{"id":400627,"date":"2009-04-02T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400627"},"modified":"2022-06-13T19:09:13","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T18:09:13","slug":"a-modernseg-fokozatai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/a-modernseg-fokozatai\/","title":{"rendered":"Degrees of Modernity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Since there is an argument that we are now living at the \u2018zero hour\u2019 of a new modernity, in which information is available simultaneously and transterritorially, new possibilities are opened up for comparison in contemporary art. The three exhibitions discussed all deal with the phenomenon of national representation within a globalised art context. Arctic Hysteria<\/i> is a show of Finnish art curated for an international audience, Mi Vida<\/i> is an exhibition based on a Spanish collection of international art, while Altermodern<\/i> is the 2009 edition of the British art triennial that trespasses national borders.<\/p>\r\n

The curator of the latter is Nicolas Bourriaud, who offers not just an ambitious exhibition, but a provocative contribution to current thinking about globalisation and the position of contemporary art within it. The term \u2018Altermodern\u2019 is at the same time the title of the exhibition and an attempt to describe the period that followed postmodernism. It has roots in the idea of otherness, multitudes of possibilities and alternatives to a single route, and is related to the more widely recognised notion of \u2018alterglobalisation\u2019, that refers to the \u2018plurality of local oppositions to the economic standardisation imposed by globalisation.\u2019<\/p>\r\n

The starting point for reading the present, according to Bourriaud, is the \u2018death of postmodernism\u2019 for which he offers an insightful analysis of its two phases. The first phase belonged to the 1980s and was characterised by the \u2018eternal reversions of modernist forms\u2019, this was succeeded after 1989 by a \u2018multiculturalist mythification of origins\u2019, expressed through the question \u2018where do you come from?\u2019 and identified with genre, ethnicity, sexual orientation or nation. Although the ideas that characterise the \u2018altermodern\u2019 are themselves open to question, they can provide useful keys to understanding the present moment of contemporary art, including the issues raised by the two exhibitions in Budapest.<\/p>\r\n

Arctic Hysteria<\/i>, as essentially a national show, relates to what Bourriaud calls the post-modernist \u2018neurotic preoccupation with origins typical of the era of globalisation\u2019. The Finnish show, camouflaged behind a larger geographic entity – Arctic – which covers only a narrow northern strip of the country, takes as its starting point the exploration of national clich\u00e9s. This is to some extent itself a clich\u00e9 in curatorial approaches to national survey shows, however, Arctic Hysteria manages to go beyond this frame of reference by pushing its clich\u00e9s to an extreme in order to appeal to the international audience at PS1 New York, for which Arctic Hysteria<\/i> was originally conceived.<\/p>\r\n

The most resonant works in the show are those that refer to globally recognisable issues, such as Ilkka Halso\u2019s series<\/a> the Museum of Nature<\/i>, which depicts views of the natural wilderness getting \u2018museumised\u2019<\/a>. Mika Taanila\u2019s film is about futuristic living pods<\/a> that already in the 1970s probed the limits of the modernist technological imagination. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen\u2019s Complaints Choir<\/a><\/i> is itself a transnational work whose formula has been popularly employed from Budapest to Singapore.<\/p>\r\n

A common reaction to Arctic Hysteria<\/i> in Budapest was \u2018what would Hungarian art look like if given the same treatment\u2019 and if so, which national stereotypes would be available for curatorial repackaging? This however is a post-modernist trap, as it is a submission to the homogenising standards of the international art world. In this sense, Arctic Hysteria<\/i> is one degree less contemporary than Altermodern<\/i>, which instead privileges local difference and opposition to the globalised art model.<\/p>\r\n

Mi Vida<\/i> is from the point of view of exhibition design better produced than many recent shows in the Mucsarnok and manages to break up the cavernous space by blocking off communication along the side wings and for once resisting the temptation to fill the walls with unjustifiably massive projections. The four smaller projection rooms accessible through dark passages create appropriate environments to appreciate intimate works such as Kimsooja\u2019s poetic film<\/a> A Laundry Woman-Yamuna River, India<\/i> and Jesper Just\u2019s emotionally-charged video<\/a> No Man is an Island<\/i>, although the pitch black in some cases makes it impossible to read the wall labels. Candice Breitz\u2019s Mother<\/i> familiar to many from the 2005 Venice Biennial, remains a faultless post-Freudian incantation of the cinematic tropes of the mother<\/a> daughter relationship and is a good counterpart to the previously mentioned film.<\/p>\r\n

The major drawback of Mi Vida<\/i> is connected to its origins in a collection of a \u2018Museum of the Present\u2019. When contemporary works are uprooted from their original setting and reduced to a bare state of objecthood, for which the only context that counts is their financial value, they very often lose some of their ability to communicate and directly affect the viewer. Bourriaud in his text for Altermodern<\/i> is convincing about the dangers of the hyper-marketisation of contemporary art, when he warns against making art into a \u2018secondary type of merchandise in a system of values entirely oriented towards this \u2018general and abstract equivalent\u2019 that is money.\u2019<\/p>\r\n

The several works in the show that represent the horrors of war come across as voyeuristic and exploitative through their presentation within a purely visual and aestheticising context. Likewise Marina Abramovic\u2019s Balkan Erotic Epic<\/i> functions in this objectified setting as a spectacle of self-colonisation<\/a> for the Western gaze with its sensationalist reinterpretation of the erotic secrets of South Slav folk culture.<\/p>\r\n

Thinking in terms of modernity, this show of a famous international collection exemplifies the Mucsarnok\u2019s current devotion to the laws of the art market, which is expressed through the prominence it gives to the Budapest Art Fair, offering the entire space to private collectors, and foremost in the fresh practice of VIP private views. By seeking to adopt the forms of the global art market\u2019s structures at the cost of diminishing the best of local art traditions, such as democratic rules for exhibition openings, the institution scores less on the scale of modernity, since it fails to question the unconditional rule of the art market.<\/p>\r\n

Altermodern<\/i> as a show disappointed those brought up on the glamour and spectacle of the Saatchi era. Generally Bourriaud did not go for the celebrity artists, but rather for \u2018alter-celebrities\u2019, such as Gustav Metzger. Subodh Gupta\u2019s gigantic mushroom cloud<\/a> Line of Control<\/i> made out of aluminium cooking pans<\/a> and Ruth Ewan\u2019s giant accordion Squeezebox Jukebox<\/i> in a sense push the clich\u00e9s of British art over the edge. While Walead Beshty\u2019s installation of Fedex Sculptures<\/i>, damaged glass cubes fedexed around the globe<\/a>, points to the critique of the overproduction and overcirculation of contemporary art, one of the most compelling works is Nathaniel Mellors\u2019s Giantbum<\/i> installation, which takes the viewer on a coprophiliac journey<\/a> inside the hermetic netherworld of modernist obsession.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since there is an argument that we are now living at the \u2018zero hour\u2019 of a new modernity, in which information is available simultaneously and transterritorially, new possibilities are opened up for comparison in contemporary art. The three exhibitions discussed all deal with the phenomenon of national representation within a globalised art context. Arctic Hysteria […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630574,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400627"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2023687,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400627\/revisions\/2023687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}