Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.
There are several characteristics which lend art to being postmodern; these include the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, bricolage, the use of text prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, performance art, as well as the break-up of the barrier between fine and high arts and low art and popular culture.Ideas About Art, Desmond, Kathleen K. John Wiley & Sons, 2011, p.148International postmodernism: theory and literary practice, Bertens, Hans , Routledge, 1997, p.236
Use of the term The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is "contemporary art". Not all art labeled as contemporary art is postmodern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modernist and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject postmodernism for other reasons. Arthur Danto argues "contemporary" is the broader term, and postmodern objects represent a "subsector" of the contemporary movement.After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History Arthur C. Danto Some postmodern artists have made more distinctive breaks from the ideas of modern art and there is no consensus as to what is "late-modern" and what is "post-modern". Ideas rejected by the modern aesthetic have been re-established. In painting, postmodernism reintroduced representation.Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, New York: The Free Press, 2001, Some critics argue much of the current "postmodern" art, the latest avant-gardism, should still classify as modern art.Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture Charles Jencks
As well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art, postmodern has also been used to denote a phase of modern art. Defenders of modernism, such as Clement Greenberg,Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism , 1979. Retrieved June 26, 2007. as well as radical opponents of modernism, such as Félix Guattari, who calls it modernism's "last gasp",Félix Guattari, the Postmodern Impasse in The Guattari Reader, Blackwell Publishing, 1996, pp109-113. have adopted this position. The neo-conservative Hilton Kramer describes postmodernism as "a creation of modernism at the end of its tether".Quoted in Oliver Bennett, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World, Edinburgh University Press, 2001, p131. Jean-François Lyotard, in Fredric Jameson's analysis, does not hold there is a postmodern stage radically different from the period of high modernism; instead, postmodern discontent with this or that high modernist style is part of the experimentation of high modernism, giving birth to new modernisms.Fredric Jameson, Foreword to Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1997, pxvi. In the context of aesthetics and art, Jean-François Lyotard is a major philosopher of postmodernism.
Many critics hold postmodern art emerges from modern art. Suggested dates for the shift from modern to postmodern include 1914 in Europe, and 1962 or 1968 in America. James Elkins, commenting on discussions about the exact date of the transition from modernism to postmodernism, compares it to the discussion in the 1960s about the exact span of mannerism and whether it should begin directly after the High Renaissance or later in the century. He makes the point these debates go on all the time with respect to art movements and periods, which is not to say they are not important.James Elkins, Stories of Art, Routledge, 2002, p16. The close of the period of postmodern art has been dated to the end of the 1980s, when the word postmodernism lost much of its critical resonance, and art practices began to address the impact of globalization and new media.Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp2-3.
Jean Baudrillard has had a significant influence on postmodern-inspired art and emphasised the possibilities of new forms of creativity.Nicholas Zurbrugg, Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, Sage Publications, 1997, p150. The artist Peter Halley describes his day-glo colours as "hyperrealization of real color", and acknowledges Baudrillard as an influence.Gary Genosko, Baudrillard and Signs: Signification Ablaze, Routledge, 1994, p154. Baudrillard himself, since 1984, was fairly consistent in his view that contemporary art, and postmodern art in particular, was inferior to the modernist art of the post World War II period, while Jean-François Lyotard praised Contemporary painting and remarked on its evolution from Modern art.Grebowicz, Margaret, Gender After Lyotard, State University of New York Press, 2007. Major women artists in the Twentieth Century are associated with postmodern art since much theoretical articulation of their work emerged from French psychoanalysis and feminist theory that is strongly related to post modern philosophy.de Zegher, Catherine (ed.) Inside the Visible, MIT Press, 1996Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine, Women Artists at the Millennium, October Books / The MIT Press, 2006,
As with all uses of the term postmodern, there are critics of its application. Kirk Varnedoe, for instance, stated that there is no such thing as postmodernism, and that the possibilities of modernism have not yet been exhausted.William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-century Thought, University of Chicago Press, 1997, p4. Though the usage of the term as a kind of shorthand to designate the work of certain Post-war "schools" employing relatively specific material and generic techniques has become conventional since the early to mid-1980s, the theoretical underpinnings of Postmodernism as an epochal or epistemic division are still very much in controversy.The Citadel of Modernism Falls to Deconstructionists, – 1992 critical essay, The Triumph of Modernism, 2006, Hilton Kramer, pp218-221.
Characteristics
Postmodernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against or reject, trends in modernism.The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss, Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (July 9, 1986), Part I, Modernist Myths, pp.8–171 General citations for specific trends of modernism are formal purity, medium specificity, art for art's sake, authenticity, universality, originality and revolutionary or reactionary tendency, i.e. the avant-garde. However, paradox is probably the most important modernist idea against which postmodernism reacts. Paradox was central to the modernist enterprise, which Manet introduced. Manet's various violations of representational art brought to prominence the supposed mutual exclusiveness of reality and representation, design and representation, abstraction and reality, and so on. The incorporation of paradox was highly stimulating from Manet to the conceptualists.
The status of the avant-garde is controversial: many institutions argue being visionary, forward-looking, cutting-edge, and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and therefore postmodern art contradicts the value of "art of our times". Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art per se, and thus aims to overturn the "myth of the avant-garde". Rosalind Krauss was one of the important enunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, and the new artistic era is post-liberal and post-progress.The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss, Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (July 9, 1986), Part I, Modernist Myths, pp.8–171, Part II, Toward Post-modernism, pp. 196–291. Griselda Pollock studied and confronted the avant-garde and modern art in a series of groundbreaking books, reviewing modern art at the same time as redefining postmodern art.Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans reviewed. Manchester University Press, 1996. .Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon. Routledge, London & N.Y., 1999. .Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. Routledge, London, 1996. .
One characteristic of postmodern art is its conflation of high and low culture through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery. The use of low forms of art were a part of modernist experimentation as well, as documented in Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik's 1990–91 show High and Low: Popular Culture and Modern Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art,Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: literature and culture, 1889–1939, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp6-7. an exhibition that was universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp and Hilton Kramer together in a chorus of scorn. Postmodern art is noted for the way in which it blurs the distinctions between what is perceived as fine or high art and what is generally seen as low or kitsch art.General Introduction to Postmodernism. Cla.purdue.edu. Retrieved on 2013-08-02. While this concept of "blurring" or "fusing" high art with low art had been experimented during modernism, it only ever became fully endorsed after the advent of the postmodern era. Postmodernism introduced elements of commercialism, kitsch and a general camp aesthetic within its artistic context; postmodernism takes styles from past periods, such as Gothicism, the Renaissance and the Baroque, and mixes them so as to ignore their original use in their corresponding artistic movement. Such elements are common characteristics of what defines postmodern art. Art Spiegelman, when discussing his selection of a specific style for Maus, described a postmodernist's ability to develop a wide "palette" of varying styles that they can draw from at will, where their predecessors would instead focus on improving and maintaining a single "trademark" style.Spiegelman. Metamaus, p. 141.
Fredric Jameson suggests postmodern works abjure any claim to spontaneity and directness of expression, making use instead of pastiche and discontinuity. Against this definition, Art and Language's Charles Harrison and Paul Wood maintained pastiche and discontinuity are endemic to modernist art, and are deployed effectively by modern artists such as Manet and Picasso.Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, 1992, p1014.
One compact definition is postmodernism rejects modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art, and disrupting genre's conventions with collision, collage, and fragmentation. Postmodern art holds all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody, and humor are the only positions critique or revision cannot overturn. "Pluralism and diversity" are other defining features.Michael Woods: Art of the Western World, Summit Books, 1989, p323.
Avant-garde precursors