The Wandering Nature of the Artist in the Altermodern Context

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If heterochronic elements brought together form one of the main components of the altermodern, the wandering spirit of the artist is its complementary part. He is a wanderer, an individual in quest for ‘something’, trying to discover a higher meaning or simple, absurd facts, woven out of threads of fantasy or from the past experience. Throughout modernism, referring to the changes started in Renaissance, the artist looked at all times towards ‘something’ to discover. Nowadays, the times have changed: there are no patterns, no rules of what is allowed or not; anything is permitted and that is the only rule to be followed. (Galaasi, 2010) The choices are there to be made and the artist can select any path, the only observation to this course being that he always undertakes a journey. Everything is available: information, archives, speed, movement, communication. This is the age of charter flights, cheap mobile phone costs, large archived data bases available online and social media sites. They are all there to be accessed and this is what creates a new need of relating to a different option, which has not been offered for granted. Thus, the ultimate tool of the old masters, the wandering or the action of walking in order to discover new realities, can be considered as the missing link that is able to provide fulfilment.

The altermodern artist is by definition nomad (Bourriaud, 2009a), meaning that his sense of belonging to a place is diminished for that the nomad is a person that is on constant move, the itineraries undertaken completing him. This characteristic is being shaped when the place of his origins fails to fulfil him anymore and offer a sense of accomplishment. Nevertheless, in a world where discrepancies in between...

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