I found some interesting comments on Artblog.net today regarding "modernism" and "postmodernism." Of course, some of it was incorrect. There still seems to be some difficulty in defining the latter. However, as mentioned by your editor almost a year and a half ago, there are those that say "postmodernism" is dead. This was being discussed back in 1997 at a Univ. of Chicago Conference on After Postmodernism.
I wonder if the majority of commentors over at Artblog.net also comment about other media than painting with the same vigor? They have some heated discussions about painting for sure. There seems to be a more narrow focus on media as well. That is meant as an observation, nothing more.
I remember some years ago speaking with several people, including Robert F. Thompson, Ph.D., saying that postmodernism cannot be such because modernism had not been fully realized as a project throughout Western culture. This event doesn't seem to have caused any great death throes until now. Maybe it won't ever.
Without some definition of terms, all those discussing the current exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg at Miami Art Museum, the whole conversation gets muddled.
Modernism:
Concentrating on the period extending roughly from 1860-80 to the present, Modernism/Modernity focuses on the methodological, archival, and theoretical exigencies particular to modernist studies. It encourages an interdisciplinary approach linking music, architecture, the visual arts, literature, and social and intellectual history. (Johns Hopkins Univ.)
The term modernism commonly refers to those forward-looking architects, designers, and artisans who from 1860-80 on, forged a new and diverse vocabulary to escape Historicism, the tyranny of previous historical styles. (Minneapolis Inst. of the Arts)
Until recently, the word "modern" used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art is modern at the time it is made. In his Il Libro dell'Arte (translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook") in 1437, Cennino Cennini explains that Giotto made painting "modern" [see bibliography]. Giorgio Vasari writing in 16th-century Italy refers to the art of his own period as "modern." [see bibliography]
As an art historical term, "modern" refers to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and is used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. The term "modernism" is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, "modernism" can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art. (Sweet Briar College)
Postmodernism:
Firstly, postmodernism was a movement in architecture that rejected the modernist, avant garde, passion for the new. Modernism is here understood in art and architecture as the project of rejecting tradition in favour of going "where no man has gone before" or better: to create forms for no other purpose than novelty. Modernism was an exploration of possibilities and a perpetual search for uniqueness and its cognate--individuality. Modernism's valorization of the new was rejected by architectural postmodernism in the 50's and 60's for conservative reasons. They wanted to maintain elements of modern utility while returning to the reassuring classical forms of the past. The result of this was an ironic brick-a-brack or collage approach to construction that combines several traditional styles into one structure. As collage, meaning is found in combinations of already created patterns. (Univ. of Virginia)
Although the term "postmodernism" is continually undergoing interrogation and redefinition, one constant that emerges from the critical discourses surrounding it is a sense that postmodernism involves a radical rethinking of representational strategies, and with this a questioning of our underlying assumptions about how "meanings" are produced. Postmodern narratives are therefore frequently formally experimental as William Burrough's emblematic "cut-ups" demonstrate, employing such techniques as fragmentation, intertextuality, and appropriation to fundamentally alter the way language represents the "meaning" of texts. Other postmodern narratives are preoccupied with the intersection of the "past" and contemporaneity, continually asking what's at stake when representations of previous cultural history are put to work in various ways as a comment on the present. (Univ. of Calif. Berkeley)
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. (PBS.org)
Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself." (PBS.org)
Death of Postmodernism?
So post-modernism is dead. And what's to succeed it? Perhaps a period of critical realism? "Clearly, critical realism is by now a diffuse and interdisciplinary movement, covering a wide spectrum of opinions. The question is: how broad a church can critical realism be if it is to remain both critical and realist?" Roger Caldwell examines the evidence and takes a look at its would-be successor: Critical Realism. (Philosophy Now) Critically Realist?
"For the last two decades of the twentieth century the dominant cultural paradigm was that of postmodernism. But at the beginning of the new millennium a new paradigm is on offer. Postmodernism is dead. It is to be succeeded by the age of critical realism. That at least is the promise that José López and Garry Potter hold out as propagandists of the new movement (they edited a collection of essays called After Postmodernism - An Introduction to Critical Realism, published by Continuum in 2001).
One may question whether it is even possible to state theories of this kind without self-contradiction. If objective truth about reality is impossible, then what is the logical status of the statement that objective truth about reality is impossible, since it itself aspires to objective truth?
The notion of nature, and for that matter human nature, tends to be seen as essentially a social construct, which means that we can never speak of nature as such but only of discourses about nature. The result of this, combined with a suspicion of scientific thought as indissolubly linked with political and social domination, is that sociologists are powerless to contribute to debates about such important contemporary issues as loss of biodiversity or ecological degradation, assessment of which is crucially dependent on scientific analysis. If sociologists deny the validity of a scientific account of nature to begin with, dissolving ‘nature’ into so many discourses, they are left with a hapless relativism, inadequate to deal with the ‘real’ problems that clearly exist."
Is Postmodernism finally on its deathbed? Roger Caldwell examines the evidence and takes a look at its would-be successor: Critical Realism.
I know my local artist friends read this but, maybe they might want to post a comment for a change. Of course, this is in reference to the art of Robert Rauschenberg, whose art, as I have said many times, is some of my favorite. For many reasons.
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