Nicolas Bourriaud: Severing Artistic Roots

Up until the section of The Radicant titled Radicals and Radicants, Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing took the form of a radicant: moving from topic to topic with little roots relating to what was said in the previous page or even paragraph. Each topic may have been severed at its source and still flourish onto another topic. Perhaps I was not aware of the artistic language that he was using, but until the point where he explains how to distinguish a radicant from a radical (p.51) I was uninformed, at a loss for argument congruence, and hopelessly bored of the reading.

I was enthusiastic to understand a few passing insights that Bourriaud wrote about relating to the convergence of media. On page 31, he mentions how the intersection of art and cinema revolving inwards towards each other in a reverse direction affects profit margins: leading to a more cost effective medium. This touches on Fuller’s efforts to economize architecture and design, in a different light. Perhaps there is a way of making art more Earth friendly.

That is also where digitalization may be the solution for a cleaner and efficient use of time, space, and file storage. A public broadcasting system was one way to radiate massive amounts of information to all those who own a television and wanted to be exposed to a piece of artwork or documentaries in the most convenient way, “’I come from there,’ the artist could say, ‘but I am showing you images of my universe using the format that is most familiar to you, the televised image.’” (p.32). As Fuller would share to his audience, “We are all astronauts aboard a little spaceship called Earth.” On this craft, we are all related, and television is a wonderful medium to possibly unite us all.

Of course, television is more complicated than that. Later on in the book Bourriaud expands on his first idea of the television, “A transportable image, a moving mirror: in the world of unlimited reproduction, the destiny of the subject is that of a permanent exile.” (p. 42). The fleeting thought that every moment an experience may be, one day, captured on video, makes me very conscious about how the future evolves. The past may or may not be of consideration at the moment that I am next in front of a camera and microphone. But, will I become exiled from even the closest moment of my past as it transfers into digital format?

I keep a backup for my computer files. Sometimes I keep multiple places to store my most important pieces of digital information. These precautions are my personal “returning to the root” (p.50) that may suspend me in a past time of which I have no memory and must start anew. This poses as a problem to Contemporary artists whose “universe contains neither origin nor end, except for those they decide to establish themselves” while simultaneously escaping the modernist thought that eventually there will be an “end of art.” (p 52-3). His radicant theory feels very weightless and universal, which provides a perfectly open plane for defining new and transient boundaries in collaborative art.

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Ian Wallace