Postmodern art

Postmodern art is a term used to describe art which is thought to be after or in contradiction to some aspect of modernism. In general movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video are described as post-modern. The traits associated with the use of the term post-modern in art include bricolage, use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, depiction of consumer or popular culture and Performance art.

Use of the term

The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is Contemporary Art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject post-modernism for other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe,, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.

It has been used to denote what may be considered as the ultimate phase of modern art, as art after modernism or as certain tendencies of contemporary art. Postmodern art uses a vocabulary of media, genres or styles as parts of an extended visual language that is seen as going beyond the boundaries of the modernist vocabulary. The uses of the term in art are often sourced from Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Fredrick Jameson who argue that the condition of life and production will be reflected in all activity, including the making of art. Baudrillard, in particular, has been influential because of his conclusion that what motivates art historical change is not any 'authentic' or 'original' impulse, but simply fashion, pivoting on the desire for novelty, which he sees as an organic and integrated processes.

There are those who argue against a division into modern and postmodern periods. Not all critics agree that the stage called modernism is over. There is no agreement that all art after modernism is post-modern. Contemporary Art is the more widely used term to denote work since roughly 1960, though it has many other uses as well. Nor is post-modern art universally separated from modernism, with many critics seeing it as merely another phase in Modern art.

As with all uses of the term post-modern there are critics of its application, however, at this point, these critics are in the minority. This is not to say that the phase of art denoted by post-modernism is accepted, merely that the need for a term to describe movements in art after the peak of Abstract Expressionism is well established.

In general Pop Art and Minimalism began as modernist movements, a shift in the paradigm and a philosophical split between formalism and anti-formalism in the early 1970s caused those movements to be viewed by some as precursors, or transitioning to postmodern art. Other modern movements cited as influential to postmodern art are Conceptual art, Dada and Surrealism and the use of techniques such as assemblage, montage, collage, bricolage and art forms which used recording or reproduction as the basis for artworks.

File:Sol LeWitt Four Sided Pyramid.jpg

Minimalist artist Sol Lewitt's Four Sided Pyramid (1999), on display at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C

Defining Postmodern art

Post-modernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against, trends in modernism and reject some aspect of modernism. In some descriptions post-modernism as a period in art is completed, where as in others it is a continuing movement in Contemporary art. In art, the specific traits of modernism which are cited are generally formal purity, medium specificity, art for art's sake, the possibility of authenticity in art, the importance or even possibility of universal truth in art, and the importance of an avant-garde and originality. This last point is one of particular controversy in art, where many institutions argue that being visionary, forward looking, cutting edge and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and that postmodern therefore, represents a contradiction of the value of "art of our times".

One compact definition offered is that post-modernism acts in rejection of modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, and to eradicate the boundaries between high and low forms of art, to disrupt genre and its conventions with collision, collage and fragmentation. Post-modern art is seen as believing that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody and humor are the only positions which cannot be overturned by critique or later events.

Many of these traits are present in modern movements in art, particularly the rejection of the separation between high and low forms of art. However, these traits are considered fundamental to post-modern art, as opposed to merely present in one degree or another. One of the most important points of difference, however, between post-modernism, and modernism, as movements in art, is modernism's ultimately progressive stance that new works be more "forward looking" and advanced, where as post-modern movements generally reject the notion that there can be advancement or progress in art per se, and thus one of the projects of art must be the overturning of the "myth of the avant-garde". This relates to the negation of what post-structuralist philosophers call "metanarratives".

Rosalind Krauss was one of the important annunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, and that the new artistic era existed in a post-liberal and post-progress normalcy. An example of this viewpoint is explained by Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New in his chapter "The Future That Was":

Where did this new academy begin? At its origins the avant-garde myth had held the artist to be a precursor; the significant work is the one that prepares the future. The cult of the precursor ended by cluttering the landscape with absurd prophetic claims. The idea of a cultural avant-garde was unimaginable before 1800. It was fostered by the rise of liberalism. Where the taste of religious or secular courts determined patronage, "subversive" innovation was not esteemed as a sign of artistic quality. Nor was the artist's autonomy, that would come with the Romantics.

Radical movements in Modern Art

Radical movements and trends regarded as influential and potentially as precursors to post-modernism emerged around World War I and particularly in its aftermath. With the introduction of the use of industrial artifacts in art, movements such as Cubism, Dada and Surrealism as well as techniques such as collage and artforms such as cinema and the rise of reproduction as a means of creating artworks. Both Pablo Picasso the Modernist and Marcel Duchamp the rebel created important and influential works from found objects.

The ignition point for the definition of modernism as a movement was the austere rejection of popular culture as kitsch by important post-war artists and taste-makers, most notably Clement Greenberg with his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, first published in Partisan Review in 1939.

Jackson Pollock, Abstract expressionism, and Process Art

Main articles: Jackson Pollock, Abstract expressionism, Process art, and Western painting

Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948

During the late 1940s Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made at the mid-century point. Pollock's move - away from easel painting and conventionality - was a liberating signal to his contemporaneous artists and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process - working on the floor, unstretched raw canvas, from all four sides, using artist materials, industrial materials, imagery, non-imagery, throwing linear skeins of paint, dripping, drawing, staining, brushing, essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.

In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s Color field painting, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, Process Art emerged as a revolutionary concept and movement that encompassed painting and sculpture, via Lyrical Abstraction and the Postminimalist movement, and in early Conceptual Art. Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Sam Gilliam, Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who emerged in the 1960s during the era of late modernism that spawned the heyday of Process art.

Pop Art

Main articles: Pop Art and Western painting

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam! (1963). On display at the Tate Modern, London.

In 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the movement. While later American examples include the bulk of the careers of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and his use of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction. There is a clear connection between the radical works of Duchamp, the rebellious Dadaist - with a sense of humor; and Pop Artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the others.

Minimalism

Main articles: Minimalism and Western painting

By the early 1960s Minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich, the Bauhaus and Mondrian) which rejected the idea of relational, and subjective painting, the complexity of Abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement and depending on the context can be construed as a precursor to the post modern movement. Seen from the perspective of writers who sometimes classify it as a post-modern movement, (which it isn't) early minimalism began and succeeded as a modernist movement to yield advanced works, but which ultimately - partially abandoned this project - when a few artists changed direction in favor of the anti-form movement. In the late 1960s the term Post-minimalism was coined by Robert Pincus-Witten to describe minimalist derived art which had content and contextual overtones which minimalism rejected, and was applied to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt, and Barry Le Va, and others. Minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce their late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers.

In the 1960s the work of the avant-garde Minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley also became prominent in the New York art world.

Since this time, many artists have embraced minimal or post-minimal styles and the label "post-modern", has attached to them. Maybe as a way of denoting a greater desire to make art which is appealing to general audiences or maybe because those are already familiar and known styles.

Collage, Assemblage, Installation art

Main articles: Collage, Assemblage art, and Installation art

Robert Rauschenberg Untitled Combine, 1963

Related to Abstract expressionism was the emergence of combined manufactured items - with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz among others were important pioneers of both abstraction and Pop Art; creating new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion of unlikely materials as parts of their works of art. Another pioneer of Collage was Joseph Cornell whose more intimate scaled works were seen as radical; partially because of his personal iconography and partially because of his use of found objects.

Dada

Main article: Dada

In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His point was to have people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art, because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "Readymades." The Fountain, was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art. Other famous examples being John Cage's 4' 33" which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence and Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing. Many conceptual works take the position that art is created by the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not from the intrinsic qualites of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture.

Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess.[1] Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross that features a chess game, where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.[2]

Performance art, and Happenings

Main articles: Performance art and Happenings

Carolee Schneemann performing her piece Interior Scroll

During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push the boundaries of Contemporary art. Yves Klein in France, and Carolee Schneeman, Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, and Yoko Ono in New York City were pioneers of performance based works of art. Groups like The Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina collaborated with sculptors and painters creating environments; radically changing the relationship between audience and performer especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York, and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and others collaborated with artists Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and engineers like Billy Klüver. These performances were often designed to be the creation of a new art form, combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. The works were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism, and the spontaneous improvisation, and expressivity of Abstract expressionism.

During the same period - the late 1950s through the mid 1960s various avant-garde artists created Happenings. Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in varied specified locations. Often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physical exercise, costumes, spontaneous nudity, and various random and seemingly disconnected acts. Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman among others were notable creators of Happenings.

Fluxus

Main article: Fluxus

Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931-78), a Lithuanian-born American artist. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht and Dick Higgins.

Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.

Movements in Postmodern art

High and Low

As a kind of response to Clement Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch in 1990 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik curated High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition attempted to elucidate the extent that artists and high culture drew on and from popular culture. Although universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp and Hilton Kramer together in a chorus of scorn. The exhibition is remembered today as a benchmark of postmodernism.

Conceptual Art

Main article: Conceptual Art

Conceptual art is sometimes labelled as post-modern because it is expressly involved in deconstruction of what makes a work of art, "art". Conceptual art, because it is often designed to confront, offend or attack notions held by many of the people who view it, is regarded with particular controversy.

Installation art

Main article: Installation art

An important series of movements in art which have consistently been described as post-modern involved installation art and creation of artifacts that are conceptual in nature. One example being the signs of Jenny Holtzer which use the devices of art to convey specific messages, such as "Protect Me From What I Want". Installation Art has been important in determining the spaces selected for musuems of contemporary art in order to be able to hold the large works which are composed of vast collages of manufactured and found objects. These installations and collages are often electrified, with moving parts and lights.

They are often designed to create environmental effects, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Iron Curtain which was a row of barrels intended to create a traffic jam.

Performance art

Main articles: Performance art and List of performance artists

Intermedia, Multi-media

Main article: Intermedia

Another trend in art which has been associated with the term post-modern is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new artforms along the lines of Fluxus, Concrete Poetry, Found objects, Performance art, and Computer art. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press, a Concrete poet, married to artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp. One of the most common forms of "multi-media art" is the use of video-tape and CRT monitors, termed Video art. While the theory of combining multiple arts into one art is quite old, and has been revived periodically, the post-modern manifestation is often in combination with performance art, where the dramatic subtext is removed, and what is left is the specific statements of the artist in question or the conceptual statement of their action.

Appropriation art and Neo-conceptual art

Main articles: Appropriation art and Neo-conceptual art

In his 1980 essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens identifies the re-emergence of an allegorical impulse as characteristic of postmodern art. This impulse can be seen in the appropriation art of artists such as Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo because, "Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery."

Institutional Critique

Main article: Institutional Critique

Critiques on the institutions of art (principally museums and galleries) are made in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke.

Sources

• The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005, Hilton Kramer, 2006, ISBN 0 1-56663-708
• Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), Kirk Varnedoe, 2003
• Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, Irving Sandler
• The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss
• Postmodernism (Movements in Modern Art) Eleanor Heartney
• The Shock of the New Robert Hughes
• Sculpture in the Age of Doubt Thomas McEvilley 1999
• After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History Arthur C. Danto

See also

• Postmodernism
• Neo-Dada
• Contemporary art
• Postmodern music
• Remodernism
• Classificatory disputes about art
• Trauma and the Arts
• Modernism
• Modernist project