During this final lecture before the Christmas break we discussed postmodernism in photography and the questioning of modernist notions.
Modernism
Although there is no particular definition for the term ‘Modernism’ or ‘Modern Art’, we usually refer Modernism to the works produced during the period 1870-1970. Modern artists used new materials, new techniques of painting, and developed new theories about how art should reflect the perceived world. During the period entirely new types of art had been developed. There are many different styles that are covered by modernist art, however there are also certain principles that define the term:
- A rejection of history and conservative values (such as realistic depiction of subjects);
- Innovation and experimentation with form (the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work) with a tendency to abstraction;
- An emphasis on materials, techniques and processes.
Key Characteristics of Modernism
- Medium as message – purity of form, often leading to abstraction
- Forward looking, progressive. A continuing search for improvement or refinement
- Art matters and has real, intrinsic value
- The artist’s vision is represented in the art work created
- The meaning of the art work can be ascertained by looking at it.
Postmodernism
The term ‘Postmodernism’ is used from 1970 and describes the changes seen to take place in the Western society and culture from the 1960s. Beginning with Pop Art, postmodernism was a reaction to Modernist ideas and also refers to a cultural, intellectual or artistic state.
Key characteristics of postmodernism:
- It collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture
- It tends to remove the boundary between art and everyday life
- It refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be.
Postmodernism in opposition to Modernism:
- Essentially, postmodern art addresses the way art works within and against the principal culture as well as it being identified to embrace a wide range of media and approaches.
- Challenges the ‘mythologies’ of Western culture that Modernism is based on.
The Post-medium condition
Rosalind Krauss: ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ 1979
New types of artworks emerged in the 1970s exposed pluralistic ways of engaging with art making beyond the traditions of painting, sculpture and drawing. Photography became legitimised as one of a number of practices, along with video, mixed media and performance which formed part of a new flood of art practices.
“Within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium – e.g. sculpture – but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium – photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself – might be used.” Rosalind Krauss ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October (Spring 1979)
The End of Art
Andy Warhol’s discovery that anything, including a commonplace Brillo Box, could become art is described by Danto as the end point but also as the high point of the ‘revolutionary period’ of modernism. After this discovery, there were no more boundaries to cross and artworks continued to be made. However the history of art came to a halt because art that was being made in the post modern era was conscious of its own history and unable to go beyond it.
“The story comes to an end, but not the characters, who live on, happily ever after doing whatever they do in their post-narrational insignificance […] The age of pluralism is upon us…when one direction is as good as another.” Arthur C. Danto (1986) ‘The End of Art’ The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York, Columbia University Press p.107.
Modernism:
Characterised by:
- The Autonomous Art Object
- The notion of purity
- The pursuit of originality
- The exploration of a single medium
- The examination of artworks on their own terms through the process of Art Criticism.
- Authoritative readings are possible provided by the artist (or critic’s interpretation). Authority stems from the author (artist).
- The pre-eminence of the author/creator.
Postmodernism:
Characterised by:
- Allegory
- Drawing upon multiple sources.
- Appropriation
- The use of a variety of media, with choice of media dependent on intentions of the work.
- The subjection of art to a wide variety of theoretical and philosophical perspectives drawn from multiple sources.
- Multiple readings are possible.
- The pre-eminence of the reader/viewer.
Feminism and Postmodernism
It’s relevant to note that the critique of existing forms of cultural representation are being carried out by female artists who are calling into question the representation of women in film, domestic life etc. In ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’ Craig Owens draws attention to the convergence of the ‘feminist critique of patriarchy’ and ‘the postmodern critique of representation’.
These examples of black and white images study the stereotypes that are taking place in film, for example the images presented above show the artist Sherman herself posing in a variety of appearances that are referring to 1950s and 1960s film. These photographs are very fictional moments so don’t illustrate actual films. The characters that we are presented with have a great effect on the overall photographs themselves, as well as them being presented to us as characters of familiarity.
Laurie Simmons arranged and photographer dollhouse scenes since the mid-1970s which reflect on and analyse the culture of home comforts. “It’s interesting for me that a picture can be so colorful and so bright and so vivacious and so lonely at the same time,” she has said. “. . . Where is the rest of the world, where are the other people, where’s the rest of the family?”
Appropriation
“Those processes of quotation, excerption, framing and staging…necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.” Douglas Crimp, ‘Pictures’, October 8 (1979).
Intertextuality: Jeff Wall
“Postmodern photography implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.” Andy Grundberg.
“Picture for Women is a “remake” of Manet’s picture”. Although in terms of location both photographs are very different, Wall has mirrored the same style of positioning a lady starring into the camera and a man fixed behind her on the right hand side of the frame “I wanted to comment on it, to analyze it in a new picture, to try to draw out of it its inner structure, that famous positioning of figures, male and female, in an everyday working situation which was also a situation of spectacularity, that regime of distraction and entertainment which Manet dealt with.” Jeff Wall
Sherrie Levine – questioning authorship
In 1981 Levine photographed the duplicate images by Walker Evans of the Depression-era. An examples of some of the reproduced images was this famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper. The series became a landmark of postmodernism as which was both admired and confronted as a feminist take-over of patriarchal authority. Levine’s intentions of these images was to both tell a story to create meaning and recapture the past in a powerful manner.
“….Levine ‘s critical stance is manifested as an act of refusal: refusal of authorship, uncompromising rejection of all notions of self-expression, originality, or subjectivity. Levine, as has been pointed out often enough, does not make photographs; she takes photographs, and this act of confiscation, as much as the kinds of images she takes, generates a complex analysis and critique of the forms, meanings and conventions of photographic imagery (particularly that which has become canonised as art) at the same time that it comments obliquely on the implications of photography as a museum art.” Abigail Solomon-Godeau.
Robert Heinecken– mass media appropriation
Are You Rea is a series of twenty-five photograms made directly from the artist’s principal source material: magazine pages. Are You Rea covered Heinecken’s interest in the multiplicity of meanings inherent in existing images and situations. His work includes the pictures from publications like Life, Time, and Woman’s Day, contact printed so that both sides are merged together into a single image. Heinecken interpreted these pages “as social documents of certain co-existent words and images, locked by chance into that piece of paper—that content which very much reflects the false idealization of American goals and ideas of the 1960s time period.” (MOMA ‘Object Matter’ Exhibition catalogue)
Richard Prince – ‘Re-photography’
In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end was the advertisements featuring luxury goods and perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them using a variety of strategies to intensify their original article. “The pictures I went after, ‘stole,’ were too good to be true. They were about wishful thinking, public pictures that happen to appear in the advertising sections of mass-market magazines, pictures not associated with an author…It was their look I was interested in. I wanted to re-present the closest thing to the real thing.” Richard Prince.
Prince’s picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy), perpetually disappearing into the sunset.This lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surface. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Doug Rickard – ‘Post-photography’
A New American Picture depicts American street scenes, located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard took advantage of Google’s massive image archive to virtually explore the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen with a tripod- mounted camera, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane.
Gerhard Richter – Painting Photography
Why is photography so important in your work?
“Because I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That’s why I wanted to have it, to show it – not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.” Gerhard Richter.
Gregory Crewdson – staging fictions
Gregory Crewdson works within a photographic tradition that combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans. His method is filmic as he builds decorative sets to take pictures of unusual detail. He works mainly in massachusetts. Uses actors and residents interchangeably. Creates exotic and strange events for the camera – to be photographed but with the production values, planning and attention to detail of film making.
Thomas Demand- constructing worlds
Demand begins with a pre-existing image culled from the media, usually of a political event, which he translates into a life-size model made of coloured paper and cardboard. His handcrafted facsimiles of architectural spaces and natural environments are built in the image of other images. Thus, his photographs are triply removed from the scenes or objects they purport to depict. Once they have been photographed, the models are destroyed. Born in 1964, Demand began as a sculptor and took up photography to record his ephemeral paper constructions. In 1993 he turned the tables, henceforth making constructions for the sole purpose of photographing them.
James Welling – Re-representation
“Instead of re-presenting someone else’s image he presents the archetype of a certain kind of image. These pictures look like pictures we have seen – abstractionist photography from the Equivalent school of modernism for instance… They are dramatizations of the postmodern condition of representation.” Andy Grundberg.
Mark Dorf – Digital re-representation
Through his altered images of forests and mountains, Dorf scrutinizes the influence of information on the sublime, examining how we represent the natural world through the filter of science, maths and technology.
Susan Derges – New/Old Photography
Susan Derges trained as a painter before turning to photography, and in particular to the cameraless photography for which she has become internationally renowned. This process was used very early in photography and allowed artists to fix shadows onto light sensitive paper. Removing the camera allows an almost alchemical transformation, to extraordinary and powerful effect.
Eileen Quinlan – The Photographic Object
The initial inclination to label her photographs “abstract” is based on their look, a designation problematically founded on a modernist painting paradigm and simply inaccurate. It is more accurate to say that the artist is involved in the material concerns of photographic practice. Quinlan creates images of dimensional confusion by photographing modest studio constructions of foam, mirrors, and other common materials, and she exposes the construct of the artificial scarcity of the edition by often displaying an entire edition side by side and treating it as a singular piece.
Post-Photography?
“Post-photography is photography that flows in the hybrid space of digital sociability and is a consequence of visual overabundance. In post-photography, truth and memory – once fundamental qualities of the camera – are brushed aside in favour of connectivity and communication.” Joan Fontcuberta
Photography Theory 