altermodernity

Bourriaud comments that when faced with art made by someone different from us, or of a minority we do not have the right to critique it because we cannot understand it, therefore we will become unable to attribute a value to the work. But isn’t it possible to acertaine intent, materials, and composition purely upon the formal aspects of a work? If we preoccupy ourselves with the content of work whose origins we cannot understand then perhaps that is why the modernists dismissed all other aesthetics and ideas in opposition with purity and utopia.

Post modernism is supposedly based in “respect for the other” in which we pretend to assign worth to the arts of other cultures, without challenge, because it is of something we cannot understand and instead of attempting to find a place among our own ideas of art it is labeled first by its country of origin in order to frame the critique through the lens of that specific culture.

Modernism, says Bourriaud, is based in the “root”, this is something I have difficult time believing as I was under the impression that modernism was about Utopia and Purity, and what about those concepts is concerned with origin? Utopia will not rise up in the minds of people who appreciate their current status and society, it is only when we through away what has been done before that Utopia can be achieved. Kazimir Malevich claimed that modernism there is a “passion for the beginning” and because of this it sews the seeds of the future, thus establishing the root. If we imagine modernism as being “rooted” in its own ideas then the metaphor holds water, then the disregard of other cultures and ideas that don’t stem from “the root” will not be allowed.

How is the work of Duchamp and Kazimir Malevich and anomaly within modernism? Bourriaud says that this work was produced outside the natural progression of art history and thus was able to “produce history”. Is this purely based on the ideas that these two had and how they were in opposition to the consensus at the time? Aesthetically the work seems very much in keeping with the “natural Progression” so perhaps it was the language they used to describe there art that made it different? If a readymade informs the future, and it is an object taken from everyday life, how is this not an extension of modernism and “the root”?

I don't really understand what altermodern work looks like.