is one the rehearsal and one the real thing? In one the players are in a building that looks like an art center, and they read their lines from scripts. But when it’s time for one of them to pull some shit out of his bottom the prop is there already, whereas if it had really been a rehearsal he could have just mimed it. In the other the setting is different, there seems to be a lot of plush red (like hell or an old-fashioned movie theater), whereas the other one was all white. In the red place the actors speak effortlessly from memory — but the performances are excellent in both. Are they acting acting? There is a shit-eating character who laughs like Doctor Evil from Austin Powers, a blond angry woman, and a boyish man who plays an innocent. There’s no beginning or end. The films are shown in a constructed corridor with the walls lined with heavy rough felt, which is nice to the touch. At the end of it you find yourself faced by a sculpture of three realistic heads of the same actor who played the evil shit eater. They’re on some kind of mechanical device incorporating sound speakers. Their mouths open and their eyes roll, and they speak and sing funny lines that join in with the disconnected chatter you can overhear from the TV monitors. Spellbinding? Or standard stunts from the artworld?

Ha ha
To give it the benefit of the doubt, "Altermodern" is about being entertaining and trying to stage certain proposals about the ruling ideas of the present. Bourriaud writes in the catalogue essay: "Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible for us to produce something that made sense starting from an assumed heterochrony, that is, from a vision of human history as constituted of multiple temporalities, disdaining the nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any kind of era — a positive vision of chaos and complexity." I came away feeling that diversity is the show’s main strength, but the feeling that it has any strength at all seemed a lot to do with "staging" as a value: the show is a triumph of design and installation (in the non-artworld sense of the word) not of great artistic accomplishment. If the message is open-mindedness — artists now are global nomads drifting and wandering and drawing on a vast range of ideas — at the same time there is a rigid law against making imagery in any way that fits a past model — or where giddy disconnectedness isn’t the reigning value. Earnest making is thought to be ridiculous. But earnest position taking is respected. This narrowness gives the show its vivid character. You might still complain, though, that to be vividly amusing about modernity is definitely an achievement, but despairing comedy isn’t the only register art has ever been capable of. How about some substance and belief and emotion? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, as the bitter laughter from God’s bum might have it.