The Emergence of Critical Postmodern Art
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In the midst of the postmodern art tumult of the 1980's there emerged a group of artists whose artwork was outwardly focused and culturally critical in a broad Debordian sense. Focusing on the subjects of postmodern culture, critical postmodern artists depicted the dark side of the postmodern world from their multiple perspectives. They did this with well-crafted works that may communicate on a broader less elitist level. These artists are not neutral toward their subjects.Keywords:
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Since the nineteenth century there have been a series of 'isms' in the art world that have taken the artist further into a territory that non-artists often view with disdain and derision. These 'isms' such as late modernism, seem designed to keep out non-artists. This self-contained stance has estranged the arts from the rest of society to the point that it has rendered the artist socially impotent. Even though postmodernism offers new perspectives and relationships between artists and the culture they inhabit, non-artists seem especially wary of it. Ironically though, postmodernism in some form, may be the vehicle that could re-integrate art with everyday life. Research for this thesis probes the following questions: Can postmodernism lead us to a model of art making that is at once aesthetic and socially integrated? And if so, what are the implications for the artist, art education and the community at large?
Modernism
Modern art
Everyday Life
Postmodern music
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Silvio Gaggi's survey of the vast terrain of twentieth century arts and ideas is unique not only for its scope but also for the clarity and cohesiveness it brings to wide-ranging, seemingly disparate works. By identifying underlying epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical issues. Gaggi draws connections among such modern and postmodern masterpieces as Pirandello's and Brecht's theater, Fowles's and Barth's fiction, Warhol's paintings, Godard's and Bergman's films, and Derrida's literary theory. Modern/Postmodern begins with a discussion of the profound skepticism--about traditional beliefs and about our ability to know the self--that lies at the heart of both modernism and postmodernism. Gaggi identifies the modernist response to this doubt as the rejection of mimesis in favor of a purely formalistic or expressionistic art. The postmodern response, on the other hand, is above all to create art that is self-referential (concerned with art itself, the history of art, or its processes). Drawing from the work of Piranadello and Brecht, paradigms that can be applies to many different art works, Gaggi emphasizes how these works from diverse media relate to one another and what their relationships are to the contemporary artistic and philosophical climate. He concentrates on the works themselves, but examines theory as a parallel manifestation of the same obsessions that inform recent literature and art. Gaggi asks, finally, if self-referential art can also be politically and ethically engaged with the reality outside it. He concludes that the postmodern obsession with language, narrativity, and artifice is not necessarily a decadent indulgence but is, at its best, an honest inquiry into the problems, questions, and paradoxes of language. Modern/Postmodern is a lively approach to postmodern art that will interest all students and scholars of contemporary art and literature.
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In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable.The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era?Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.
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The problem being considered in this paper is the alienation of the general viewer from contemporary art. Modern art has become less understandable than ever before to the non-art audience because it has, in many cases, ceased to deal with human-oriented subject matter, and has become detached from life. This paper examines ways in which modern art might be made more accessible to the world through the artists' use of emotion, intuition, intelligence, and other Humanistic elements as content for paintings. It contains a four-part proposal of what Humanist art is. The basic form is the use of rhetorical questions about modern art, leading one to more questions and to a broader, more open-minded attitude toward modern art.
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Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of practice. We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered outsider art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s post-critical turn. This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those uncritical forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.
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The Third Avant-garde investigates radical art
manifestations in Southeast Asia, which took place around the mid-1980s, when
postmodernism started to gain force in the region. It proposes that the
advent of postmodernism in Southeast Asia is anchored in the materiality of
traditional arts, an aspect that renders it different from its Western
equivalent. The dissertation distinguishes two sets of postmodern
manifestations: first, practices that use traditions in a celebratory way,
and second, a set of works which use traditional arts radically. This study
proposes that the second possibility manifests a double dismantle—first,
against local patronizing forces that were enforcing artists to practice
academic art and Western media (such as painting and sculpture), and second,
a distancing attitude from Western art intelligentsia, who acted as ‘owners
of the discourse’, and regarded ‘non-Western’ practitioners as followers
rather than as trendsetters. For this investigation, the discipline of
anthropology was called in, as was the art historical category of the
avant-garde. The two approaches combined reveal how contemporary art from
Southeast Asia that reprocesses traditional arts can be regarded as
avant-garde. These gestures are novel, and result from practicing art in a
certain location, and which is bound to a specific socio-political context.
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Modernist aesthetics is certainly predicated upon the concept of an individualized vision or oeuvre, but it also subsumes under the Western canon modes of collective production in ancient and medieval cultures, as well as from tribal cultures and contemporary Western consumer culture. In the later stages of modernism—Surrealism, Dada, and Pop art for example—and in postmodern practices, this individualized concept has been under attack from many quarters. With the rise of community arts practices in the U.S. and the U.K., the re-articulations of women artists and artists of color, public art, and the increasing use of new technology, group practices and collaborations have increased dramatically. Sometimes these have been driven by ideology, sometimes by sheer necessity. In certain practices the process of collaboration has been paramount, the growth or enabling of individuals or groups being the goal.1 However, in situations where there are ideas to be communicated more widely, aesthetic power becomes especially important—it is central to the work's ability to speak beyond the confines of any single group. The “beauty” of such images derives from the imaginative interpretation of meanings embodied in the ideas, in the distillation of the desires of a constituency in a form that expresses those ideas effectively.
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Beckett's work has been important to several generations of post-war visual artists, and continues to figure strongly in contemporary work. Although this relationship has often been seen in terms of a shared minimalist aesthetic, the present essay argues that a more significant engagement emerges in the work of several artists who emerged alongside and in reaction to minimalist art in the late 1960s. These artists saw Beckett's work as departing from Clement Greenberg's late modernist notion of the autonomous artwork, emphasizing instead an openness to the body, popular new technologies and everyday life. It is this version of Beckett, rather than the minimalist one, that remains influential in today's art world.
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This chapter is concerned with how we think about the art of the twentieth century in the era of twenty-first century globalism. How do museums move from a geographically and ideologically restricted, chauvinistic, Western canon view to embrace the global history of practice? The concern here is not with contemporary art today, which has faced up to the global challenge with geographical egalitarianism, but with those canonical art histories central to the purpose of those canonical memory institutions, now to be found in almost every capital on Earth, the national galleries. Notions of progress frame the art referred to in this chapter but most of the world's art from this period falls outside or has been excluded from the modernist narrative to be found in Western Europe and United States. This art was produced in systems where the authority, ideology or resonances of modernist art culture, the nation, the state or the empire shaped the materials, form, subject matter and trajectory of artistic creation. This mode of artistic production became increasingly challenged in the West from the 1960s onwards. In other parts of the world this only happened with the collapse or weakening of communist governments around 1990. In all these countries, it was followed by the 'postmodern plurality' of globalised contemporary art culture. Only in a few places, where authoritarianism remains, has this still not happened. This chapter, which uses as its primary materials museum practice, exhibitions and art writing, begins by discussing the problem and then asks whether modernism was, at that moment when it was contemporary, perceived as a geographically restricted phenomenon. How did this change as modern art was canonised and remembered, particularly in museums? What roles did location and the nation play in the conceptualisation and remembering of modernism? Was modernity a singular conception experienced universally or did it differ according to location? And finally, using the art of Mongolia as an example, is there a case for privileging location or nation so as to improve the interpretation of artistic modernities and in so doing produce an enriched sense of engagement and creativity? Can such a viewpoint empower and diversify the art histories we show in museums?
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