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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Reflection on... the postmodernism

Posted by seiinod at 10:33 PM

For the first "Reflection on...", I would like to have a look on postmodernism and some of its contradictions... It is a tough subject but it is essential to understand the notion of postmodernism if you want to enter in a leading art gallery as a semi-conoisseur :-)) All those strange art pieces that seem to come directly from our toys box and that now costs $1000 when presented by Koons or Kelley!
I'll come back very very soon on those two artists in a next post to give you a clearer view on the main actors of the postmodernist scene. It will be more clear then! But first, a brief explanation of modernism:

The modernism...

Reviewing the advances of modern art history for example, it is easy to dress a parallel between the evolution of art and societal phenomena: The progress of science was accompanied by the development of electronic or multimedia art, bioart and optart.

The theorical concepts used by the major artists of the twentieth century can be found “in Marxist intellectual tradition, in Freudian Psychoanalysis, and in various forms of transaction between the two”. Therefore, marxism theorisation has been developed to analyse colonialism processes; Freudian advances in psychoanalysis have been reappropriated by feminists artists.
Finally, those two new trends have been put together in analysis of hegemony mechanisms.
Regarding the variety of societal influences and the speed of social changes influencing the art world, artists were seeking for a new definition of contemporary art that incorporated the diversity of new media, the progress in sciences and technologies. An intention of progression, experimentation... That is modernism!
This cultural orientation, shaped the modernist trend, that remained the major influence on the contemporary ‘high-art’ production issued from the hegemonic western world until the 1980’s. Harrison and Wood argue that the process of idea evolution in these days was based on typical western concerns such as the myth of originality or the fundamental oppositions that are nature/culture, male/female, capitalism/communism.
On the basis of such theorical background, the culture from which the artworld emerged and the process of idea developement is defined as typical “Western in its orientation, capitalist in its determining economic tendency, bourgeois in its class-character, white in its racial complexion, and masculine in its dominant gender” (Harrison and Wood 1992:1015).
The next step for the art world was to criticise this hegemonic power of western culture in the modernist art world and to introduce the post-modernist concepts.

The contemporary art world shaped by post-modernist ideologies:

Harrison and Wood (1992) recognise that post-modernism has been introduced by three major theorists: Daniel Bell (1978) as a first author argues that the hope of modernism “lays in a return to consensus based on the shared need for moral and economic order”. Following this definition, Post-modernism would then come as a disruptive approach to modernism.
Habermas’ (1984) as the second major postmodernism theorists is reported to argue (Harrison and Wood, 1992) that “a strong ressource of aesthetic resistance remains necessary as a counter to the increasing power and autonomy of economic and administrative systems”, and therefore explains that the power to resist hegemony on the artworld lays in the hands of those who produce the artworks.
Finally, Harrison and Wood, report Lyotard’s (1984) view on postmodernism as an opposition to Bell’s view in which he “equates the postmodern, with a continuing scepticism regarding a possible consensus [...] with a form of nostalgia for the experience of an unattainable wholeness of presence” (1992:1016). In his view, postmodernism should therefore “wage a war on totality”(1992:1016).

Each of these three views remain influencial in the ‘high art’ sphere and the debate on post-modernism becomes deeper and more subtle. Due to the limitations imposed by the focus of this blog, I will not explore the post-modernism discourse in depth. However, what might be interesting at this point would be to note that each of these authors present a different view on postmodernism, which might have its origin in the three different origins of the writers (U.S.A. for Bell and respectively France and Germany for Lyotard and Habermas). Their views have been shaped by a set of specific social, historical and political conditions associated with each of these three different countries. Although they are different, they remain ‘western views’ and this fact has to be taken into account when debating on the evolution of art history.

The post-modernist critique on art history that claims for the originality of an idea, must therefore also analyse in which position the critique has been written.

Pictures:

Mike Kelley - Craft Morphology Flow Chart

Jeff Koons- Balloon Dog

Read more...

  • Bell, D., ‘Modernism and Capitalism’, in Bell, 1978
  • Habermas, J (1984) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity
  • Harrison C. And Wood P. (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford
  • Lyotard, J-F (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Manchester: Manchester University Press

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