Sunday, February 28, 2010

Post-Postmodern: Conclusion

The following is total speculation. I make no claim to rigorous scholarship. Instead, I am playing with a particular notion.

During the past two months I have written about the Postmodern (Pomo) Versus the Post-Postmodern (Po-Pomo), primarily a monologue about a contemporary critical and metacritical approach to the visual arts. Finally, I came to a four-part conclusion. First, many of my readings that speculate about Post-Postmodernism indicate that a characteristic of the Po-pomo is the use of new technologies to slide any viewer away from a centered position into confused realities. Instead, this is a characteristic of both the Pomo and Po-Pomo. Second, an actual / real new Po-Pomo characteristic seems to be the artist’s intent to inflict discomfort while refusing to communicate a specific message. * Third, It is too soon to be certain about the complete contents of a Po-Pomo philosophical bag of tricks. Fourth, I am certain that the Postmodern and Post-Postmodern must be intimately related, sort of like a dog chasing its own tail. They are not opposed to one another, and that means that the change from one to the other does not represent a paradigm shift.

The two month on and off lengthy discussion of the Pomo versus the Po-Pomo also started me to thinking about extreme change in the arts, and in the culture at large, an actual paradigm shift, like the change in the visual arts at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, from the 10,000 year history of representational art to the concerns of extreme abstraction and non-objective Modern Art. That change in the Arts had been preceded by the shift from monarchy to democracy in both the American, and the French Revolutions. And, it was accompanied by the destruction of the monarchy in Russia. Thus I maintain that a paradigm shift is often accompanied by extreme political, social, and/or cultural upheaval. An actual paradigm shift would be like a massive social earthquake followed by a long period of recovery and pronounced change.


Today, in the United States of America, no matter how much change anyone predicts we continue to limp along in the same direction the West has maintained for hundreds of years, binary opposition in all matters. It is always one political party versus the other, one race versus the other, one religion versus the other, one sexuality versus another, one theory versus another, and one art form versus another. For every idea there is an equal (perhaps not so equal) and powerful opposite. All of our processes whether philosophical, spiritual, political or intellectual are reduced to one thing versus another. Instead, as the structuralists through to the Postmodern deconstructionists in various fields demonstrated, binary oppositions while they may be the most important way humankind thinks, are at the very least problematic.*2 They provide an easy way to avoid a much more complex structure that is more appropriately graphed on a three-dimensional matrix rather than the single one-dimensional line of opposition.

I’m not wishing for a paradigm shift in the Arts, because, as I observed above, an actual paradigm shift in the Arts is usually heralded by something like the First Russian Revolution of March 1917 in which the Tsar and his family were deposed. That revolution unfortunately led to the Bolshevik Revolution of the following October which led directly to the murder of the Tsar and his family, and finally to the excesses and genocide of the communist government under the megalomaniac, Joseph Stalin. Then there is the French Revolution of 1789 that led to the “The Reign of Terror” and masses of guillotined aristocrats and ordinary citizens. I could provide more examples, but you see my point. Never the less, being immersed in all the argument and division caused by our myopic oppositional vision is extremely frustrating, and the temptation to react in an emotional contrary motion to any perceived direction is, as both the revolutions mentioned above demonstrate, inaccurate and probably unhealthy as well. So, I’m reduced to a condition of stasis, just as our own political system seems to be paralyzed in a paroxysm of oppositional frenzy.


Instead, I would much rather see a paradigm shift in which we attempt to turn away from binary opposition toward a more complex model of thought. What about substituting the 3-dimensional matrix for the single one-dimensional line created by binary opposition? That would be a drastic change in the way Western culture approaches the universe. Why not push that model forward, and how might that be accomplished? Would it be taught in schools? What would be the effect of such a drastic change in the way we conduct our intellectual lives? And, by extension, what new kind(s) of political system(s) – other than anarchy and revolution - would such a model encourage? How would such a change affect human spirituality and religious institutions? What changes might we see in the way science is performed in our culture? Or is that the way science is supposed to be performed? And, most importantly to me, what new direction(s) would we take in the arts?

Notes

* The first observation was based on my reading of David Bate among others.

• Bate, David, “After Postmodernism?” in Lens Culture, http://www.lensculture.com/bate1.html, © 2005. Viewed 10:35 EST, Friday, January 15, 2010.

*2 I make this observation based on some of the following readings.

Reading

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatologie. Trans. with intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
---. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
---. Writing and Difference. Trans./Intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Fleck, Ludwig. The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.
---. The History of Sexuality: Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure. trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985.
---. The History of Sexuality: Volume 3, The Care of the Self. trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1984.

Frankel, Vera, The Body Missing Project. Toronto: 1995. On line. Available from http//www.yorku.ca/bodymissing/intro.html (Jan. 21, 2000).

Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Kirby, Alan, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (2009).
---------------- “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” Philosophy Now, No. 58, 2006. Viewed on line 9:-- AM EST, Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

LeVautour, Bernard P. Provencher. “The Death of “Pseudo-Modernism” and Beyond; A Return From “Critical Realism.” In Le Vautour Chronique, http://levautourchronique.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-pseudo-modernism-and-beyond.html. Viewed 10:50 AM EST, Sunday, February 7, 2010.

Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books (1663).

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism.” reprinted as an
appendix to the English edition of Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71-82. Harrison and Wood, 1008-1017.

Schaffner, Ingrid and Matthias Winzen (eds.). Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Munic: Prestel, 1998.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Post Modern Versus Post-Postmodern: Continued


In my entry dated February 12, 2010 I looked at David Bate’s article, "After Postmodernism," in which he, a photographer discussed Hyper Realism in the visual arts as a Post-Postmodern – I’m calling it “Po-Pomo” - phenomenon. I am a visual realist myself so I tend to stay focused myopically. However, on Sunday a week ago, I read “Post Minimal to the Max,” an article by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. In that article, Smith gives examples of artists she believes should currently have much more exposure in the major museums of New York City. All of the artists fit in categories other than realism. Smith decries the sameness of the New York Museum art scene, and I am reminded that there is so much more to both the Modern and Postmodern than extreme realism in the visual arts. Some of the artists she discusses are Jim Nutt, Dona Nelson, Nicole Eisenman, Roy De Forest, Peter Saul, Louis Dodd, Thomas Nozkowski, and Larry Poons. Because of my own Realist proclivities Smith’s article took me by surprise. Smith expressed displeasure over seeing the same international Minimalist artists repeatedly in the major New York museum venues- though she is not devaluing either the museums or the artists - generated by the need to conform to the committee system in place and to raise cash. She simply emphasizes the fact that so much more is being left out. Based on the reading of Smith I have left so much out of my own discussion of the contemporary art scene. For instance, in my last journal entry I didn’t think to observe that David Bate’s photographs from the series “Bungled Memories” (image above) are actually Minimalist works.

Thus, it behooves me to look into and possibly write at length about trends other than realism and how these relate to the topic “Post-Postmodern versus the Postmodern.”

* Bate, David, “Bungled Memories,” David Bate Website at http://davidbate.net/EXHIBITIONS/Bungled-Memories.html. Viewed 10:21 AM EST, Friday, February, 12, 2010.


Reading

Bate, David, “After Postmodernism?” in Lens Culture, http://www.lensculture.com/bate1.html, © 2005. Viewed 10:35 EST, Friday, January 15, 2010.

Smith, Roberta, “Post Minimal to the Max,” Arts and Leisure, New York Times. Sunday, February 14, 2010. (1 and 23).

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Cold, Cold and more Cold!

I know I shouldn’t complain because I could be sitting in 44 inches of snow, as are all my friends and family in Lancaster Pennsylvania. However, it has been running ten to twenty degrees below normal here in South Florida since the last week in December. The coconut palms are brown and forlorn, and they express exactly my own feelings about this El Nino weather with their lower branches broken and pointing directly to the ground. I also know that in the past other El Nino years have brought repeated heavy snow and cold to Lancaster County. So, is this one any different? Definitely in severity, proving scientist’s contention that extreme weather is a property of climate change. Thus, I am really tired of listening to the conservative and liberal pundits argue over the possibility of such, when it is so obvious to the rest of our planet’s population that “CLIMATE CHANGE IS A FACT.” I don’t give a (BLEEP) what your idiotic opinion about said change is, Rush and Glenn. And, Keith and Rachel, you don’t need to argue with those two knee jerk fools.


Be that as it may, I am extremely tired of this cold and wet winter. So, I looked in my photographic files for a picture that would lift my spirits, and I found this one from Butterfly World, that wonderfully unexpected Zen-like venue in the middle of the Gold Coast. I took the photo in 2008, and looking at it reminds me of walking into the rain forest environment with the thousands of butterflies flying everywhere around me. I'm also reminded that butterflies are a wistful metaphor for our own short lives, and these beautiful creatures tell us that Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama and all the other manifestations of God want us to make the most beautiful and perfect lives that we possibly can.* To do anything else is not only woefully inadequate, but also sinful.

KD Lang at the Winter Olympics 2010

If you didn't see the opening ceremonies you have to play the incomparable Ms. Lang singing Leonard Cohen'a masterpiece.

Okay. Now you can no longer view and listen to Ms. Lang courtesy of the Olympic Committee. Ain't it wonderful!


*I am not quoting the Baha'i faith. I have reached my own conclusions concerning God's love for the creation and those men and women who seem to retain a thorough connection to and knowledge of God throughout there lives.

Friday, February 12, 2010

The Death of Postmodernism: PoMo Versus Po-Pomo

A Continuation of the journal entry dated February 7, 2010, itself a part of a larger discussion of the topic, “What Comes After the Postmodern?”

*1

*2

David Bate, himself a photographer, moves on to a discussion of the photography of Walker Evans, and Andreas Gursky. The two are removed from one another by several generations but nonetheless; David maintains the two use description to evoke a presence that is overwhelming but that “inhibits the communication of a specific message.*3  I ask, isn’t that a kind of sliding reference in that we are talking about sliding away from any particular communication. Additionally, linking the two (past and present) together and then attempting to project that onto a new Art and art critical reality bridges time and place, a characteristic of the postmodern.

Simultaneously, it would seem that whenever a paradigm shift occurs, the new must deprecate the past. I agree with David Bate that the “Po-Pomo” may be in part characterized by a turn toward a “newer kind of neo-realism,” one in which images are so certain in their representation that the viewer is struck, if not brutally, at least mercilessly with accuracy, whether constructed or not. At the same time, I wonder if that wasn’t what Photorealism (1970’s to early 1980’s) which has morphed into the Hyper-realism of the 2000’s wasn’t / isn’t about. The original Photorealists were interested in creating an illusion of the photograph, depth of field, reflections and other distortions, thus conformed to the postmodern sliding reference theme. However the extension into the possible Po-Pomo realm of Hyper-realism of the 2000’s includes the meticulous rendition of painful realities by Denis Peterson, Gotffried Helnwein, David Bate himself and others. I wonder if this last might be too narrow, and that an actual Po-Pomo must include a broader set of characteristics inclusive of much of Postmodernism deconstructive tendencies as well as the new “painful realities.” In either case, the Po-Pomo and the Postmodern must be linked in a fit of compulsive obsession, like a dog chasing its tale, and we would have change with not so much change.

A thoughtful world is so gray!

Of course, all this last is conjecture. We should know whether this particular change is actual sometime in the next decade.

Notes:

1. Bate, David, “Bungled Memories,” David Bate Website at http://davidbate.net/EXHIBITIONS/Bungled-Memories.html. Viewed 10:21 AM EST, Friday, February, 12, 2010.

2. Andreas Gursky Photography, You Tube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drn1EUz_LOg. Viewed 10:51 AM EST, Friday, February 12, 2010.

3. In an E-mail dated February 11, 2010, David defended the conflation as follows. “…Walker Evans and Gursky: these figures are drawn together by the exhibition - the first ever 'ohotography' exhibition - held at the Tate Modern, it is not me who collapses them together.” Tuesday, February 9, 2010 12:55:23 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern, viewed 9:12 AM EST, Wednesday, February 10, 2010.

Readings:

Bate, David, “After Postmodernism?” in Lens Culture, http://www.lensculture.com/bate1.html, © 2005. Viewed 10:35 EST, Friday, January 15, 2010.
-------------------“Re: Use of an image in my Web Journal,” Tuesday, February 9, 2010 12:55:23 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern, viewed 9:12 AM EST, Wednesday, February 10, 2010.
-------------------“Bungled Memories,” David Bate Website at http://davidbate.net/EXHIBITIONS/Bungled-Memories.html. Viewed 10:21 AM EST, Friday, February, 12, 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatologie. Trans. with intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
---. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
---. Writing and Difference. Trans./Intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Frankel, Vera, The Body Missing Project. Toronto: 1995. On line. Available from http//www.yorku.ca/bodymissing/intro.html (Jan. 21, 2000).

Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Kirby, Alan, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (2009).
---------------- “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” Philosophy Now, No. 58, 2006. Viewed on line 9:-- AM EST, Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

LeVautour, Bernard P. Provencher. “The Death of “Pseudo-Modernism” and Beyone; A Return From “Critical Realism.” In Le Vautour Chronique, http://levautourchronique.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-pseudo-modernism-and-beyond.html. Viewed 10:50 AM EST, Sunday, February 7, 2010.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism.” reprinted as an
appendix to the English edition of Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71-82. Harrison and Wood, 1008-1017.

Schaffner, Ingrid and Matthias Winzen (eds.). Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Munic: Prestel, 1998.

Williams, Val and Susan Bright, Curators, “How We Are Photographing Britain: 22 May – 2 September 2007,” Tate Modern, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/howweare/. Viewed 10:00 AM EST, Friday, February 12, 2010.

Wilson, Fred, “What Comes After Post Modernism,” in A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC, http://www.avc.com/a_vc/about.html. Viewed 11:03 AM EST, Sunday, January 3, 2010.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

The Death of Postmodernism: PoMo versus Po-Pomo


The virtual political poltergeist of Joe the Plumber, has finally been banished from this Blog, and I return with pleasure to our past discussion about the direction in which contemporary art and art criticism is headed. In this entry I will meta-critique the article “After Postmodernism?” by David Bate, published in the Web magazine, Lens Culture. Mr. Bate asks a few questions, and I am paraphrasing – Is an ideological vacuum the fundamental characteristic of the Post-Postmodern - where has the Postmodern got to and what has replaced it? .

Just because an ideology does not name itself, it does not mean that there is not one. It may simply be that we have not managed to give a name to this post ‘postmodern’ condition.
*1

Which brings me full circle to my January 17th journal entry, “After Postmodernism,” in which I claimed that the Post-Postmodern has not yet been named. And now, a few days later I wonder if it hasn’t been accidentally named - during the second half of the first decade of the 21st Century - the “Post-Postmodern” or “Po-Pomo” by a group of artists and art critics searching for something to grab hold of.

In his article Bate says that Postmodernism was named in the process of redefining / dethroning (my words) Modernism. That process included dealing with the notion that originality is primary, sine qua non to Modernism’s platform. Instead, the Postmodern claimed that no thing could be completely original, that the present always refers to or in some way quotes the past. That isn’t to say that we learn from the past, only that it is always part of any time and place. Art in that nexus was a recombinant soup of various elements from the past with the present. Thus (my own thought), Postmodernism, a way of thinking that claimed there was no such thing as universality was itself based on at least one all-encompassing concept - more, as we shall see.

Bate also refers to the notion of the text and “inter-textual reference” in Postmodernism leaving out the link between text and image, assuming that everyone knows that the two have become interchangeable.* He equates inter-textual reference with the banality of diurnal life, and the operations of new technological spaces like the internet. As example he uses Cindy Sherman’s work because she often referenced the category, Hollywood B grade films in her self-portraits, except that he calls them “trashy Hollywood films.” Bate continues in a negative paroxysm of Sherman's sliding textual references into a confused reality. He then generalizes that “It seemed, this postmodern culture was leaving behind 'reality' proper for a mediatized world. That is to say, postmodern culture was characterized as an environment of frenzied inter-textual reference,…”* I concur with Bate that sliding and/or inter-textual reference leading to confusion is indeed a characteristic of the Postmodern, though I can't agree that the use of sliding and/or inter-textual reference equates to the trite in contemporary life and the new technologies as well. In that case we would have to do away with Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup can, Brillo Boxes, and all the Serigraph portraiture. I personally am not willing to do away with Andy or any of Modernism and Postmodernism - all of the Twentieth Century simply because it demonstrates the impossibility of achieving a singular truth.


To be continued

Notes:

1. Bate, David, “After Postmodernism?” in Lens Culture, http://www.lensculture.com/bate1.html, © 2005. Viewed 10:35 EST, Friday, January 15, 2010.

Readings:

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatologie. Trans. with intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
---. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
---. Writing and Difference. Trans./Intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Frankel, Vera, The Body Missing Project. Toronto: 1995. On line. Available from http//www.yorku.ca/bodymissing/intro.html (Jan. 21, 2000).

Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Kirby, Alan, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (2009).
---------------- “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” Philosophy Now, No. 58, 2006. Viewed on line 9:-- AM EST, Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

LeVautour, Bernard P. Provencher. “The Death of “Pseudo-Modernism” and Beyond; A Return From “Critical Realism.” In Le Vautour Chronique, http://levautourchronique.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-pseudo-modernism-and-beyond.html. Viewed 10:50 AM EST, Sunday, February 7, 2010.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism.” reprinted as an
appendix to the English edition of Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71-82. Harrison and Wood, 1008-1017.

Schaffner, Ingrid and Matthias Winzen (eds.). Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Munic: Prestel, 1998.

Wilson, Fred, “What Comes After Post Modernism,” in A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC, http://www.avc.com/a_vc/about.html. Viewed 11:03 AM EST, Sunday, January 3, 2010.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Crashing Waves

We return control of this journal to John Bittinger Klomp.


Just wanted to put up a sunny day at Blowing Rocks to show the incredible natural beauty of the south Florida Seascape where it has not been compromised.