Nicolas Bourriaud: The Radicant (2009) [English/Spanish]

In his most recent essay, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that the time is ripe to reconstruct the modern for the specific context in which we are living. If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.

Translated from the French by James Gussen and Lili Porten
Publisher: Sternberg Press, March 2009
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9
192 pages

Traducción de Michele Guillemont
Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2009
Colección: “Los sentidos”
Subcolección: “Artes visuales”
ISBN: 978-987-1556-12-0
226 pags.

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publisher [Spanish]

PDF [English] (updated on 2012-7-28)
PDF [Spanish] (updated on 2012-7-28)