Ceramics Round 2

The article The Margins discusses the age old debate of art verses craft within the medium of clay and how the materiality of clay affects the content of a piece. In the article Ceramics is broken down into three main veins, technical, historical and conceptual. A main purpose of this article is to discuss a shift in artists being trained in a specific medium that they produce work within to considering the material as changeable and able to combine with other mediums to attain a conceptual idea where the material is chosen because of the way in which it supports the concept.

The article Altermodernism is about a show at the Tate Triennial 2009 curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. He claims that Postmodernism is dead and labels where the art world is and will continue to be as 'altermodern'. The word is complex and has many different angles including being a reaction against standardization and commercialism and an embrace of globalization and its economic, political and cultural conditions. He refers to the experience of altermoderism as one of wandering- in space, time and mediums. The eight components or 'continents' of altermoderism are 8 Continents of Altermodernism are energy, travel, borders, exiles, archive, viatorisation, heterochronia and docu-fiction. The later three being words constructed by Bourriaud. In talking about these continents he says, "our civilization, which bears the imprints of a multicultural explosion and the proliferation of cultural strata, resembles a structureless constellation, awaiting transformation into an archipelago.” I'm not sure how much I feel like altermodernism has 'stuck' in the art world as what artists, curators and critics uniformally refer to as the art movement we are currently in. I say this because the term was foreign to me until reading this article that was written over a year ago. However, I do feel that it well describes what is happening with the world at large as well as the art world. This generation is less multicultural and more global, aware of the differences of others from the beginning. However, there is still an issue of access. Most are now able to access the internet and all of the amenities that come with it but for those that don't, it becomes an issue of privilege rather than availability.