I don't want to comment on Bourriaud's last section because I am not sure that I understand the fundamentals of his thought and, to be honest, am not sure that it is completely understandable by anyone. After wallowing through the first two sections with only superficial comprehension, I refuse to give the third section, which is full of rambling discourse, disconnected thoughts and made up words (for which he only knows the meaning) all of my attention.
What I am left with after finishing the book is a feeling of superficiality, as if Bourriaud is caught up in the frenzy of the mass media market, the world of technology, and of globalization without vision or any ability to stand above this world and analyze it from an all encompassing view. In other words, his weltanschaung is micro focused; he's taken one element and made it into a universal and global theory. I consider this a huge intellectual faux pas.
His manifesto only takes into account a few individual artists out of thousands, only those who are responding to this mass media take on the world. There are more artists. Thousands maybe millions more. He's taken a very small piece of the pie and is calling it the current art world and 'new' art movement. His thought and writings flounder as he grasps for universal meaning from this micro view. Most annoying is his coining of the word 'alter' because it means 'old' in the German language. Now, even though the French have historically not been overly fond of the Germans, the Germans are still a major part of the global world and especially of the art world. If he is going to tag a 'supposed' art movement that he says has its roots in globalization than, in my opinion, it would be much better if he'd tag it with a word that works for all parties involved. It feels like a slight on the nation that brought us Bauhaus.
Bourriaud is caught up in his language (which feels like he considers his 'art') and it results in convoluted thought. He seems to have lost perspective as evidenced by his stating the obvious over and over again. He likes to think these are new developments when stated with academic force. For example, his statement "the artist is collecting signs and creating pathways..." has been true for at least several hundred years if not more. The only difference in 2010 is in the length, complexity and breadth of these pathways.
I find the discussions around his thought and writings to be supremely uninteresting unless we bring in some comparisons in logic to the discussion. Bourriaud is missing the forest for the trees, to use an old overused cliché which I must admit feels very satisfying to use in connection with Bourriaud.
The forest he is missing is critical. The chaos that he says artists are responding to is really a symptom of a culture floundering under a massive weight of irrelevant data, garbage data generated by a paradigm of thinking that is losing its grip on our culture. The paradigm created by the German philosophers of the 18th and 19th century such as the Descartes adherence to reason and the scientific method as law for truth. It is almost like the current paradigm is spewing out garbage like a squid spews ink as its final act when caught in the net. Data is not the only garbage being generated. We also produce massive amounts of physical garbage and moral garbage. And we spin around in this mass trying to find meaning. I see this everywhere.
This chaos cannot and will not last; it is simply not sustainable on any level. It is the final act, the climax of the old paradigm before it loses steam to new patterns. Therefore, to say it is the artist's path to interconnect this irrelevant data into paths to create meaning for the rest of the culture puts reader and thinker on a path of futility. It is the artist's role to see past the garbage, see its meaning in its totality, not as each piece of garbage relates to another piece of garbage. The path is beyond the garbage.
Brilliance never lies in complexity. It lies in simplicity.
Thank god we are done with this book.
