4.1: What is Postmodernism?

Defining Postmodernism

By Sarah Churchill

Abstract Expressionism represented perhaps the most logical endpoint of modern art's descent into pure abstraction, pure "art for art's sake." Exhausted by the extreme poverty of the Depression and scarred by the violence and despair of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, Ab Ex artists reconstructed a world broken by human cruelty by trusting their own inner emotions and intuitions. Their rebellion paved the way for the many smaller rebellions that would follow in second half of the twentieth century. But the utopian dreams and technological progressivism of the prewar era were now dead. Skepticism and a kind of cool, reactionary inquiry replaced the passionate fury that was modern art in the early twentieth century.

Postmodernism, which began in the 1950s, is exactly what it sounds like – a description of what came after the movement known as modernism. It isn't characterized by any single style, but rather by an eclectic variety of approaches and "isms" building on and against each other in fine art, photography and architecture. Conceptual art, Minimalism, Video art, Performance art, Institutional Critique, and Identity Politics are just a few of responses that characterize postmodernism. While disparate in intentions, ideologies and material concerns, postmodern artists were united by a certain ironic and playful treatment of the fragmented subject. They broke down the invisible barrier between high and low culture hierarchies, undermined concepts of authenticity and originality, attacked institutions (museums and galleries particularly) and emphasized the image and spectacle in their work.

Postmodernism questioned many of the dominant master narratives and racial and sexual hierarchies that had long-structured modern art. In surviving the war and living through Cold War that followed, they came to reject modernists' embrace of technological progress and rationalism, seeing history as far messier and more fractured than those nationalist narratives upon which they'd been raised. The 1960s and '70s, particularly, sparked a rethinking of the art historical canon. With the rise of second-wave feminism and post-colonial theory, as well as the turbulence of global Civil Rights, Indigenous Rights and Decolonization movements, many female artists, queer artists and artists of color rose to prominence by explicitly challenging their elision from the vast art historical complex in and through their art.

Read more about postmodernism at theartstory.org.

Read more about postmodernism at the Tate Modern.

The Case for Copying

by THE ART ASSIGNMENT

1968: The Year that Changed Everything

To this day, 1968 proved to be one of the most tumultuous years in modern history. In America, the Vietnam War was still raging, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, waves of student-led protests occupied university campuses and the National Democratic Convention in Chicago turned violent, as TV cameras captured bloody clashes between police and demonstrators.

Europe was also profoundly touched by America's youthful rebellion against war, injustice and the status quo. In May 1968 students from Poland to Paris and elsewhere took to the streets in a kind of confused social, sexual and political rebellion. Motivated by Marxist political ideals, their revolution was largely symbolic. However, historians like Julian Bourg have argued that what followed from the revolutionary impulses of the '60s was an ethical turn in philosophy. As Bourg has poignantly argued, “The twentieth century began with Vladimir Lenin’s observation that making an omelet meant breaking eggs; it ended with the assertion of the rights of chickens.”

"You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials, because
The revolution will not be televised"

–Gill Scott Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (1969)

The irony, of course, in Scott Heron's affecting poem and song about this turbulent time period is that in the 1960s and '70s, the revolution was televised. The ubiquity of photojournalism and a broader revolution in global media consumption meant that for the first time in history, everyone was watching history unfold in real time. Iconic imagery of violence and protest saturated the public imagination and the stark division between reality and representation began to break down and be questioned, particularly in postmodern photography and in the photorealist paintings, drawings and sculptures of artists like Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Duane Hanson and Richard Estes. Postmodern photography particularly, as Donald Crimp argued, played with such interpretations in order to subvert them, showing photography to be “always a representation, always-already-seen…purloined, confiscated, appropriated, stolen.”

Sources:

Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal, Kingston, London and Chicago: McGill-Quenn University Press, [2007] 2017)

Crimp, Douglas. “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism.” October 15 (Winter 1980): 92–101.

Fink, Carole, Philipp Gassert, Detlef Junker, and Daniel S. Mattern, eds. 1968: The World Transformed. Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1998.