LAD wrote:Cranius, do you think you could elaborate on how the term continues to be used (if it does) in the visual arts and your thoughts on the matter.
Throughout the first-half of the twentieth-century the linear progression of modernism had seen a refinement of form and process in art, through reductivism, and a tendency towards absolutism. Avant-gardism was its own
raison d'étre. (See Marinetti's
Manifesto of Futurism).
By the late fifties/early-sixties the visual arts had reached an impasse. The work of artists such as Rothko and Pollock represented a historical endgame, in which painters attempted to paint the 'final painting', free from cultural significance and meaning--They had literally painted themselves into a corner.
Clement Greenberg, the preeminent theorist of Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, thought that painting should be primarily concerned with the connection between artist and brush strokes. He was obsessed with the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the materiality of paint and was very rigid in his conception of art.
Abstract Expressionism came to represent the patriarchy of high art. The CIA even funded extensive tours of Abstract Expressionism around the world, in order to champion freedom of expression in the world's foremost democracy. Art became a cultural weapon. The uncritical individualist pose of the artists like Pollock (the 'Lonely Rebel' as Jameson puts it) began to appear increasingly chauvinistic. Painting in particlular seemed to be a masculine pursuit. The rise of feminism and race in critical theory began to question the cultural primacy of painting.
(When I went to the recent Guston retrospective you can see this struggle of ideas internalized; as Guston goes through his own paradigm shifts--from surrealism to extreme abstraction and out the otherside into self-referential neo-expressionism)
Duchamp, who can be considered the forerunner of post-modernist art, suffered his own intellectual crisis with painting as early as 1912, coming to see it as the ' senseless glorification of the hand'. His use of 'ready-mades' leveled the playing-field of art, and narrowed the gap between artist and audience. This layed a lot of intellectual ground-work for artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. High and low art distinctions could now be blurred, and multiplicity of meaning and 'rhizomic' undrerstanding became acceptable. Although Pop Art may seem like a historical genre, it was gateway through which art became more accessible and even flagrantly populist. Other genres such as cinema and billboard art were elevated to high art status (In the case of Jodorowsky's
El Topo and
Holy Mountain it was mime and symbolism that were reasserted). Technology has also begun to play a part with the emergence of video and performance and other time-based media. A good definition of postmodernist art is that it tests the limits of expression with the tools it finds to hand.
My least favourite examples of post-modernism are from the eighties/nineties, with artists such as Koons self-consciously strategizing for postioning within the art-market. The supposedly clever irony of holding a mirror to the market really bears out Debord's observation that: "...the image has become the final form of commodity reification". There was also a trend for ultra-postmodernism in which artists attempted to ride the zeitgeist wave of the paradigm shift. This allowed a lot of hucksters and chancers to write themselves into art history.
I think the debate
vis-a-vis post-modernism and modernism is beginning to move on and there is almost a move towards a form of 'post-art'. The Chapman brothers and Matthew Barney are conscious exponents of this.
Martin Kippenberger is good example of a self-effacing post-modernist, who never sticks to single medium and openly acknowledges that he gets other people to paint for him.
Intresting links:
Adorno: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction