The Radicant

by Nicolas Bourriaud, James Gussen (Translator), Lili Porten (Translator)

In ordinary language, 'modernizing' has come to mean reducing cultural and social reality to Western formats. And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own an altermodernity whose issues and features this book seeks to sketch out.In his most recent essay, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that the time is ripe to reconstruct the modern for the specific context in which we are living. If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century's modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization. To be it means setting one's roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a world art criticism in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.And if twenty-first-century culture was invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who insistently is emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation. This figure is accompanied by a domain of forms and by an ethical translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History, Theory, Philosophy, Criticism

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2008

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

[Clara Obligado · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una perspectiva muy interesante

[Kris :(( · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stonks

[PC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comentario a modo de memorándum personal:

“El artista radicante inventa recorridos entre los signos: como semionauta, pone las formas en movimiento, inventa a través de ellas y con ellas trayectos por los que se elabora como sujeto al mismo tiempo que constituye su corpus de obras. Recorta fragmentos de significación, recoge muestras; constituye herbarios de formas. Lo que hoy podría aparecer como extraño, es por el contrario el gesto de una vuelta al principio: la pintura, la escultura, ya no se conciben como entidades de las que uno se limitaría a explorar los componentes (a menos que se considere sólo segmentos de historia de estos "orígenes"). El arte radicante implica por lo tanto el fin del medium speciflc, el abandono de las exclusividades disciplinarias.”

“El artista radicante inventa recorridos entre los signos: como semionauta, pone las formas en movimiento, inventa a través de ellas y con ellas trayectos por los que se elabora como sujeto al mismo tiempo que constituye su corpus de obras. Recorta fragmentos de significación, recoge muestras; constituye herbarios de formas. Lo que hoy podría aparecer como extraño, es por el contrario el gesto de una vuelta al principio: la pintura, la escultura, ya no se conciben como entidades de las que uno se limitaría a explorar los componentes (a menos que se considere sólo segmentos de historia de estos "orígenes"). El arte radicante implica por lo tanto el fin del medium speciflc, el abandono de las exclusividades disciplinarias.”

[Sjonni]

Nicolas Bourriaud développe une théorie critique de notre environnement culturel qu'il désire qualifier d'altermoderne, une révision fondamentale du multiculturalisme postmoderne issu de l'anticolonialisme qui réduit toute production culturelle à l'origine de son auteur en faveur d'une vision de l'art non-linéaire, chaotique et globale. La portée de son discours dépasse l'interprétation de l'art moderne et rejoint bien au delà des vastes espaces virtuels ouverts par cette nouvelle civilisation mondiale qui s'édifie sous nos yeux. Je le comprends comme ça, du moins.

[Gian · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting thoughts about contemporary thought and art.