Altermodern and the nomads
There is an interesting video of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the 4th Tate Triennial, explaining his conception of Altermodern. Bourriaud is also writing a book, The Radicant. From the publisher’s site:
To be radicant: 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 mode: translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate.”
It sounds almost like nomadology or psychical nomadism: the practice of taking as one needs from any moral, religious, political, ethical, or whatever system, and leaving behind the parts of that system found to be unappealing.
I suppose the key difference is the Radicant sounds more inclusive while the Nomad is more deliberately making decisions about what should be discarded. Both concepts appeal since they seem to work against any kind of cultural studies approach that great ouroboros and cul-de-sac of academic thought.
Another book to add to the reading pile.