Thread: Art and the postmodern: What is art?

Originally Posted by sycld

Yeah, Think has stated it very well. I would have said that modernism was rational, pessimistic review of what has come before, and in the arts it was characterized by symbolism forming webs of association, existentialism, a greater attempt to render things from a particular person's perspective, and to these ends the beginnings of questioning symbols from the past and subverting them to the purpose of trying to determine how they have subverted and controlled us as humans.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, is the exploding apart of any intellectual framework or constraining form. Well, perhaps more accurately as Think put it, it is focused more on turning an eye upon itself and trying to understand the places, forms, and frameworks that Western art has used for centuries. Sacrosanct symbols and things which were once considered inviolable are profaned are twisted and altered in surprising or shocking ways (famously in Francis Bacon's set of Screaming Pope paintings, based on Velasquez's series of paintings of popes). Art becomes more of a playful game.

I really don't know what post-postmodernism is, and I haven't devoted any thought to it, so I'll take Think's explanation at face value. I thought that syncretism was a mark of postmodernism, but perhaps Think is correct. I remember hearing a contemporary composer praising compositional form and a return to form.



I think you're underestimating yourself and your knowledge.

haha well thank you
As far as my speculations on post-postmodernism go, I would agree with you that PoMo has been characterised by a kind of syncretism but would distinguish two types of it. In PoMo, as you've demonstrated well, historical forms of art have been played with and combined primarily in the name of iconoclasm, and whilst PoMo has no particular conceptual or hermeneutic "worldview", these uses of historical art have nonetheless generally been ironic, playful, cynical and so on, so that art is dislocated from it's historical and hermeneutic context and viewed through the "lens" of PoMo (I would perhaps say "eclectic" rather than "syncretic"). When I say that Post-Postmodernism will likely be syncretic, I mean this in the sense that I anticipate that the canon will be reconstituted, irony and reflexive distance will disappear, and the actual hermeneutic structures of historical art will return. The beauty of this development will be that with this simple change of viewpoint, postmodern work will become post-postmodern retroactively. In Literary Theory, for example, I remember Mikhail Epstein arguing that postmodern concepts will become conventionalised, and as a consequence all the concepts PoMo struggles with and presents tongue-in-cheek will become "naturalised" and taken seriously again. Another early example of this change for me is the "New Sincerity" movement, which deliberately tries to overcome Postmodern Irony. This sudden re-emergence of the whole history and hermeneutics of art which happens as art becomes sincere and self-serious again would inevitably lead to syncretism of quite historically and culturally different forms of art into new systems of composition and interpretation, which would fuel a huge, potentially ahistorical, acultural art movement.
Essentially, I'm arguing that across the humanities and social sciences, I'm increasingly spotting the seeds of the cultural equivalent of the Baha'i faith, and I'm all for it.
Another potential thread of this movement, if you'll allow me to be incredibly speculative and credulous (and bearing in mind that I'm much more confident of the above than of this), is the movement of the left towards a "positive culture" (i.e. defined by independent goals as opposed to being merely a reaction to existing conditions), which started with counterculture but has grown to environmentalism, fair trade advocacy, localisation (in Europe, at least), and most tellingly, cultural syncretism. If you factor in increasing distaste for "consumerism" (particularly the bottling and selling of culture) and the growth of "spiritualism" in all of it's condescending, post-colonial glory, the left increasingly becomes not a negative opposition to right wing "traditional values" (i.e. the traditional leftist "respect and tolerance for different forms of life" with all the accompanying implications of incommensurability between different cultures), but a positive syncretist alternative which simply absorbs the right wing views into a culture of analogy, dialogue and ecumenism.
But maybe that's too much to ask for.

Originally Posted by sailor jack

Thank you all for your views, they have all been taken into account. However I have an issue with almost all of the comments. Not that I'm disagreeing with them in any way.

Most of these posts describe postmodernism and even modernism as going against the norm

Think said "In Art, the Modernist tendency is away from traditional forms"
Sycld said "Postmodernism, on the other hand, is the exploding apart of any intellectual framework or constraining form."

All of these comments link modernism and postmodernism with one being influenced by another. They also seem to describe modernism and postmodernism as soley avant garde (simply being something which opposses the "norm"). So my question now is: Can a piece be postmodern, or even modern, without being avant garde? This may seem like a contradiction in terms as the avant garde being anything other than normal, or anything other than what was before, and both modern and postmodern art being something which was not known before.

I would argue that it could not be either Modernist or Postmodernist without being "Avant-Garde", but for different reasons. In Modernism it would be impossible because Modernism is defined by it's compositional and hermeneutic rules, which are precisely different from and in conflict with traditional forms. If you create art in a Classical, Byzantine, Romantic style it is simply by definition not Modernist because it is incommensurable with Modernist paradigms. Now, as has been said, Postmodernism has no such paradigms; however, if you created art in the older styles, it would either be considered Kitsch, and so not art, or it would be considered ironic, and therefore art but for different hermeneutic reasons than for which the art would exist in it's "native" period. Or it would be considered Kitsch in it's naive, genuine attempt to belong to the traditional school, and because of this be considered Art because Postmodernism embraces Kitsch, but again you see the hermeneutic distinction from it's belonging to art simply by virtue of it's compositional and hermeneutic place in the paradigms of historical art.

Originally Posted by sailor jack

Think also mentioned "urinals in public" which he described as "Modern Art". Correct me if I'm wrong but if you are thinking of Marcel Duchamps piece "Fountain" then it is commonly agreed that this is a postmodern piece rather than modern.

Originally Posted by sycld

He was talking about "Modern Art" in quotes, i.e. the colloquial meaning of the phrase or what people think of when they hear "modern art." In that sense, it refers to contemporary art rather than art from the period of modernism.

uh huh

Originally Posted by sailor jack

I suppose my main questions or the purpose of all the questioning I do is this: Where do we stop? All this jargon, personal interpretations, this web of generalities and near unexplainable ideas seems to be endless. Is there a definitive result which we can reach? If so, why has it not been reached? This may seem like a broad question, and I have already been ridiculed by people more educated than myself, but I feel it necessary to look at the bigger picture.

My theory, or idea as it is hardly as substantial as any theory I've ever seen, is this: Our perseverence and endevour to find an answer to these questions fuels the perseverence and endeavor to create new ones. It might seem obvious or ridiculous. I know people on either side of the argument. I think the answer is too obvious and people like myself create new questions on different branches of an idea almost to just keep busy. Are we overlooking an answer that is right in front of our eyes? Maybe the answer to "why?" is simply because we can. Like any other cultural object, we create new tangents because we want to know where it will take us and if we can create a new tangent off of that. This takes me into a much wider question which i will post later but for now, what are your thoughts?

Well, obviously this is huge question and not one which we can perhaps ever answer with much confidence, but the provisional one I was going to give you when I read that first paragraph is by and large what you said in the second. It's known as reflexivity in social theory and it means we've got a much greater reason to be annoyed about observer effects than physics has. If we ever figured out how the totality of art, politics, psychology, sociology or economics worked, our very knowledge would increase the complexity of that particular system. I don't think this means that we should ever stop thinking about these things, but if the theory holds, it does mean that the humanities and social sciences are the cultural equivalent of a dog chasing it's own tail.