So, how do we move around in a world in the midst of emerging radicantity? At first Bourriaud would seem to advise us to seek shelter from the rain of cultural images surrounding us in our consumer society. To paraphrase, he calls our cultural production a precipitation which erodes the natural contours of human society. This rain disturbs the system of relations that produces it as a work. If these abundant products and ideas are ours to play with are we constantly tripping over our own toys?
I relate to the idea of aleatory materialism. In our globalized culture, the curious-minded artist is constantly being exposed to a random assortment of images and ideas while researching an idea using the internet. In experiencing this personally, I find it helpful to set limits on what I'm willing to explore so that I can find what I want more quickly. However, most every time I get sidetracked and end up reading something fascinating about some amazing thing someone else has done in the world. Balancing those two types of experiences is the new way of generating ideas. Each of us does it differently by allowing our minds to block or absorb specific bits of information.
This inevitably leads to taking a found image or idea and adapting it for our purposes. In a sense we've always been doing this. Where it becomes interesting is in Duchamp's interpretation of the readymade malentendu. There is something beautiful in the interpretive error that happens between explanation and understanding. This leads me to think about how mass media spins news events to boost ratings, or how a student mis-interpreting an assignment accidentally comes up with something brilliant. At the root of this misinterpretation is the theory of the clinamen. Being unable to predict the precise trajectory of an atom away from a collision with another atom has been interpreted as the basis for understanding or explaining the existence of what we understand as free will. Maybe this phenomenon is what guides us in our online research, how long we linger on a particular webpage, when and where we will click next..
At the end of the essay titled Interform, pp 158, Bourriaud makes what feels like the main point of The Radicant:
"Artists who are working today with an intuitive idea of culture as a toolbox know that art has neither an origin nor a metaphysical desitnation, and that the work they exhibit is never a creation but an instance of post production. Like the materialist philosopher whose portrait Althusser sketches in his works on aleatory materialism, they know neither where the train is coming from nor where it is going, and they don't care: they get on."
At the end of Global Art or Art of Capitalism, pp. 166, he makes another salient point:
"The quality of an artist's work depends on the richness of his or her relations with the world, and these are determined by the economic structure that more or less powerfully shapes them-even if, fortunately, every artist theoretically has the means to evade or escape that structure."
