Altermodern at Tate Britain; badges, global culture and all of us

Above my desk is a poster that says “all artists are cowards”, it is an exhibition poster for an artist called Bob and Roberta Smith and every time I look at it I smile.

Bob and Roberta Smith are one of the many new rising talents who have been chosen by Nicholas Bourriaud to be part of the Altermodern exhibition at Tate Britain. The conceit of the show is based on his naming what he sees as the next movement in contemporary art that replaces post-modernism. A post-post-modernism, that encompasses the global, networked, intercultural existence many of us now live in and some of us are immersed in.

The show is funny, clever, curious and encapsulates something about the 21st century that has a real resonance. The wall paintings in Franz Ackermann’s installation are like looking at a networked digital space from the inside. They seem to map some strangely familiar visualisation of online spaces and the cyber journeying that takes us between digital information and its interactions.

This idea of the (alter)modern journey comes also into Walead Beshty installation of Fedex boxes. These large glass cubes that bear the marks of their travels between the artist and a variety of destinations, are like the scars of environmental damage or the dangers of too much travelling on the human soul. The corners are cracked, the glass is broken and they seem sad, lost and rather beautiful.

Loris Greaud installation (wires attached to boxes that resonate and vibrate the physical architecture of the room in time to flashing blue lights) seems to take you deep inside his head. But unlike the Ackermann paintings that seem to portray an internal digital space in a very public domain, this work takes you into the very intimate personal space of the artist’s own thoughts and brain waves.

Bob and Roberta Smith is adding a new piece of work to the show each week. It’s creation starts with a conversation with the curator at 11am on a Monday morning which is then developed to becomes a new work to be placed somewhere in the gallery. Each new piece stays insitu for a week before being moved to a public storage area – a kind of art lost property area – where each piece can be moved aside. Each of the works possesses the same humour and cut-the-crap satire that I have come to know and love from my office poster. One expresses the regret “ I wish I would have voted for Barack Obama’ another simply states next to its found object sculpture consisting of a trumpet and megaphone ‘I was up all night making this’.

There is a lot more worth seeing – the quietly breathtaking moonscapes by Darren Almond, Simon Starling’s replica desks that encapsulate the loss of detail and signal that comes over distances. You need at least two hours to do the show justice, of which at least 20 minutes is needed to watch Lindsay Seers ‘quasi-documentary’ about her own life as an artist and the impact that not speaking until she was eight had on her artistic development. In particular her time spend as both a human camera and projector. I left her projection space totally unsure if any of it was true but full of big questions about the nature of communication and seeing both inside and outside of us.

You can also for an extra 65p buy a badge and be your very own Bob and Roberta Smith. I did and am.

MA2007 Maurice Davies “Empower Don’t Control”

Maurice was in great form for his keynote, passionate and you can tell that he really does believe what he is saying.

He asks “If museums as the new churches of society, then we need to do more than just encounter and celebrate, we need to inspire”

He would like to see museums matter to society and see their exhibitions have as much impact as an opera, play, book or individual work of art to create a full experience that does more than just interpret. His sites examples of exhibitions that have had a key individual at the heart of the vision, individual artists or designers that are from outside the museum world.

This sounded to me like a call to work with the Arts Council more closely.

Will Hutton yesterday was talking about all the cultural sector being on the same page, so that places museums alongside the Arts Council world who have a lot of experience of commissioning exhibitions and large scale installations with artists.

I wonder what would happen if this kind of partnership started to happen? Museum curator’s skill sharing with visual artist organisations with a view to commissioning artists to create the kind of experiences that Maurice talks about (again, this comes back to Will Hutton’s point about the experiential economy – this is the growing area of the creative industries).

In the ACE visual art strategy ‘Turning Point’ they talk about the need to bring together the historical and the contemporary and that is the same as what Maurice was saying about the need to “connect to contemporary issues” and to “interpret the past and the present”.

I wonder how long it will take for this type of partnership to be a requirement from government and not simply an idea? I believe that there is a lot of ways that the MLA and ACE could help each other – not to dictate or overtake, but to exchange expertise, criticisms, success and failures – and I know that there are some organisations that are already leading this.

Personally, I’m not sure that this vision of inspiration should be an expectation of all museums. I quite like things that I can just encounter, things that are just there for me to see, that are not trying to change my life – who wants a life changing experience every day?

But Maurice is right that at their best, the kind of profound life changing shows that are possible in museums are the aspiration that the sector should strive for.

Tate’s first public call for participation in Flickr

For the first time, Tate is inviting members of the public to contribute to the content of an exhibition. About How We Are Now

The only restrictions are a max of four per group and all photograph must be taken in the United Kingdom and illustrate and be tagged with one of the four themes of the exhibition: portrait, landscape, still life, documentary.

The group’s photographs will be displayed on screens as part of the exhibition at Tate Britain and will also be posted and shared on the exhibition website at Tate Online and on the website of the exhibition (The Observer).

In the final weeks of the exhibition, 40 photographs — 10 from each of the four themes — will be chosen by Tate to form the final display in the gallery through August. A panel of curators, artists, photographers and others will select the final 40 photographs. The final 40 photographs will also be archived on Tate Online as part of the exhibition’s website.

Day of the Figurines

Just been listening to Matt Adams from Blast Theory talk about their new online SMS game Day of the Figurines.

It is interesting that the technology available to artists now seems to have caught up (almost) with the ideas. I remeber when I was first commissioned any digital art in 1993, what you had was a Mac LC and photoshop and that seemed very cool. But artists always wanted to do more and the ideas were always more interesting that the results. I guess in some ways this is still true but the gap is closing and the technology is becomming less of an issue and more of a tool.

The game they have build warrents attention, it is curious and exploritory and I like the idea of SMS being a cultural space. Where are the new cultural spaces beyond the museums and galleries. Discuss.