The Exform

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 includ-ed 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.