*The term applied to a wide range of cultural analysis and production since the early 1970's.
*If modernism= 1860-1960 then logically postmodernism= 1960's-today.
*Generally referred to as a significant shift in attitude away from the certainties of a modernism based on progress.
*In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism.
*Starts as a critique of the International style - Robert Venturi. 'Learning from Las Vegas' 1972.
- ideas developed by Charles Jencks, 1977.
*Only rule is there are no rules!
*Celebrates what might otherwise be known as 'kitsch'.
*If modernism equates with:
- Simplified aesthetic
- Utopian ideals
- Truth to materials
- Form follows function
- Complexity
- Chaos
- Bricolage (mixing up styles and materials)
- Parody, pastiche and irony
- Only rule= there are no rules
- Celebrates what might be otherwise be termed kitsch
*postmodern aesthetic= multiplicity of styles and approaches.
*Theme of 'double coding', borrowing or 'quoting' from a number of historical styles.
*Space for marginalised discourse- women, sexual diversity, and multiculturalism.
(Le Corbusier, Chapel of Notre Dame Du Haut, Ronchamp, 1953-5)
*No longer truth to materialism. Movement known as 'brutalism'.
Term comes from the French word for concrete. (Modernism has failed?)
*Attention to detail that went with modernism goes out of the window.
*Ultimate post-modern city is Vegas. Very 'kitsch'.
*‘I didn’t like Europe as much as I liked Disney
World. At Disney World all the countries are much
closer together, and they just show you the best of
each country. Europe is more boring. People talk strange languages and things are dirty. Sometimes you don’t see anything interesting in Europe for days, but at Disney World something different happens all the time, and people are happy. It’s much more fun. It’s well designed!’
A college graduate just back from her first trip to Europe, in Papanek, V. (1995), The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, page 139
Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram building, New York, 1957.
-> Symmetrical, balanced architecture. A modern building with post-modern features.
Ron Herron/Archigram. 'Walking City in New York', 1964.
->Shows progression of ideas. Designing for fun rather than for uses.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1972-77.
->Everything thats is supposed to on the inside of the building is on the outside. It is is an old area of Paris, so really stands out and makes a statement.
James Stirling, Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany 1977.
->Joking, playfulness in architecture.
DESIGN
Michael Graves, Kettle for Alessi, 1985.
->Emulates form but takes away from function. Playfulness, makes things attractive, but is it now just about status? Owning objects like these shows you have money to spend on designer products? Art for arts sake?
Ettore Sottsass, Carlton Bookcase, 1981.
Hussein Chalayan, Afterwords 2000-2001.
*Grew up with Civil war all around him- people living in an environment where they might have to move at any given time. People being displaced by war/environmental disasters.
People will need use his designs- making a statement rather than creating a functional product.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup cans 1962.
*Is it graphic design? Using graphic production to create highbrow art. Turning something kitsch into an art piece.
Roy Lichenstein, Drowing Girl.
*Using popular comic style to create fine art- going against all rules of fine art before.
Jeff Konns, Dirty- Jeff on Top 1992.
*Highly kitsch! Emulating cheap, tacky statues- challenging fine art conventions before him.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968 L.H.O.O.Q)
*Post modern art started here?
Michael Craig-Martin was a high brow intellectual and was the tutor of Damien Hirst. So could be argued opened the way for a lot of post-modern art.
Damien Hirst, Mother and Child Divided, 1993.
Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, 1995.
*This work saw Tracey Emin labelled as a 'slut' by the media. She actually meant everyone she had sleep next too in a bed as well, as in not just had sex with. This shows how the media view women? Quick to label her and therefore dismiss her work.
*Art like this is very easy to make, shows no great talent. Does that mean it should not be labelled as art?
Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994.
*This artwork is putting women in a position society does not want them.
Jake and Dino Chapman, 1995.
*The ultimate 'shock' piece. Was this designed to just be controversial and get noticed for how horrible it is? Or is there a deeper meaning? A reference to cloning and the future of science perhaps?
Playing with perceptions. Very tacky and kitsch.
Jake and Dino Chapman, Works From the Chapman Family Collection, 2002.
*This piece is easier to understand and to grasp the message behind it. It is making a comment on globalisation and the raping of older cultures. We get their artefacts to place in museums and they get McDonalds and Starbucks in return.
Chris Ofili, Holy Virgin Mary, 1996.
*The first famous black artist in the UK. He used materials and colours that symbolised his heritage. He used elephant dung in his work to represent his African roots and Rastafarian colours.
*This piece really offended and shocked people- people did not want to see a black Virgin Mary. White christians considered it offensive.
Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, 1997.
Shithead, 1993
*Chris Ofili is making a statement about the lack of black superheroes here. The argument is does he ruin the message by how simple his work is, how it could be taken for a joke?
Martin Creed, Work no. 22: The Lights Going On and Off, 2000.
*The media questioned if the person who wired up the light is actually the artist?
Mark Wallinger, Sleeper, 2005.
*Wallinger's film Sleeper, features the artist dressed as a bear wandering round Berlin's Neue National at night. This won the Turner Prize much to the amazement of the media. Is it deliberately offensive and deliberately provocative?
Barbara Krugar, I shop Therefore I Am, 1987.
*A comment on post-modern society and consumer society.
*Selfridges then took it as part of their advertising campaign. Should we look it as a new, inventive way to display artwork- making art available to the masses, or is it selling out?
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, USA 1970.
*First land art. It laid down the foundations for the land art movement.
Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993.
*A female artists who people seemed to only be interested in her work rather than her personal life, unlike Tracy Emin.
*K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was an action that took place on 23 August 1994, in which the K Foundation (an art duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) burned cash in the amount of one million pounds sterling on the Scottish island of Jura.
This money represented the bulk of the K Foundation's funds, earned by Drummond and Cauty as The KLF, one of the United Kingdom's most successful pop groups of the early 1990s.
They were making a statement about art and the money that fuels it- is art all about making money?
Is fine art becoming popular culture, instead of the high culture it once was- more interactive, less cultured? Is fine art progressing or being dumbed down?
Challenging perceptions of what is seen as art.
Summary
*Postmodern attitude of questioning conventions (especially modernism)
*Post modern aesthetic= multiplicity of styles and approaches.
*Shift in thought and theory investigating 'crisis in confidence'
*Space for new voices
*That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
*the question to ask now is what will happen with art in the future? Altermodern?
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