What is the essence of meaning today? A new show enlightens us.
Smash all instruments
"Altermodern," curated by Nicholas Bourriaud at Tate Britain, features the work of 28 artists. Most are in their thirties and forties, and more than half are British. One — Gustav Metzger, whose autodestructive works of 50 years ago influenced the Who to smash up their instruments onstage — is in his eighties. The nonnatives are from all over: Delhi, New York, Yaoundé. I don’t know how wide any of their artistic horizons really are, though. The theme of the show is open-mindedness: a sense of all times being available to the present and the accessibility of all subjects. It’s true anyone can find his or her way into these artworks. But while no one is excluded no one will necessarily be greatly enriched by the experience, which is much more to do with style than substance.
Israeli mayor endures shamanic trance
Nobody could fail to find Marcus Coates quite funny in "Altermodern," doing a mad shaman act to the aged mayor of a small town in Israel, explaining the defensive tactics of the plover, and even demonstrating the sound of the plover’s call: a wry comment on peace, art, Joseph Beuys — a lot of things. In his film, Firebird, Coates wears a raccoon on his head and a stuffed hare pokes out of his jacket. The mayor doesn’t speak English — a translator conveys the gist of Coates’s comic shaman drivel, and the mayor earnestly pays attention, his expression veering between concentration and glazed but polite distraction. Coates’s whole outfit is blue and white (which happen to be Israel’s national colors). In the UK it would be called a shell suit. He has big sideburns and wears outsize Elvis sunglasses. The mayor wants to respect the situation but can’t necessarily swallow it — same as anyone going around "Altermodern" as a whole, I suspect.
Bush styling tips
Anyone can get into the art objects in "Altermodern," because they are not singular, focused, or intense. They spread out, they exist in time, they can be dipped into and they can be easily forgotten. They tend to be fragmented, either as if the thought is actually about fragmentation, or else as if thought association or thought-streams, however shallow and daft, are more true to (modern) life than thoughts that find a form or a metaphor that is densely layered or compressed, as painting for example tends to be.
Simon Starling’s installation exemplifies the first strand, where "design" becomes strange just by being put through a literal but rather neat alienation process. We see a set of slightly different stylish writing desks all based on a design by Francis Bacon (he created it for the author Patrick Wright), which has been reinterpreted by international designers who each received the same mobile-phone image of the Bacon design to work from, sent by Starling (who exhibits the results using the packing crates the objects were shipped to him in as sculptural plinths). Spartacus (formerly Lali; on her 33rd birthday she legally took the name of the slave who led a failed revolution against the Roman Empire) Chetwynd’s sexy video Hermito’s Children is in the latter camp. Shown on recycled retro-style TV sets, it proposes a kind of duality, or stoner-level double take, between comic avant-garde arty nudity that seems to be from another age on the one hand and up-to-date pubic hair trims on the other.
I am a camera
If today’s artists are sincere on the whole, nevertheless a lot of what goes on in the artworld is arch and false. Artworld people act sincerely within patterns and structures that are often rather empty. Marcus Coates’s joke on political futility is based on this paradox. The whole show is pervaded by it. An artist records the pattern of his brain waves while thinking of what to do for an exhibition. They become the basis for a sound installation. Another artist draws New Yorker-style cartoons of a whimsical fantasy island inhabited by pantomime monsters. Another one pretends she thought she was a camera as a child; it was disturbing and dreadful, so she thought she was a projector instead and that felt better. And yet another one writes a play that mimics the authority-baiting tones of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and is set in God’s bottom. All these works in "Altermodern" by Loris Gréaud, Charles Avery, Lindsay Seers, and Nathaniel Mellors, respectively, have a certain flair.
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.
Matthew Collings is Modern Painters’ London-based contributing editor.
"Getting to the Heart of God's Bottom" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.
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