I am struggling to find any specific photographs that represent the post moderism theory, can anyone suggest a few artists ?
I am struggling to find any specific photographs that represent the post moderism theory, can anyone suggest a few artists ?
Sarah,
Man Ray's stuff looks post modernist to me, but I understand that he was prepost modernist. OTOH if you want examples of work by someone who earns a wage producing post modernist art, you'd need to find a postpaid modernist or a prepostpaid modernist. But I'm just postulating here. ;-)
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
Oh my goodness; everyone's definition is different, whether they like or don't. Seems to be more of an approach or attitude than a look.
If you know what it is when you see it, you might look at the Museum of Contemporary Photography website (www.mocp.org). Click on "Exhibitions," and from there go to "Traveling exhibitions" as well as "Past" and "Upcoming."
Off the top of my head...
Nancy Wrexwroth
Anne Arden McDonald
Cindy Sherman
Baudrillard's pics
Sally Mann's later stuff
Bear in mind there ISN'T one postmodern theory, there are zillions. You could safely argue ( more or less ) that anything from a feminist viewpoint will fit, but how you make it fit...
Unless you are doing this for a paper, I really wouldn't bother its a black hole you'll disappear down... or make an academic career
Postmodernism replaced concern with objects in front of the camera with self-referential discourse; it is about criticism, making literature, not pictures of things. It is appealing to a large intellectual group because it yields easily to great quanties of scholarship; participants need not make art, photographers need not Be There. It yields easily because it leverages its nitwits upon the impossibility of finding the semiotics of photography itself. Postmodernism is a social disease, but an entertaining one.
Thomas Demand probably
Or any TV "reality" show
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
jj said..
hah! That would make a great email sigPostmodernism is a social disease, but an entertaining one
Hello,
The classic book on the subject is: Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Art Criticism and Theory) edited byBrian Wallis and Marcia Tucker. It might be hard to get. The newmuseum.org say that they have it. It's the book that Rosalind Krauss and her people used to teach with. It covers a lot of different areas and is illustrated.
My graduate degree is mostly related to post modern photo theory and in retrospect I was exposed to some pretty interesting ideas but infact the actual stuff produced by artists was mostly purely nonsense. It's Art for nonartists. For them it's all about something you can figure out and not something that you can feel or have passion for or even have any real interest in at all.
The basics of photo theory are interesting though like the writings of Roland Barthes in his "Image Music Text" and "S/Z". Don't get any Frencher than that though.
Personally I prefer just walking around with my old crappy 4X5 and two lenses taking pictures because that is a real experience to me.
The classic book on the subject is: Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Art Criticism and Theory) edited byBrian Wallis and Marcia Tucker. It might be hard to get.
I have it here. It is available new in a paperback. ISBN: 0879235640
Julian, you're calling Anne Arden McDonald a postmodernist? I call her a Romantic! I do it to her face. She'd be so ammused by the posmodern title. She works in genre that's been with us over a hundred years (at least the well known self portrait series that I think you're talking about). I know where she fits into the tradtition because of her own slide shows on the topic.
Of course, this is the conundrum with postmodernism ... not even the postmodernists agree on a definition. It's more a fuzzy umbrella of ideas about art.
Because of this, it's less like a social disease and more like a "syndrome." That's a fancy word that doctors and researchers use when they see the same symptoms together a lot, but are not sure what the underlying cause is.
Some of the symptoms:
"conceptual" nature of the work. It tends to start with an idea, and then work to illustrate that idea.
The idea itself often concerns popular culture, depictions of popular culture, or other art that deals with depictions of popular culture.
A related idea is that any heirarchy of high or low culture, artistic or commercial imagery, serious or casual expression, is artificial. Therefore you can not make a case that Bach's Well Tempered Clavier is any more worth listening to then the Empire Carpets jingle.
A common idea is that appropriation, rather than creation of original metaphors, is where all the opportunities for creativity can be found. By appropriating an image, you can presume to have appropriated all the meanings and associations that the viewing culture has attached to that image.
Another common premise is deconstruction. Attributed to Derrida, and related to many other highbrow theories of culture-based philosophy that many artists like to quote without having read, deconstruction is a branch of criticism that promotes relativism of interpretation. In other words, if you can find a certain meaning in a text (and everything is a text. even you, dear reader), that meaning is as defenseable as any other. Meaning is found by tearing the text apart into its elemental pieces. If there are any instructions for putting a text back together again, they seem to have been misplaced.
Postmodern art may show all or some (or maybe even none!) of these symptoms. It does seem to be less fashionable now than it was ten years ago. I agree with JJ that part of its appeal is its easy yielding to scholarship. I also think its appeal is that it's easy to teach. Ideas are much easier to work with than personal metaphors in a classroom environment.
I also agree that Cindy Sherman is a classic example of postmodern photography. Sherry levine is the poster child of the movement. Duchamp was the great precursor to the movement with his "Readymades." He summed it up so well that it's amazing anyone after him found anything to say at all.
Bookmarks