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
