La Exforma

by Nicolas Bourriaud

Author of the influential Relational Aesthetics examines the dynamics of ideology

Leading theorist and art curator Nicolas Bourriaud tackles the excluded, the disposable and the nature of waste by looking to the future of art—the exform.

He argues that the great theoretical battles to come will be fought in the realms of ideology, psychoanalysis and art. A “realist” theory and practice must begin by uncovering the mechanisms that create the distinctions between the productive and unproductive, product and waste, and the included and excluded.

To do this we must go back to the towering theorist of ideology Louis Althusser and examine how ideology conditions political discourse in ways that normalize cultural, racial and economic practices of exclusion.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Theory, Cultural

124 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a curator and art critic, who curated a great number of exhibitions and biennials all over the world.

He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jérôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art (1992–2000), and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from 1987 to 1995. Bourriaud was the Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art from 2007-2010 at Tate Britain, London, and in 2009 he curated the fourth Tate Triennial there, entitled Altermodern. He was the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, an art school in Paris, France, from 2011 to 2015. In 2015, he was appointed director of the future Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier, France, due to open in 2019, and director of La Panacée art center.

Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics (1998/English version 2002) and Postproduction (2001). Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s. Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at the CAPC contemporary art museum in Bordeaux.

In Postproduction (2001), Bourriaud relates deejaying to contemporary art. He lists the operations discjockeys apply to music and relates them to contemporary art practice. Radicant (2009) aims to define the emergence of the first global modernity, based on translation and nomadic forms, against the postmodern aesthetics based on identities.

(from wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tomorrow, who knows what point of view will offer the best way to revisit the ruins of the world today?


The Exform felt like a necessary read after the first volume of Vollmann on Climate Change. One of the chief concerns about this crisis for WTV is the idea of waste and the consequent detritus in furthering the harm to planet. This accumulation of garbage, defunct ideas, post dated people is the point of departure for Bourriaud, who following Althusser sees the world as a series of constructive collisions, all the way building and discarding. Never cited is Marx's dustbin, which leaves me pondering Noddy Boffin and turns of fortune.


While the author appears concerned about artistic production and thus cites all sorts of aesthetic examples, his lodestars aside from Althusser appear to be the benchmarks Benjamin and Bataille, the latter's potlach in the Accursed Share demonstrating our present worth--as we toss our smartphones and flat screens into a landfill in an orgiastic triumph of our identity. Urban Planning leads to more favelas and Walmart will process your tax return.

[David W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hated reading this and couldn’t explain it without my class notes if I tried, but it fundamentally shifted the way I view media. I can’t recommend this to anyone other than philosophers and aesthetic / media theory fans, but it really is interesting (even if it is extremely esoteric).

[Martin Hare Michno · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes Nicolas Bourriaud a good forty pages before explaining what this book is about, and writes instead on how Althusser stormed into a talk by Lacan. But those forty pages leading up to the clarification are still great. This book is simply about ideology, art and waste. It's about how ideology, like the unconscious, works "behind our backs" to create a false (idea of) reality. Ideology thereby generates exclusion zones; things, people or waste that simply cannot be assimilated to this false reality: the undocumented worker, the madman, the chronically unemployed, or production refuse such as CO2 and plastic - essentially, the excess of materialism which does not fit into the ideal bourgeoise ideology. For Bourriaud, as I understand, art serves as a "point of contact", a socket or a plug, in the process of exclusion and inclusion - he calls this the exform.

[Gina Herald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another nod to capturing the body of the past via the detritus that no longer is relevant to "historical necessity". Whereas Whitehead (supposedly) referenced understanding the emotional (preconscious/unconscious) motivations of those who were vying for an alternative direction to history at the time, we also see Bourriaud tie this in as the metaphor of DNA testing on the passed away body. Art, Bourriaud has it, can exploit its sociocultural glorification by becoming a podium for its more dysfunctional aspects (according to capitalism)--namely its uselessness, its productive failures that "failed" to push the market or the standing narrative anywhere, its idleness. This, in order to bring past emotions of dead histories back into the present. By re-conversing in this way, they effect living agents. It brings the counter-narrative back into the world by restating the contained semiotic environment which enlivened the real drives toward an aim that history did not actualize. Then, by putting it in the museum environment (digital or physical), it becomes an atemporal image--alive in its own regard, in a place where it died, but now has become living again. It's important to note that this is not just remembrance, but reinstantiation. A series of facts spoken solely and obstinately from the standpoint of the given historical position is a remembrance, usually all references to the matter at hand are entombed in the past tense as a sign of the acceptance of future irrelevance. An attempt to resignify using atemporal language the matter in a pertinent semiotic environment where its emotions seem not only highly understandable, but even compelling, is reinstantiation. Interesting.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and thought-provoking string of tangentially related narratives from art history, psychoanalysis and cultural materialist philosophy. I think I enjoyed The Exform but I wish I'd read it without engaging with the blurb on the back as I'm not sure it delivered against the promise it was set up by it. A meandering string of interesting segments which lacks much in the way of a structure, the book forgoes a clear argument and replaces it with a hazy vibe of assertions and examples of artists' practices which only half support the claims made. If you read one book from the Verso Futures series, I'd recommend Psychopolitics over this any day.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fabulous little book is on a par with the best of John Berger. It is biting and insightful and addresses a number of contemporary issues not the least of which is rubbish, ausfall, garbage, detritus - that which is left over and discarded. He presents a wonderful image of the curators of museums and art galleries all over the world becoming overwhelmed buy the output of the art factory in the same way that as consumers we are overwhelmed by the production of the consumer society its negative analogue.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

going from an introduction to althusser over definition of ideology to string it into a line of different ages of art from modernism and to today in a brilliant manner. Must read for everyone interested in sociopolitical art critique

[Jorge Sibaja · Rating 3 out of 5]

not incredibly potent but still a decent read with some good ideas

[Barry Shitpeas · Rating 4 out of 5]

not exactly a page turner

[Jonathan]

The discarded, the between, the outside.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book! Though I'm not really sure what it was about...exactly...But lots of interesting things to think about. From the book: "...the Matrix, in which the simulacra governing human life are generated hails the protagonist Neo with the words, 'Welcome to the desert of the real.' This is what defines the void in our age: society is a simulacrum, decisions are made in a vague elsewhere, all political action seems in vain...to be able to act, then, one must view the real as a void. All political action starts here, in a dead zone."

Word.