You say that today global migration is the most important cultural phenomenon, and that this situation makes it possible to think about cultural identity anew. What is cultural identity today? 

A cultural identity is a collage of texts, forms, signs and acquired behavioural patterns that permit an individual to define himself or herself as part of a group or national community. It is, therefore, nothing but a fiction derived from history. Today it is all the more dangerous and virulent because the violence of the general economic globalisation movement leads to a tendency to bind individuals and nations back onto this type of fetish in order to defend themselves against the deterritorialisation of the »MacWorld«. One story stands against another. And art of the present offers, in contrast to that, an ensemble of forms that cast doubt on every story: what you call reality is merely a scenario, as Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Tacita Dean and others show us. The idea of origins is the key to the Western metaphysical scenario: the world has an origin and a purpose, so do you. It is not by chance that the Modernism of the 20th century is based on the idea of radicality, derived from the word radical, which means »belonging to the roots«. It was a matter of purging art and politics and returning to some original principle. To what extent does Modernism share its interests with Fundamentalism? It seems certain to me that at least radical logic is common to both: removing the superfluous and returning to the source, to the roots. The modernity of our own century is taking shape in opposition to this modernistic principle, starting with figures that oppose the »universe of the root« most strongly, the nomad, the wanderer, the refugee. Future modernity will be radicant: instead of returning to origins it will let its roots grow in keeping with its forward movement. It will produce an art that is not identity-based but creates singularities. 
This can be seen already in such different artists as Rirkit Tiravanija, Paul Chan, Francis Alÿs and Simon Starling: far from being open to some kind of allocation to pre-determined formal identity, their work unfolds in a dynamic of roaming and wandering. They are semionauts: they invent routes amidst signs without limiting themselves to a type of space. We are facing an extraordinary challenge: to invent the specific culture of a time which, in its essence, is a time of migration. To do that we need to give up the old ways of thinking, which interpret a work according to its place in an existing cultural field. We need to develop critical tools able to grasp the trajectories rather than static fields. The radicant is a requirement for cultural restructuring. It is something quite different to the rhizome, as invented by Deleuze and Guattari, because in the rhizome you move about as if in a cycle of interconnected meanings associated with each other. The rhizome is an image of a networked, flowing and horizontal world. The radicality of the tree, the simultaneity of the rhizome: what is the specific quality of the radicant in relation to these other two models of growth? In contrast to the rhizome, it takes the form of a linear path, even if it can be a winding one, for it is associated with the path followed by a person. The radicant does not inhabit an ideal structure, where everything is in communication, but rather a precarious state. It constructs its route from what it finds.

You think that the Modern in the twenty-first century will be built up on exchanging and also translating cultures, which you call transcoding. Please tell us more about that. 

Translation is a new idea. Bruno Latour says, quite correctly, that Modernism had no need to translate: sooner or later the »backward« countries will catch up and it will be a matter of speaking the same language everywhere, the language of technological progress. Modernist abstraction plays the role of an Esperanto … Today the translation of singularities – including the untranslatable – is the basis of aesthetics for a new generation of artists. Translation figures in contemporary art are numerous, but transcoding is probably the most important – shifts from one format to another, production of forms through the act of translation itself: a good example is »Mont Analogue« by Philippe Parreno, which reproduces a text by René Daumal as Morse code … Again the practices of reproduction or remixing of the new American artist generation, Wade Guyton, Peter Coffin, Kelley Walker, Seth Price and Josh Smith, who have placed the shift of an image from one format into another at the centre of their work, show the importance that this aesthetics of translation has come to have. Further, there are artists who translate the specifics of their local culture into a vocabulary derived from art history: from Sooja Kim to Surasi Kusolwong one encounters practices that associate specifically Eastern philosophical subject matter with a formal vocabulary that comes from Minimal Art or Concept Art. Let’s take a young artist like Bruno Peinado: his art speaks argot. It speaks Pidgin English. It speaks with the logo, with communications, with advertising, with brands, with the binary, with information science. Like most artists he is concerned with creating images of the world; but because no imaging process can free itself from the codes of dominance, they express themselves in the most recent visual languages of cultural globalisation. The artists who interest me today are those who articulate problems in argot, in unique languages that can touch anyone. Translation is the ethics of receiving signs.

You argue that it should be possible to assess an artist on the periphery by the same aesthetic criteria as a Western artist, within the same theoretical framework. This contradicts the post-modern attitude that an artist is to be judged according to his own cultural values. 

That is the heart of the multicultural ideology: according to post-modern thinkers an artist should be judged by the aesthetic criteria that come from his cultural tradition. In other words, we refuse to permit him to belong to our own space; we deny that there could be a common space (which I call the space of translation) including me and the other. That also means that the artists are assigned to a lower position: judging them by their local tradition and their local codes means implicitly that these artists would be unable to free themselves from them and to achieve singularity; it means developing a critical discourse about the rules that dominate the cultural discourse, which is our criterion for judging contemporary art. If a German or French painter were to paint flowers in the Impressionist style in 2007, we would consider him to be of no significance. When an African artist follows the tradition of his country, is that supposed to be wonderful?! The politics of »recognising the other« (Charles Taylor) turns out to be a machine for making others inferior, it implies the submission of the individuals who come from »peripheral« countries – submission to their folklore and their history, denying the autonomy, for example, of a Hindu or African artist in relation to his cultural determinants.

Could you explain that further and suggest an alternative model? 

It is a matter of fighting against the concept of origins and against every form of identity allocation, the categorisation of society. In art the task would be to free the forms from their identity function. The other model is that of translation, which assumes that one enters the discourse of the other and translates it into one’s own language, so that formal language has the status of a vehicle rather than of an identity factor. It is not a matter of privileging meaning over form: in art form is part of the meaning. The African or Asian artists who, in my opinion, are important today may sometimes use traditional forms of their culture but they are not stuck with them: these forms have been set into movement, nomadised, and encounter other vocabularies. »Form routes« thus emerge in dynamic cartographies. The reference to local forms in Pascale Marthine Tayou, Shimabuku, Damián Ortega or Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, just to name a few that happen to occur to me, define the world as a territory whose dimensions, temporal and spatial, can be explored by everyone. 

Why do you focus on the question of identity and culture, rather than on class or gender, for example? Or do you think that questions of class and gender are to be seen in cultural terms and not, for example, in economic or social terms? 

Identity discourse makes use of geographic origins just as much as of gender, sexual practices and social classes. Post-modern thought is thought about identity allocations under the cover of deconstructing the West-centred discourse. It is always a matter of taking the individual back to a category that seems appropriate for classifying his discourse and defining his »identity«. But these big categories, these abstractions are in service of power, because they legitimise the idea of a society that consists of rigid communities. We are familiar with the role these subdivisions play in debasing political discourse, which no longer confronts citizens who expect political answers, but customers. You become an artist when you break out of all these consumer panels, out of the statistics. Judith Butler and queer thinking go beyond this post-modern ideology of allocation by asserting indeterminacy and undecidability in the constitution of the sexual subject. That is a radicant way of thinking. 

What role does exoticism play in your approach? 

I devote a chapter of my book to exoticism, basing it on the writings of Victor Segalen and on his Essay on Exoticism, written between 1904 and 1918⁴. As a traveller he noticed very soon and very clearly the damage caused by Western colonisation – a courageous position at the time. He worked on a full »Aesthetics of Diversity«, an apologetic text on heterogeneity and the plurality of worlds that were under threat from the Western civilisation machine. Segalen defines the »feeling of exoticism as a »concept of difference; the perception of the diverse, the awareness that something is not one’s own ego«. His eulogy on exotics could be applied to the artist of today: an individual who is able to base his relationship to the world on a critical evaluation of diversity, not as a goal in itself but in order to fight against entropy, whose present-day mask could well be cultural globalisation. It is not globalisation that is bad but what it brings with it, the allocation of identity, culture sliced up for theme parks, the enforced unity of languages and ways of thinking.

1	Editor’s note: Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Ashley Bickerton and others
2	Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005 (Second Edition)
3	Editor’s note: intermittend work is when permanent or full-time jobs are replaced by unstable working conditions such as off and on employment, like jobs on call, etc.
4	Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetic of Diversity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002

Translated by Nelson Wattie


NICOLAS BOURRIAUD (*1965) is art theorist, curator and the artistic director of the Parco d’Arte Visuale, Torino, and advisor of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev. 1999–2006 he was Co-Director of Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Among others, he was curator of the Moscow Biennale, 2007, curated the Biennale de Lyon (with Jérôme Sans), 2005, and »Aperto«, Biennale di Venezia 1993. With Relational Aesthetics (1998) and Post­production (2001) he has published important books on the visual arts of the 1990s.

Postproduction, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005
Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du réel: Dijon-Quetigny, 2002