In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future. From here the very notion of history, of memorandum, retrospection and the artefact is called into question. The Time Traveller has become lost not in space, but in time, and nothing will ever be straightforward again.

Like the Time Traveller I too am a wanderer of ancient museums in unfathomable lands. From my perspective, having just visited The Tate Britain’s 4th Triennial exhibition, history and future have coalesced, time has become space and space time in the most explosive of reversals. For I have seen the Altermodern, a series of new works by roving, mainly British, artists.

If Altermodern’s curator, Nicolas Bourriaud, is to be believed, the time for Altermodernism is not now, but everywhen. Starting from the Latin alter, for ‘other’, Bourriaud’s insistent exhibition spreads outwards, not like the spokes of a wheel or the branches of a tree, but like a spider’s web, it’s silken threads tending to overlap, to bind in globules of infinite stickiness. In the literature for the Altermodern exhibition, Bourriaud uses phrases like “the struggle for diversity”, “a positive experience of disorientation” and “trajectories [that] have become forms” to characterise a mode of ‘modern’ art wrapped in a cocoon of its own definitions. The modernist museum has long since crumbled - so Bourriaud suggests - leaving us to mistrust its linear notion of progress; to deny the inevitability of cultural (r)evolution. In its place arose postmodernism’s looped perspective of time and the artefact, where the narrative journey through the museum became like an acid-trip of self and meaning.

But postmodernism too was a dream (or maybe Bourriaud’s nightmare) destined to destroy itself. Our schizophrenic humanism has become globalised and, like the internet’s digital cobweb, grows in complexity by the nanosecond. Into his Altermodern maelstrom Bourriaud has cast a series of works orchestrated with this complex network in mind. As one ponders the Altermodern museum (The Time Traveller’s Tate Britain perhaps?), one encounters a voyage through Liquid Crystal landscapes; a fictional archaeology and the concrete head of a God; the lost desk of Francis Bacon, corrupted by digital transmission; a series of animatronic heads, depicting an artist in chorus with himself; a nuclear plume of soldered cooking pots; a gigantic accordion; an epileptic hashish bar; and a brand new global language for the Altermodern generation.

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