Still from WALL-E,  dir: Andrew Stanton, 2008.

The future of contemporary art resides in waste, in the repulsive remainders of totalitarian capitalism stored in warehouses, abandoned housing blocks, and the sort of places that the robot in the film WALL-E had devoted his life to cleaning. This is what Nicolas Bourriaud argues in The Exform, his new book published in London as part of the Verso Futures series.

The Exform is a curious mixture of art theory, structuralism, and pop culture references. Bourriaud, a former curator at Tate Britain and director of the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, is best known for Relational Aesthetics, a book that takes its title from a 1995 article where he identified contemporary art’s focus on how things relate to consciousness. The article emphasized the relationship between art and its audience, and it is precisely from this notion of relational aesthetics that Bourriaud’s new concept, the “exform”, takes root. The exform, like relational aesthetics, exists in a site “where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste.” Bourriaud defines exform as a “point of contact,” “a plug”, a “socket” and a sign “that switches between centre and periphery, floating between dissidence and power.”

What to do with waste in this overfull world is the main question in Bourriaud’s somewhat vaguely written book. He is the first to confess that he had begun writing with a vague idea, which he confronted with clear images (Bourriaud’s methodology in putting this book together comes from a Maoist slogan in Jean-Luc Godard’s film La Chinoise). The idea of the book is to resist the temptation to deduce a theory about contemporary art after giving an account of recent works; Bourriaud wants to take the opposite course, with not completely satisfying results.

On the face of it, The Exform is a love letter to French philosopher Louis Althusser whose obsession with deconstructing the inner mechanisms of the notion of ideology Bourriaud seeks to apply to artworks. The book reads like an exercise in imagining Althusser as an art critic. In On Ideology Althusser had shown how ideology has to be repeated on a daily basis by the ideological instruments of the state in order to survive—it is a mechanism, he argued, that can exist only through repetition critical theory has to reveal. This is philosophical realism dismantling the idealism of ideology; a similar approach is needed in art criticism, according to Bourriaud and this can be achieved by revealing the linkage points of our overfull world where we live “in archives ready to burst, among more and...