Curator-bashing is the art historian’s new favourite sport. Poor Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the Tate’s fourth Triennial exhibition, Altermodern. The premise of the show is that we have entered a new phase of post-post-modernity called Altermodern. It’s all about globalisation, decentralisation and the artist as traveller. The show has been criticised as ‘the residue of the curator’s fun’ and the product of Bourriaud’s privileged travel budgets. It’s been said that the show isn’t about the artists at all, but that it serves as a high-profile platform for Bourriaud’s opinions.

The show’s manifesto is not without its problems either: you can certainly find some holes if you look hard enough at his manifesto. He claims that Altermodern is an ‘in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation’, casting it as a universal characteristic of all contemporary art. But his selections are just that, selective, and do not seem representative of everything going on in contemporary art.

Let’s not pick holes in Bourriaud’s manifesto too much though, and remember that it is probably impossible for anyone to give an accurate representation of current artistic trends in a single exhibition. Ignoring academic opinion seems to be the way forward here. Academics see a bias towards the curator because they can think of nothing else: that’s what they’re interested in. But if we let the works of art speak for themselves, it turns out to be an extremely worthwhile show.

Marcus Coates being weird

Marcus Coates’ The Plover’s Wing is a video of the artist, wearing a stuffed badger on his head and a rabbit emerging from his tracksuit top, in conversation, via an interpreter, with an Israeli mayor. He offers to find a solution to the mayor’s worries about youth violence in his town, before performing a bizarre ritual of mimicking animal behaviour in the mayor’s office. He says that a plover he encountered in this state immediately felt unnecessarily threatened by his appearance, suggesting that this might be the case for the Israeli youths too. It seems to raise some questions about art’s capacity for social change: perhaps the absurdity of Coates’ intervention is mocking the inability of art to have a major impact on society, or it may be genuine in its desire to create dialogues about political problems between Israel and Palestine in an attempt to solve them. Either way, the film contains some touching moments, like the mayor’s particular interest in the appearance of the plover (“Does it have a crest?”).

The desks Simon Starling had made.

There is a bias towards works that make issues of globalisation and travel explicit. Franz Ackermann’s installation includes a large black and white photo (a self-portrait?) of a man with an airport luggage tag attached to his belt.  Walead Beshty’s cracked glass boxes are displayed on top of the FedEx boxes they’ve been shipped around the world in. Simon Starling’s ‘Three White Desks’ are displayed on the wooden crates they’ve been transported in. But in Starling’s case, the work is about more than transit. It emulates an event that took place in Sydney in 1947: the recreation, after a photograph, of a desk designed by Francis Bacon in the early 1930s. Starling sent a photograph of Bacon’s original desk to a cabinet-maker and asked him to recreate it as accurately as possible. Starling then took a photo of the copy on his camera phone and sent it to another craftsman, then repeated the process with a photo of the copy of the copy.

The work seems to be about copying and creativity. Each of the cabinet-makers copied the photo according to the brief, but this surely involved a certain degree of creativity. The final desk is bare wood and much smaller and squarer than the first, bearing the traces of the creator’s style as much as their ability to follow Starling’s ‘design’. The idea of the work itself is a creative copy of an event that took place in the 1940s. It also seems to be about the reconstruction of alternatives to modernism: Francis Bacon’s modernist furniture designs are remade in what Bourriaud would call an Altermodern age.

An academic eye could certainly find reasons to criticise Bourriaud’s show, but that is surely to be expected of any exhibition. A lot of the art is very clearly in touch with reality, and makes us think about issues outside of the art world. I reckon visitors to the show will engage with these, rather than getting caught up in art-historical arguments.

Tate Triennial: Altermodern is on at Tate Britain until 26th April.

Lady Muck