Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Butler

Author:Christopher Butler [Butler, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Sociology, Art, Social Science, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Humanism, Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), General, Literary Criticism, Modern, History & Surveys, Movements, Criticism & Theory, Postmodernism, History
ISBN: 9780192802392
Publisher: Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2002.
Published: 2002-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

Indeed, it is typical of many postmodernist commentators (such as Andreas Huyssen) that they see the ‘true’ function of the avant-garde as being critical in the postmodernist sense – it should attack the bourgeois institutions of art and therefore be directed to a (better?) future. Of course, this is far from true of all the avant-garde movements in our period, or before it. It is a political prescription, which would hardly capture, for example, what Charles Jencks and his colleagues (whose view of postmodernism is highly eccentric to that sketched here) would understand by postmodernism, in defending a conservative return to an admittedly parodic neo-Classicist realism in painting and in architecture.

Postmodernist art therefore echoes in very various and often indirect ways the doctrines we have discussed above; it resists the master narrative of modernism, and the authority of high art which modernism itself takes from the past, and it worries about its own language. It is often simply unconcerned by the relationship between the formerly ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres, for example as expressed in the two symphonies Low (1992) and Heroes (1997) by Philip Glass based on the work of David Bowie and Brian Eno, and it can often look quite trivial and popular and tacky. An alliance with popular culture is seen as anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical, and dissenting. It disrupts narrative – as can be seen, for example, in the figurative painting of Eric Fischl and David Salle – because a coherent narrative too easily allies itself to a grand one. (That is why painters like Anselm Kiefer, who devote themselves to grandiose works with a ‘deep’ relation to history and myth, so significantly lie outside the postmodernist mainstream.) Much postmodernist art pays attention to hitherto marginalized forms of identity and behaviour. This runs from the serious feminist work of Mary Kelly, who documented her relationship to her baby son in Post Partum Document (1973–9) (‘document’ here reveals the nature of the work as a politically significant text, rather than as a formally organized image designed to give visual pleasure) to Madonna’s stage performances and her book Sex (1992), in which the relationship to pleasure is entirely different, and which shocked so many feminists for her apparent ‘theatrical’ submission to sadomasochistic practices, as the ‘victim’ of men.

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