Think about this. The postmodern era is over, the global financial crisis was the final nail in its coffin. In its place: art that begs, borrows and steals, with no particular aesthetic or geographic home front, art that moves about and never arrives anywhere because it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, it's about embracing the placelessness of the global and the great multicultural melting pot. So, that's the premise (more or less) of Altermodern, the Tate triennial, which opened at Tate Britain this week.
I went yesterday and wasn't disappointed. With the art, that is. The premise may be a matter for connoisseurs. What is/was postmodernism exactly anyway? And whatever it is, would it be so lacking in irony as to have a conventional beginning, middle and end? Why is it always necessary to describe something by what it is not?
Still, there is something important here, I think, and it is hinted at by the reference to the current global crisis. Here we are at what feels like a turning point in human history. Global warming, terrorism, financial meltdown. The worthlessness of recycling materials, the defense of torture, protectionism spreading the globe. The world seems particularly strange right now, and so right now we need art more than usual. Art, not entertainment. Because what art does best is show us the strangeness in what we had thought was ordinary, and the ordinary in what seems strange.
Go see the exhibition if you can. Look out especially for the brilliant paintings and sculpture of Charles Avery (slideshow here), whose work revolves around the idea of a world, a mythical island, made exceptionally strange through the artist's imagingings. Strange as in whimsical, recognizable, full of meaning and spare, surprising beauty.
Altermodern is at Tate Britain until April 26, 2009. Charles Avery's solo show at the Scottish National Gallery ends on February 15.
(Photo: Strange trees, Pimlico, London (near Tate Britain), Saturday.)