It is commonplace today for art scholars to lazily categorize
Post-Modernism as one more movement of Modern/Contemporary Art
sandwiched somewhere between the site works and computer viruses
of the last three decades of the 20th Century. Post-Modernism
is dead, passé! Or at least the desire of art historians to
revisit it is dead. And this presents artists with a problem,
for many of the issues first raised by Post-Modernism remain
unresolved.
These topics fester beneath the death mask of academic
disinterest. This situation would be pitiful for artists if we
continue to concede the theater of art theory to the dreary
ruminations of critics. For all its failures, some of which
will be reviewed here, Post-Modernism was the final great
artists’ manifesto of the Twentieth Century. It is more
relevant to us today than all its predecessors, not because it
claimed "the death of art," nor grandiosely "the death of
civilization," but simply, and more modestly, it proclaimed "the
death of Modern Art."
As working artists, this is a claim we need to seriously
revisit again. We need to grasp the full implications of the
end of the Modern Art era. This is not an issue to delegate to
the "arts intelligencia" who have no credentials to lead, who
have been seduced for this past quarter century by their own
blasé, and who would have us believe that we are making
"Contemporary Art" as some natural extension of Modernism.
Every art is contemporary with its historical times. To call
our product contemporary is to practice stupidity while ignoring
the pathos of it. The real issue is that Modernism is over. We
have entered a new historical epoch of art. We don’t yet know
what the defining principals will be, so we don’t know what to
call it. But gracias a Dios, it will not be called Contemporary
Art, nor Post-Modernism which swallowed its tail in the morass
of semiotics, and choked from the ugliness of its own name.
But the Post-Modern movement was the radical break with
Modernism, and for that we can respect it, and be eternally
grateful. We are no longer post-anything, nor neo-anything. We
have entered the new playground, and we are comfortable with the
swing sets. But before I attempt to outline the distinctive
traits of this new era, let us briefly examine our history so
that we may better understand the present, and also let me first
state my own position. The core, strategic, defining issue of
one hundred years of Modern Art has been successfully
completed. The monotheistic, patriarchal God of Judaism, Islam,
and Christianity is dead. Modern Art, in collaboration with the
historicism of communism, the unfettered and unapologetic greed
of capitalism, the relentless materialism of science, and a new
Godless philosophy, all collaborated to kill the father-God.
Though the fundamentalists rabidly fear it, and will fight "red
in tooth and claw" against it, the truth be told, their God is
slain.
The
role of modern art in this patricide was to shift the
aesthetic. For five centuries commencing with Giotto, the
patronage of the Catholic Church and the secular states of
Western Europe collaborated to perfect the aesthetics of a
pan-European painting style based upon impeccable perspective,
theatrical lighting, and stunning realism. Through the abject
beauty of Botticelli and Raphael, the humor of Hals, the glory
of Poussin, the heroicism of David, even in the pornography of
Delacroix, for half a millennium the art of Western Europe from
insipient Renaissance to Enlightenment and empire was heroic,
greater than life, God-inspired and God-reinforcing. European
art was a continent-wide divine apotheosis; it was the unified
vision of an art at once fantastic and of sublime realism. The
first real sign of decay in this ideological fortress of
Christian self-imagining did not appear until the beginning of
the 19th Century when Goya reintroduced into painting the
atavistic Middle-Ages’ fascination with the grotesque.
Once begun by a fistful of French reject artists, the new
aesthetic discoveries of Modern Art collapsed the fluffy and
inflated image of God. Ridicule, even blasphemy became
possible, then commonplace. Seeing is believing such that the
public slowly caught on to the novelty of other picture planes,
other color combinations, other psychological moments worth
knowing, other competing pathways to the sublime beyond the
hegemonic corridors of church and academy.
Modern Art, which began in the 1870’s, ended one century later
in1968 with the global social revolutions in Mexico, the United
States, and France. Its mission, its unconscious mission for
the most part, the assassination of God, was accomplished. But
that future role, which becomes apparent in hindsight, was not
known at all in its early decades. The mission of Modernism did
not begin to reveal itself to artists (and then only to some)
until the 20th Century was well under way. First came the
manifestos of Kirchner and Marinetti asserting the avant garde
role of the artist. Then came the violent and absolute
destruction of the classical picture plane by Cubism. And the
coup d’grâce following the utter terror and insanity of WW I was
the Dada movement’s attack on the Enlightenment’s unshakable
faith in human reason. Again in hindsight, the consequences of
such a radical shift of esthetics values within such a brief
moment of time made the outcome of Modernism inevitable.
So
as artists taking the first fateful steps of the new millennium,
we cannot be sure which directions will be most fruitful, but
two things we can know. We do not need trained guide dogs to
show us the path, and we can examine what has already transpired
in visual art since 1968 to see what is indicated from that.
There are a variety of topics which are no doubt relevant, but I
will confine my discussion to just three.
First, what occurred of such enormous magnitude as to warrant
equivalence with concepts like Baroque or Neo-Classicism that
marks 1968 as the watershed from Modern Art to the present as
yet un-named art epoch? The answer is the immediate and radical
shift in art from the dominance of issues of form, to the
overwhelming dominance of issues of content.
Modern Art is concerned with issues of form. Aesthetics is the
study of form, and "form is truth" Modern aesthetics invented a
new "abstract truth" to directly compete against the old "God
truth" of realism. The search for a new, defining, formal,
anti-Christ, abstract truth, is the defining paradigm of the
century of Modern Art. This new truth ultimately succeeded in
discovering both its own divine, and its own sublime.
In startling comparison, Post-Modernism immediately subordinated
form to content. Post-Modernism overturned the purpose of
art-making to favor content, that is, to make art about
meaning. "Content is meaning!" Four decades into the
experiment, and there is no evidence anywhere that the issues of
meaning are not going to continue to dominate art creation for a
very long time yet to come.
To
understand the profound relevance of this shift from formal art
to content art we must understand that all Western philosophy,
science, history, politics, all Western thought in every
academic discipline bar none, is built upon an architecture of
"oppositional dualism." I am not referring here to any one
debate like mind/body dualism, but instead to the entirety of
all such binary oppositions in Western thought. Good or evil,
day or night, to be or not to be, Western thought is structured
by the pairing of binary opposites. This architecture is
distinct from Eastern dualism which seeks to balance male and
female, positive and negative. In Eastern duality, yin and yang
exist as binary forces which struggle within the unity of the
whole. Western dualism is forever asymmetrical, oppositional,
and combative. Thesis begets anti-thesis, while synthesis
becomes thesis to battle the next antithesis. Every discipline
has its polar warring camps. Without this structure, Western
thought would not advance. We would collapse once again into an
intellectual Dark Age. We would not have history, we would not
progress. Perhaps this is art’s next mission?
This
is not to imply that the Chinese have no sense of history, or
that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not monotheistic
religions. The point is that dualism is structural and operates
at the subliminal level of culture. Thus, the pendulum of power
in art has swung to the opposite pole. Form has been
subordinated to the service of content, and with this great
change has come a florescence of new subjects. The former
boundaries of "proper subject matter" have been rent asunder.
All topics of our current age are game- our planet, our history,
our genocides, our follies, our private neurosis, and our
internal medicines- all, and much more, have been prized opened
for inspection. Never mind that the presentation of so much of
this material is ill-conceived and oppressively boring; that it
is being made available right now is an astounding novelty unto
itself.
This
phenomenal explosion of subject matter leads us into our second
topic which is the parallel growth of the subjective voice.
Today’s art is dominated by opinion. Nobody making "relevant"
art searches for universals anymore. That is formalism, that’s
passé. Instead, today’s art preaches from a soapbox, it rants,
solicits, performs, hustles, teaches, reveals, investigates,
narrates, bares its soul, waves a white flag, embarrasses the
viewer, and begs forgiveness, sometime all in the same work.
There is tremendous inventiveness in this outpouring. There is
great drama, startling revelations, intense therapy, and plenty
of tedium.
The
beginning point of subject art cannot be the object, i.e., the
artwork, or even the world. Instead, it must be the subject
"me," me as the artist or me as the viewer, me and my
relationship to some facet of this world about me which I have
placed under the aesthetic microscope. The entire world becomes
the act of interpretation. Truth is no longer eternal; it can
only be relative.
The impact of Post-Modernism on architecture and on art has been
a positive adventure for the most part. But the impact of
Post-Modernism (vis à vis semiotics and linguistic theory) on
philosophy, and on Western society in general, has been
profoundly negative. Form, which is truth, which is the
objective voice, has been replaced by content, which is meaning,
which is the subjective voice. Our world has become dominated
by opinions, all clamoring to be equally valid. Amidst this
"democratic" chorus, how is one to sort the grain from the
chaff? Tragically, it is within the moral fabric of society
where the unraveling brought on by unchecked subjectivity is
truly felt. Who is the authority to preside over good and
evil? Both the right and the left can agree that there has been
a dramatic decline in moral behavior within society, though we
finger point at different villains.
The last trend of the four decades following Modern Art that I
would like to briefly discuss has been the wholesale
appropriation of cultural images and manufactured objects into
the iconographic inventory of art. Appropriation has been the
driving evolutionary engine of art from the very beginning.
Artists in one region borrow materials, stories, gods, ideas,
inventions, iconography, and/or methods from their neighbors to
advance their own repertoire. In this manner, art has
continuously ebbed and flowed with the migrations of human
culture and civilization. Thriving local and regional styles
evolved within the larger structures of trade, religion, and
empire. Some motifs became truly universal as Covarrubius
demonstrated with fret patterns throughout the pre-conquest
Pacific basin.
Post-modernism accelerated this borrowing process
exponentially. Schnabel glued broken crockery to his paintings
thus appropriating cultural meaning from archeology. Subsequent
movements or styles have blossomed where the appropriation or
manipulation of the object, or the deed of claiming ownership
itself, becomes the artwork as with found object art, recycled
art, and graffiti art. Encouraged by our art school professors
who were quick to recognize intriguing results, American artists
mined American culture for symbols and artifacts, and then went
shopping for global iconography. Appropriation became
"sampling." The results of such juxtapositions have fostered
remarkable invention, but once again, there have been unintended
repercussions, most notably, the accusation of cultural
colonialism. Appropriation means to take possession without
compensation. Semantically then, appropriation legitimizes and
legalizes cultural theft as it becomes proper to appropriate
another’s property.
I do
believe the artists’ manifestos from a hundred years ago. From
thenceforth, there will always exist in a state of flux an avant
garde of artists engaged in novel research and struggle who have
a separate mission from the great majority of artists who
decorate our homes and offices and public spaces and engage in
commerce. The two roles are not mutually exclusionary, but I
maintain that artists who wish to lead must hold their conduct
to a higher moral standard. The act of appropriation must
become once again the act of appreciation, the raising of the
value of the icon, not its crass commodification.
The
movement of Post-Modernism had its moment in history, and it has
passed. In visual art it did not leave much of a stylistic
legacy as did Impressionism, but its impact on subsequent
generations of artists will be equally profound. Post-modernism
established the new turf and many of the rules by which we will
play for a long time to come. Our current crop of art
historians and critics are out of touch, confounded by
subjectivity and helpless to read the tea leaves. The present
moment is rampant with issues. The future mission(s) of art is
wide open. This is an opportunistic time for artists.
Thomas Powell
June 2006