Which of the Following Are Characteristics of Postmodern Art? Flashcards

Beginnings

The offset signs of postmodernism were evident in the early-20^th century with Dada artists who ridiculed the art establishment with their anarchic actions and irreverent performances. The term, however, was not used in the contemporary sense until 1979 in the philosopher J.F. Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. In art, the term is usually applied to movements that emerged starting time in the late 1950s in reaction to the perceived failures and/or excesses of the modernist epoch.

Modernism

From the late-xix^th to the mid-20^th century, art as well equally literature, science, and philosophy was defined past a sense of progress and technological advancement, brought about past the industrial revolution and affiliation with the positivity of modern life. Artists such as Paul Cézanne and Piet Mondrian strove to find a universal means of expression through the increasing abstraction of their subject area. Other artists who focused on the subjective and the forbidden, such equally Salvador Dalí or Marcel Duchamp were seen every bit outliers in this emphasis on progress and rationality and their piece of work became precursors to postmodernism. By the 1930s in sure artistic circles, the process of painting, once the means to depict a subject through the use of line, color, and course, became the bailiwick itself. This emphasis on formalism was first observed and championed in the U.South. by Cloudless Greenberg, an fine art critic and violent proponent of modernism. His theoretical writings are oftentimes seen equally the antonym of postmodernism because of their advocating of artistic purity and for their singular focus on formalism at the expense of bailiwick matter. By the fourth dimension the Abstract Expressionists were painting (not yet fancy) in New York lofts in the 1940s, representation had been entirely eliminated in favor of a directly gestural expression that focused on paint awarding rather than narrative. Central to the modernist avant-garde artist was individuality, autonomy, and the trend for radical experimentation in search of an ultimate truth or meaning.

The Modernist-Postmodernist Crossover

By the middle of the century, the Western world had experienced a major paradigm shift: two devastating globe wars, millions of lives lost, communist ideologies shattered, and nuclear weapons utilized. The modernist optimism that had dominated in a pre-war world now seemed irrelevant, outdated, and doomed to fail. Europe was no longer the centre of modern art or the avant-garde. The focus of the fine art world now moved to New York City and to the Abstruse Expressionists who were flourishing in a new era of reinvigorated post-state of war capitalism. This group, however, was still very much marked by their modernism, with the movement staunchly supported past Greenberg every bit a loftier art toward which all art had been inexorably moving since the nineteen^th century. Meanwhile, outside this high art enclave, America in the 1950s was experiencing a consumerist and cultural boom as well as a stormy political climate. Once Abstruse Expressionism became a mainstream motion, young artists began to question it for its lack of reference both to the land of the world and to the flourishing popular culture of which its artists were a part. Motivated by these feelings and with a desire to create an fine art that acknowledged everyday life, artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began to experiment with new styles that borrowed and recreated imagery from the mass culture that surrounded them. The Neo-Dada style with which they would become associated was arguably the first of the genuinely postmodern fine art movements. These artists were influenced by John Cage, and many of their experiments would give rise to Popular fine art and Minimalism.

Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Postmodernism cannot be described as a coherent movement and lacks definitive characteristics. Information technology tin be improve understood instead as a set up of styles and attitudes that were affiliated in their reaction against modernism. A new approach to popular civilization and the mass media emerged in the 1950s, sparking a wave of fine art movements that reintroduced representation from disparate sources and experimented with image, spectacle, aesthetic codes, disciplinary boundaries, originality, and viewer involvement in ways that challenged previous definitions of art.

High vs. Low culture

"High culture" is a term used to draw traditional fine arts, such as painting and sculpture. The term is commonly employed by the art critic to evoke class, quality, and authenticity. It is likewise used to distinguish types of fine art media and disciplines from the "low," "kitsch," or pop civilisation of mass-produced commodities, magazines, tv, and pulp fiction that took America past storm in the mail-state of war consumerist blast. In his definitive 1939 essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch,' Clement Greenberg warned the modernist avant-garde against association with what he considered philistine outpourings. Greenberg proposed instead that artists' concerns should be reserved for an art that could transform social club. The postmodernists, in response, embraced the "popular" wholeheartedly and made it fundamental to their work. Pop artists recreated the mundane objects of consumerism, only used sense of humor and irony to transform these into gigantic soft forms (Claes Oldenburg) or into cultural icons (Andy Warhol) while the Minimalists used industrial materials to create repetitive forms reminiscent of the industrial production line. The "popular" emerged as both the subject and the medium for many artists and commercialism was embraced. This focus on "depression" civilisation stretched the definition of art, while also providing social critique.

Paradigm and Spectacle

In this new era of consumerism and television, advertising and the mass media became increasingly pervasive. In 1968, for example, the American public witnessed uncensored footage of the Vietnam War in their own homes for the first time, providing a stark disconnect with their own comfortable lives as they witnessed the horrors of war over dinner. Images on the screen were reflecting a new reality and it was often more hard to distinguish between fact and fiction, particularly with the widespread utilise of advertising. Jean Baudrillard, a prominent French philosopher, called this state of affairs "hyperreality," likening postmodern beingness to a flickering Television receiver screen: firsthand, shifting, and fragmented, with no underlying truth. These new ideas inspired artists, such as Barbara Kruger, who began to depict the surface rather than any truth or deeper pregnant. Way and spectacle, rather than substance, was where meaning was created. This focus on surface is one of the primal components of Kruger'due south I Shop therefore I Am (1987) as well as much of Pop art. Simultaneously, a camp aesthetic was born, specially evident in fashion and music, that drew from past styles of Gothic and Baroque; the more than dazzling, flamboyant, and shocking - the more effective. The piece of work of Jeff Koons is a skillful case of this aspect of postmodern art.

Mixing of Aesthetic Codes

Modernism had offset emerged in 19^th century French republic in rebellion against the historical and figurative preoccupation of the French University and its dominance over creative gustatory modality. The avant-garde movements that followed in the early-xx^th century gradually eliminated whatever references to a context or field of study, in search of a pure and unmediated form of visual expression that was radical and new. This trend reached its apogee with Abstruse Expressionism, which championed non-representational painting. Notwithstanding, in the decades that followed the movement, painting as a medium was considered cliche with petty room left for experimentation. With the advent of postmodernism, some artists began exploring past styles and media - peculiarly painting - equally role of the postmodern aesthetic that brought back both the historical and the subjective simply with a purposeful lack of stylistic integrity or unity.

Artists such equally Gerhard Richter playfully mixed aesthetic codes and genres, displacing existing meaning in structures and creating new ones. Using methods of parody and pastiche, old ideas could be recreated in new contexts. As the Dadaists had done before, other artists used collage, assemblage, and bricolage that juxtaposed text, epitome, and found objects to create layered surfaces. This mixing of codes is peculiarly evident in the compages of the 1980s and 1990s, such every bit The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland that combines features from two dissimilar historical periods into 1 visual spectacle. In film, the effect could be enhanced considerably. For example, Quentin Tarantino's, Pulp Fiction (1994) defies traditional narrative, drawing from multiple genres and offer a fragmented montage of characters and plots in an arbitrary club. Many artists also turned to multimedia technologies during the 1960s and 1970s, relishing the new opportunities that they were afforded to combine media and to create spectacle and sensation.

In that location were not simply opportunities with new multimedia technologies; from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, there was a significant crossover betwixt artistic disciplines as traditional categories were superseded. A pop postmodernist phrase was "annihilation goes," which referred both to this growing convergence civilization also equally to the plummet of the distinction between "good" and "bad" taste and the difficulty of assigning value or judging works of art based on traditional criteria as in the case with Jeff Koons. Artists adopted the mechanisms of both art and not-art forms, such as advertising, using a multitude of media to convey multiple letters.

Originality and Actuality

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal signed with a fictional name in an exhibit and called it art. In doing so he mocked the entire foundations on which the establishment of art had been congenital. Traditionally, uniqueness and originality gave an artwork its value or "aura," both in symbolic and monetary terms, and was a concept preserved through modernist art criticism. In 1936, cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, wrote a seminal essay entitled "The Work of Fine art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which radically reworked this view, laying charges of elitism at the anxiety of cardinal figures such every bit Greenberg. Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, through printing and other methods, could accomplish the democratization of art considering of its lower commodity value and increased accessibility to the masses. (The fact that ane could beget to buy, for example, a poster of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and then hang that reproduction on their own living room wall, would exist a cause for celebration for Benjamin.)

Pop artists, Minimalists, Performance artists, Conceptual artists, and others adopted Benjamin's ethos, interpreting his words through a diverse range of media and techniques that undermined concepts of authenticity and value and distorted commoditization. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol mass-produced bags and mugs, screen printed with iconic imagery. Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt exhibited their repetitive forms, but left control of their system to the curator; Allan Kaprow, Marina Abramović, and the Fluxus artists put on performances in which the audience and non the artist determined their form and meaning. Artists of all stripes, including Warhol, Richter, and Koons, were known for their appropriation of photographic and other imagery. Within Feminist art of the 1970s and again in the 1990s, amongst certain artists there was a surge of interest in the idea of collective authorship that further undermined traditional ideas of creativity and artistic genius that had been in place since the Renaissance. Artists such as Daniel Buren were increasingly concerned with the social procedure of fine art making rather than the art object, and placed the creation of meaning at the point of interaction. This new practice became known every bit Relational Aesthetics, and resisted commoditization of fine art through its performative nature, providing a powerful criticism of the art world, a field that came to be known as institutional critique.

Poststructuralism

The philosophical arm of postmodernism stems from intellectual shifts in France that occurred during the second half of the 1960s. The concept of poststructuralism is associated with the likes of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. But it was Barthes'southward 1967 essay, "The Death of the Writer" - in which he famously proposed that the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the expiry of the author - that brought near something of a revolution in the fashion we think about, and translate, art. For Barthes, works of literature or art (or whatsoever text for that matter) were never original but rather fabricated up of "a tissue of quotations" from previous and existing works.

For Barthes, and then, to "impose" an writer on a text merely limited its telescopic whereas the text had the potential to offer infinite reading possibilities (structuralism had proposed rather that by deconstructing a text semiologically then ane could uncover a unmarried "fixed" societal significant/construction). The belief that the private interpreted the text for themselves - the idea, in Barthes's words, that a text'south pregnant lay "not in its origin but in its destination" - led thus to revisionist accounts of a canon that was hitherto dominated past the life stories of the great (typically white) men of western fine art. Many take questioned the validity of Barthes's claims (Barthes himself even admitted that when reading "I desire the author"), and even though the author never literally died (postmodernists became the new authors after all), his essay ushered in the era of critical theory whereby "truths" (plural) challenged the idea of "truth" (singular). Poststructuralism supported thus the idea of pluralism and gave special impetus to those theorists and artists interested in pursuing ideas relating to "otherness" and identity politics.

Pluralism

The postmodern pursuit for a democratic fine art extended beyond reproduction, appropriation, and experiments in collective authorship. Postmodernism coincided with the ascent in Feminism, the Ceremonious Rights movement, Queer theory, the fight for LGBT rights and postcolonial theory, and provoked a call for a more pluralistic approach to art. Many artists, such as Kara Walker and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, began to address subjects from multiple perspectives. The collective impact on the arts was an increased representation of diverse, multicultural identities and likewise a playful treatment of identity and the self. This trope was perhaps most evident in the early works of artists such as Barbara Kruger or Cindy Sherman. It is especially true of Sherman whose piece of work focuses on the rift between an identity constructed through film or other media and the lived experience of women. Sherman's goal is to draw her audition's attention to the ways of paradigm production and that prototype's potential for a fluid – or "polysemic" - treatment. Sherman's work thus resists the principal narratives of fine art history and undermines the authorization of the artist.

Later Developments

There are currently two main theoretical approaches to agreement postmodernism, its relation to modernism, and its identify in the contemporary art world.

Continual Build-up on Modernism

I statement is that postmodernism both disrupts and continues modernism equally there is bear witness of both existing in contemporary art, which is a term that broadly refers to any art created within the last xx years, thus encompassing all art product of whatsoever fashion. The attitudes and styles that marking postmodernism can be understood every bit paradigmatic shifts that mark a rupture or crunch in cultural history. From this viewpoint, the impact of postmodern, post-colonial and postal service-feminist theory has sparked a sea of change in art, described by feminist writers such every bit Rosalind Krauss and Suzanne Lacy. Certainly, the diverse, ephemeral, globally focused, cross disciplinary, and collaborative nature of contemporary art exercise is informed by postmodernist attitudes and appears both persistent and transformative. Postmodernism claims to close the gap betwixt "high" and "low" culture and "good" and "bad" taste, yet there is prove that these distinctions remain.

For case, in the early 1990s, a group of young Goldsmiths College students put together a graduate bear witness called Sensations – it was what we might consider a highly postmodern concept. The reaction to the exhibition was unprecedented. Public and critics alike expressed outrage at the provocative imagery and explicit references to subjects of "bad" taste. The group became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) and sparked a revival in Conceptual Fine art using daze tactics to question art'southward meaning, equally Duchamp had done nigh 80 years earlier. Their notoriety has persisted, equally has the furor over Sensations, providing evidence for some that the old sense of taste hierarchies of modernism live on. With this argument, postmodernism has not displaced modernism but is rather an extension of it.

The Age of Mail Postmodernism

Some other view, which has recently emerged in a pocket-sized but persuasive body of writing, argues that nosotros accept moved into a "mail postmodernist" era. Some writers and critics claim that postmodernism is outdated and they question the value of a movement sustained by superficiality, cynicism, and nihilism. Some fifty-fifty debate for a return to the principles of modernism, albeit in different forms. Edward Docx calls this post-postmodern era the "Age of Actuality" characterized by a revival of authenticity and craftsmanship over style and concept. Other monikers include "alter modernism," which is Nicolas Bourriaud's term for the "nonstop communication and globalization" civilisation of today, and "pseudo modernism," which was coined by Alan Kirby. Kirby claims there has been a shift from audition spectatorship to a more active yet trivial participation, citing equally evidence the reality-TV-watching culture. These attempts to merits the finish of postmodernism are wide-ranging and generally nonconsensual just are united in elements of their critique of the postmodern concept. Weary of the relentlessness of postmodern irony and cynicism, these critics yearn for some return to truth and authenticity. In different means albeit, they undermine postmodernism'south authority as a manner of thinking or as an mental attitude to life, reducing information technology instead to one movement in a long history of movements, ane that is now in decline.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/postmodernism/history-and-concepts/