Over at Immedia mention is made of the word Radicant- our new modernism will grow roots

in the article Radicality in Art Today...

quote... 'The French art theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud was there to debate this question (is radicality in art possible today)  together with the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and the Danish academic Michael Bolt, who has been an outspoken sceptic of Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics. Bourriaud’s perspective was that radicality is not possible today because it is impossible to back to the kind of environment of 20^th century modernism in which the avant-garde movement could be radical. Bourriaud pointed out that if taking the etymolog of the radical seriously, understood as roots, or going to the origins, radicality today is not possible.


According to Bourriaud we have to give up two attitudes in order to move on. On the one hand we have to give up the attitude of nostalgia of modernism and get rid of the metal trap of post-modernism, or post-everything. The whole post prefix of the last 30 years, resulting in terms such as post structuralism, post colonial, post feminism, post humanism etc., has given us the impression that we are too late, that there really is nothing to be done but to look back and analyse how to handle the effects of the events upon which everything in the present grew out of. Bourriaud proposes instead the concept of the radicant, understood as an organism that grows its roots on the ground, a term better fit for describing where we should go with art from here. Whereas 20^th century modernism was radical, our modernism will be radicant, growing roots while it evolves or grows.

The central goal for the art field then, is to break loose from postmodernism and the extreme preoccupation with identity, that in Bourriaud’s account acts as a “war machine”. Identity, according to Bourriaud, is an ideological virus that the political field has been structured around, reducing everything to the question: “Where do you come from?”