Book = Gateways to Art - Understanding the Visual Arts (second edition) 40. Many
ID: 3491491 • Letter: B
Question
Book = Gateways to Art - Understanding the Visual Arts (second edition)40. Many of the Postmodern artworks in this chapter deal with issues of identity. Choose one example from this chapter, perhaps an artwork by Xenobia Bailey, Jolene Rickard, or Shirin Neshat. Begin by briefly describing the appearance and content of your chosen work. Next, give a definition of Postmodernism and list some of its characteristics. Discuss the connection between the personal experience of the artist as seen in the artwork and the movement of Postmodernism. In what ways does the movement allow for explorations of this kind?
Explanation / Answer
Postmodernism and its characteristics
Postmodernism and personal experience
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. 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. Some critics argue much of the current "postmodern" art, the latest avant-gardism, should still classify as modern art.
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, as well as radical opponents of modernism, such as Félix Guattari, who calls it modernism's "last gasp," have adopted this position. The neo-conservative Hilton Kramer describes postmodernism as "a creation of modernism at the end of its tether."
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. 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. 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.