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Altermodern - At the Tate early this year a mostly male phenomenon

From:     boily
Category: Art
Date:     28 July 2009
Time:     07:08 AM

Review:

Early this year the Tate asked

“Want to know what's happening in contemporary art now? Then visit Altermodern, the fourth Tate  
Triennial at Tate Britain.” 

Curated by renowned Nicholas Bourriaud the Tate triennial perported to be exhibiting the

“some of the best that current British art has to offer, alongside international artists who are working 
with similar themes” .

In an attempt to coin a new term the exhibition was named “Altermodern”, which was meant to explain 
the global culture from which these new artists have come, for some reason

“The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured 
according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – 
understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.” 

Yet artists who are “the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and 
formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing”  or who
“traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats 
of expression and communication”  seem in the most part to be men. This brave new way of being is 
experienced and communicated “best” by a group of artists in which men out number women almost 
five to one (there were twenty-eight male artists and six women artist in this show, the correct ratio is 
4.6666666:1). Certainly this altermodernity seems to apply mostly to a male way of working.


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