Thanks for your comment. As an art student, I am merely trying to understand this new terminology that you have proposed. I myself am someone who is practicing across cultural boundaries, and am often travelling to other places; I can see myself as a product of the altermodern. Your paradigm was particularly resonant for me, as I am extremely self-conscious of my position of advantage; not many people can afford to create work in a globalized manner, and I feel that the cosmopolitan trend is reserved only for the most visible and, by default, the most privileged of artists. Hence it is hard for me to imagine that all artists have full access to information and that they “all use the same toolbox, from Stockholm to Bangkok”. So I suppose that my question is similar to what Bartholomew Ryan posed in your Art in America interview (here)– that altermodernism “could be said to describe only a new cosmopolitanism that is accessible to relatively few” – maybe you can elaborate on that.

Second, my aim was to adress those issues in the aesthetic field, not to write a political statement ; maybe talking about art sounds too “bourgeois” for you? Then, you frighten me, because Jdanov’s ghost is not so far… You seem to think that it is futile to speak about anything else than environmental problems.

I believe that artists, like everyone else, hold some sort of social responsibility. I understand that you are writing from the aesthetic field, but does being in the field of aesthetics excuse us from thinking about the world from a wider perspective? Not just in terms of ecological problems, even. As Dave Hickey once said, “art is never apolitical”. I think what Ellie Harrison (here) was getting at in terms of ‘maintaining the status quo’ is that by insisting the concept of the artist as a ‘homo viator’ in your manifesto, it will essentially drive artists to behave in that manner, at an age when we really should be much more cautious about how we use our resources (myself included). Just like when you released ‘relational aesthetics’, artists were driven to really think about their work in terms of social interactions in consequence, because apparently that was what curators and critics were interested in at the time. I do not want to put words in her mouth, but perhaps this is what Harrison means: that ‘looking at the world as it is’ is not enough, especially when such looking has the consequence of spurring particular activities; that along with the writing of emerging trends (and many of us will only read it retrospectively), we need some sort of proposal for the future. And we should be able to do this without going as extreme as Jdanov.

And finally, the sentence “[…]our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe” is on the extended version of the Altermodern Manifesto page of the Tate Modern website (here). Did you not write this? If not, where is the text that I should be reading?

Sincerely,
Wendy

Ellie Harrison’s stance brings lots of confusion…

First, I am not “supporting a continuation of the status quo”, where do you read that ? I am even committed into the green party in France.

Second, my aim was to adress those issues in the aesthetic field, not to write a political statement ; maybe talking about art sounds too “bourgeois” for you? Then, you frighten me, because Jdanov’s ghost is not so far… You seem to think that it is futile to speak about anything else than environmental problems.

Three, travelling should not be reduced to “carbon-heavy lifestyle” : this is an almost obscurantist view. Reducing carbon emissions is a crucial stake, to which I totally adhere, and I even put it into practice in my everyday life. However, what about looking at the world as it is, too ?

I would rather discuss my thesis, not the absence of such or such themes. By the way, do Rancière or Badiou adress those issues in their last books ? No, but it does mean that they are anti-ecologist.

All the best,

NB

Four, the words : “our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe”, comes from the Tate media, not from me. Learn to distinguish between a press release and a text.