Author of the influential Relational Aesthetics examines the dynamics of ideology
Nicolas Bourriaud is a leading theorist and art curator. Here he looks to the future of art as a place to tackle the excluded, the disposable, and waste—the exform.
He argues that the great theoretical battles to understand the present will be fought in the realms of ideology, psychoanalysis and art and a “realist” theory and practice must begin by uncovering the mechanisms that create the distinctions between the productive and the unproductive, the assimilable and the inassimilable, and the included and the excluded.
To do this we must go back to one of the greatest theorists of ideology, Althusser, and examine how ideology conditions political discourse in ways that normalize cultural, racial and economic practices of exclusion.
“Fascinating, wide-ranging and extremely well-informed.” —Warren Montag
Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator and art critic, as well as the former Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He was the Gulbenkian Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Britain from 2007 to 2010, where he curated the fourth Tate Triennial. He is the author of a number of books, including Postproduction, Altermodern, and the highly acclaimed Relational Aesthetics.