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“Modernity killed every night.”
Quote from Jacques Vache printed above 430 Kings Road (Vivienne
Westwood’s Let it Rock store)
Is it possible to talk about a post-post-modernism in terms of visual
culture?
An essay by Amy Britton
Postmodernism, as a continuation of modernism is a different kind of
break with the past; rather than destroying the past, it rearranges
it and makes use of it for its own innovative purposes. Can it still
exist? Popular culture writer Simon Reynolds writes, pessimistically,
that in terms of culture in general, “the avant-garde has become
the arriere-garde.” Does this mean that postmodernism is dead,
or simply that postmodernism as a concept has had its place in the artistic
world for so long that it can no longer be classed as avant-garde? The
idea of postmodernism as a fixed part of artistic history is problematic
in itself, which creates further problems for the term “postmodern.”
A 2011 V&A museum postmodernism exhibition came in for some heavy
criticism for just this reason – preserving postmodernism as a
historical movement? Were does it begin? Were did it end? More, still
what is it? The term is loose and difficult. But if postmodernism is
fixed in time, perhaps our only option is to talk about a post-post
modernism.
The critic Micheal Robinson has pointed out that, at the point of postmodernism,
“developments in linguistics and philosophy were beginning to ‘deconstruct’
the central assumptions of modernism. Was there any such thing as transcendent
“truth”, or essential being? Were our perceptions, our feelings,
our very selves, anything more than “constructs” of the words
we use to describe and express them? These are some of the questions
which help to define postmodernism. Of course, like anything with the
prefix, “post,” it is partly defined by what came before it.
In culture, unlike in history, something being “post” is not
just a case of it being merely after. It takes the ideas of what preceded
it and progresses them. (For example, poststructuralist intellectual
thought advances, but also feeds off, structuralist thought, and punk
music was the launchpad for the more innovative and complex postpunk.)
So, before delving into “postmodernism”, how best to define
“modernism”? Firstly, the word “modern” comes from
the Latin “modo,” meaning “just now.” To be modernist
is to capture the moment. This goes against classical Western culture,
which sees the present as an extension of the past. Art critics generally
agree that modernism is a break with the past. The eighteenth century
had seen the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century had seen eclection
and technological innovation. Modernism continued by sweeping away tradition.
The birth of “high modernism” marked its peak as we moved
into the golden age of the avant-garde. The avant-garde can be as difficult
to pin down as modernism – for example, it is often defined by
its progressive political thinking on the left, but the fascist-leaning
tendencies of groups like the Futurists and the Vorticists ruin this
general preconception. In spite of this, such groups as still important.
The first Futurist manifesto (one of many from them) is one of the sternest
and most attention grabbing of all time – it includes such points
as “we wish to glorify war”, “any work of art that lacks
a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece” and “we
believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new
beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust
pipes like serpents with galvanic breath…a roaring motorcar, which
seems to race on like machine gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged
Victory of Samothrace.”1This is exemplified in definitive Futurist
paintings such as Giacamo Ballo 1913 work “The Speed of An Automobile,”
which carries the image of a speeding car to the borders of abstraction
in a Futurist attempt to capture what they saw as the universal “vitalising”
principle. Micheal Robinson points out that this is a painting fitting
with a time in which “moving pictures were being made for the first
time…this was an area were scientific and artistic interests collided.”
Over in Britain the Vorticist movement often attempted to deny Futurism’s
influence, but shared much of its mechanical aggression. Their 1914
manifesto, published in BLAST by its editor (a shameless self-publicist)
and leading Vorticist, Percy Wyndham Lewis, says that “machinery
is the greatest Earth-medium.” Wyndham Lewis own paintings, such
as “Alchiblades,” also have a mechanical feel. Its subject
is actually the Athenian statesman of the title, who had been ostracised
and sent into banishment as a traitor, but the pen and ink wash crates
a stark, mechanical feel, with the perspective adding a sense of “the
vortex,” so crucial to their work in general. Even Surrealism shared
this mechanical vein to a point. So much is made of the famous eye-cutting
scene which opens Luis Bunuel’s classic 1913 film “Un Chien
Andalou” that the most important scene in terms of the wider story
is often overlooked – the characters played by deriving sexual
pleasure from a woman being hit and killed by an automobile. The action
here happens slowly, keeping the dreamlike feel of both the film and
Surrealisms wider aims, but also puts the machine at centre stage. As
we shall go on to see, the developing technologies would go on to influence
postmodernism as much as these modernist avant-garde art groups.
Like any artistic movement, High Modernism was eventually called into
question. Where modernism was about progress, optimism, rationality,
agency and reflexivity, postmodernism was about sceptism, uncertainty,
non-rationalism, loss of agency and critical distance. The late 1970’s
and early 1980’s saw a growing number of commentators beginning
to question the efficiency and intellectual coherence of High Modernisms
progressive, rationalising project. To imply that this is the point
which sparked postmodernism, however, would be a mistake. If postmodernism
is “a rupture in continuity” to quote Clement Greenberg, then
its critical history is even more so. Greenberg was writing in 1965,
and for him modernism is more than art and literature. There is a Kantian
use of characteristic methods, as he takes Kant’s ideas of progression
via aesthetic experience. He uses “art to call attention to art”,
a new manifesto which almost deconstructs Theophile Gaultiers old “art
pour l’art,” notion. In America, Greenberg is considered a
Marxist critic but in the UK, he reads more like a conservative liberal.
Modernism for him does not offer theoretical demonstrations but empirical
ones, but is also as much about the technique of modernist painting,
which he defines by its flatness. He also suggests that painting needs
to purge itself of outside sources (such as music and photography) to
be a specialisation. Whilst modernism did tend to focus on specialisation,
this does raise questions whether this is the way art should be treated
– would much be neglected if we were to follow Greenberg’s
lead? With the avant garde often being a part of radical politics, surely
it can be more effective (and more democratic) if it opens its mind
to other sources? Is there any place in Greenberg’s thought for
witty artists like Marcel Duchamp, who help to define postmodernism?
Greenberg has created quite a potential argument here which we shall
revisit.
The later critic Frederic Jameson, writing from a Marxist intellectual
background, moves his thought from the modernist into the beginning
of the postmodernist. For him, the age in which he was writing (which
he describes as a “postindustrial consumer society”) either
“expresses” or “represses,” And were does modernism
fit into this? For Jameson, it assumes a Newtonian, steady-state universe,
with, as befits, a notion of “being in the present.” The postmodernist
avant-garde, however, precedes our present by mapping the future. Many
of the historical avant-garde will certainly have agreed with him –
“avant-garde” translates as “go forward” and groups
such as the Futurists (the clue is in the name…) mapped out a world
ahead of ours. The least radical modernism can do is break between the
past and the present. The way Micheal Robinson references the “deconstructing,”
of concepts in postmodernism also fits with Jameson’s decidedly
Derridean influence. The fact that Jameson also comes from very much
as Marxist intellectual background, so is likely to look at the economic
perspective, but he was not the only one doing so. David Harvey was
also looking at the profound shifts in the workings of economic infrastructure.
But, in spite of Marx’s influence, it is Derrida who truly reigns
supreme over Jameson’s thought, as he looks at the theory of practice
in deconstructions “differeance,” (re enchantment.)
Another enormous theme in Jameson’s work is that of pastiche versus
parody. For him, parody is no longer possible, as the authenticity or
aura of the object of parody becomes uncertain. Instead, we have “blank”
forms of parody or pastiche were imitation takes place but without any
definite sense of departure from existing norms or conventions. But,
in spite of Jameson’s reading, it would be a mistake to think that
humour and parody are lost from postmodernist art – see Duchamp’s
“Readymades,” almost a parody of the whole of Western art
– the readymades took a swipe not only about what is art, but whose
it is, whilst his work L.H.Q.Q predates both William S. Burroughs comments
about throwing acid at the Mona Lisa and Situationist detournement,
taking one of the most well-regarded paintings of artistic tradition
and scrawling a moustache and crude slogan (translating as “she
has a hot arse”) over it. Duchamp himself was clear about his intent
of humour, saying that “humour and laughter are my tools –
not necessarily derogatory derision –my pet tools. This may come
from my general philosophy of never taking the world to seriously –
for fear of dying of boredom.”2
By the time of Jameson writing in the 1970’s, however, Duchamp
was as established and well-loved as the artists he was parodying. The
problem with talking about modernity lies in those Latin “modo”,
“of the present” roots. How can something always be “of
the present”? In the same respect, how can something always be
of the future? This is another problem with the term “postmodernism”
– its golden age, and its birth, is defined differently everywhere.
Picking up various books, one describes its birth as beginning in 1945,
the next as being the 1960’s. The word postmodernism, meanwhile,
can actually be traced back to 1934, when it was used by Frederico De
Ornas, but not used again until 1984 with Arnold Toynbee’s “A
Study of History.”
However, the sixties are a general starting point, with the work of
Robert Venturi in the USA and Aldo Rossi in Europe. Venturi’s influential
text “Complexicity and Contradiction in Architecture” is an
attack on the “institutionalised corporate modernism of international
style.” Its takes Miles Van Der Roehes well known phrase of “less
is more” and launches an attack on it with his own detournment
style phrase “less is a bore.” This doesn’t just go against
van der Roehes, but Greenberg and his ideas of flat simplicity. Venturi
says that he rejects a “puritanically modern language,” in
favour of “elements which are hybrid rather than pure…messy
vitality…richness rather than clarity of meaning.” This sounds
like just the sort of postmodernism which would horrify Greenberg, but
is not a completely new sentiment, drawing on Cleas Odenburg declaration
of five years earlier: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical
– I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap and still
comes on top,” which could almost be a manifesto for Duchamp’s
Readymades if nothing else. But, as important as Venturi is, his thought
applied strictly to architecture. Postmodernism can be spread into almost
the whole of the arts – Jameson even makes a fleeting reference
to punk and new wave music. But what Jameson fails to point out the
impact of punk musics accompanying artists – whose techniques were
sometimes more straightforward modernist, almost old-fashioned, in the
wake of postmodernism.
One of the most highly regarded “punk artists” was Manchester’s
Linder Sterling, who came to wide attention with her artwork for the
band the Buzzcocks. The sleeve of their single “Orgasm Addict”
in particular, was eye-catching and interesting; steeped in a funny,
frightening feminism, predating the feel of the “Femorabilia”
exhibitions by thirty years. It depicts a naked woman with an iron for
her head and snarling teeth instead of nipples. Sterling, hugely influenced
by Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch,” had auto-cannibalised
her theory of “the circular woman.” Later collages of Sterlings
(such as her flyer for the gig “The Buzzcocks and Other Domestic
Utensils,” with its catalogue images of domestic commodities and
manicured hands) would continue the feminist, visually striking bent.
The roots of such work can actually be seen in Richard Hamilton’s
witty early pop-art piece “Just What Is It That Makes Todays Homes
So Different, So Appealing?”
But what about the form such works take – collage? Is that really
“postmodern”? Initially, it seems modernist. Fragments are
a huge part of modernism, from the visual style of Picasso’s fragmented
Guernica to its literary connotations (the collage’s James makes
in Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” TS Eliots famous
“these fragments are the shores against my ruin…” in
The Waste Land). But the use of collage actually goes much further back,
into the Victorian tradition – collage was the ultimate Victorian
middle-class hobby. The way modernism revisited it was more in a fictionalised
context…James in “To the Lighthouse,” cuts out images
from catalogues, creating something which probably looked very similar
to Linder Sterling’s works. So, delving into the past to do something
exciting is not modernist, with its defiant break with the past. And
postmodernism argues with modernism, so that the label does not fit
either. Is this the beginning of “post-post-modernism”? Or
are the anomalies of that prefix “post” throwing this concept?
The paradox of the prefix “post” was an issue for Lyotard
– can postmodernism therefore be thought of as according to the
prefix “post” as after modernism, as we addressed earlier?
Modernisms retention of a sequential historical order gives way to a
breakdown of historical spatio-temporal rationality. Lyotard was writing
at postmodernisms peak – in 1974, when he published “A Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” the postmodernist novelist Thomas
Pynchon won the National Book Award for his novel “Gravitys Rainbow.”
He writes that “status of knowledge is altered as societies enter
what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known
as the postmodern age…scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.”
The role of the individual in this is considered, “a self does
not amount to much, but no self is an island, each exists in a fabric
of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young
or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal
points’ of specific communications circuits, whatever they will
be3.” So, were does this leave Lyotard’s key concern of knowledge?
He writes “in the mechanism of developing a life that is simultaneously
subject, we see a return of narrative knowledge. There is a universal
“history of spirit, spirit is ‘life’ and ‘life’
is its own self-presentation and formulation in the ordered knowledge
of all its forms contained in the empirical sciences…but what this
produces is a metanarrative, for the storys narrator must not be a people
mired in the particular positivity of its traditional knowledge,not
even societies taken as a whole, since they are sequestered in professional
frameworks corresponding to their respective specialities.”4
Lyotard’s work then, commissioned by the council of Universities
of the Quebec Government, fundamentally deals with the problems of translation
from one computer language to another, and these technological changes
would have a major impact on knowledge. Perhaps postmodernism’s
role, then, was to merge elements of the past with a more Ballardian,
technological world. Those collage artists, Linder Sterling and Richard
Hamilton, succeed in this to point, with their mix of old-fashioned
domesticity and depictions of technological goods. By 1969, however,
a new cultural, technology-friendly buzzword was emerging – industrial.
The kings (and Queen) of this were COUM Transmissions…
Writing from an Eastern context, the critic Gin Sed points that modernist,
avant-garde in the West seeks to subvert. COUM Transmissions certainly
fulfil this -working long before the Tate’s famous “Sensationalism”
exhibition, COUM Transmissions were at the time the most provocative
thing the art world had ever seen. They were heavily influenced by the
1960’s art group Fluxus, who COUM Transmissions lead member Genesis
P-Orridge (real name Neil Megson) describes as having an “admirable
running battle and commentary with art itself,” something which
recalls Greenberg’s comments on “using art to call attention
to art.”
COUM Transmissions had grown out of a communal art group called Transmedia,
who played around with perceptions, a concept that P-Orridge felt inclined
to push further. “We need to search for methods to break the preconceptions,
modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us so vulnerable
to Control,” he claimed. In his influential piece “Annihilating
Reality” he also wrote the following:
“Hearsay:A new generation of performance artists has arrived.
They use existing situations in order to actually affect society from
the inside, to subliminally infiltrate popular culture aware of their
perception as art but realizing their redundancy5.”
Along with the groups other members, Chris Carter, Peter “Sleazy”
Christopherson and Cosey Fanni Tutti (real name Christine Carol Newby)
they staged outlandish shows like 1972’s “The Alien Brain,”
(featuring masturbation, double anal and vaginal sex between Tutti and
P-Orridge with a double-edged vibrator, and P-Orridge sticking hypodermic
needles into his testicles and then injecting the blood into a black
egg, alongside giving himself and blood and milk enema and expelling
the resulting liquid from his body onto the gallery floor) and 1976’s
notorious “Prostitution” at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts (which made heavy use of Tutti’s work as a pornography model
and launched the collectives experimental, often disturbing music under
the name Throbbing Gristle.6) Conservative MP Nicholas Fairban labelled
them “the wreckers of civilisation” and questions were asked
in Parliament. Is this postmodernist? Avant-garde? The fragments of
the collectives own past are there, but they were simultaneously determined
to break with the past. Particularly as Throbbing Gristle, they denied
influences altogether. They made a lot of use of postmodernism in its
most provocative forms in the Prostitution show – like a more extreme
version on Duchamp’s take on the Mona Lisa in terms of detourning
traditional ideas of artistic beauty, they stuck used tampons on the
arms of the Venus De Milo, and also, in a piece called “Tampax
Romana,” filled a vintage art deco clock with tampons. But the
eschewing of influences (respect for Fluxus aside) means that if it
is possible to talk about a post-post-modernism, then COUM Transmissions,
working as early as 1969, are perhaps the beginning (albeit in a slightly
skewed form to how we now treat the word) but their shock value has
transcended the raising of this question.
Over the years, art has become increasingly “radical”, but
perhaps not to the extent we can talk about a full post-post-modernist
state – this is not really what the term is about. Artists like
Martin Creed blend the nihilism of postmodernism with the simplicity
of modernism, but the term “modern art” is sufficient. And
then there is “remodernism” – a term which brings us
not into a reflection of our current state, but looks backwards to traditional
modernism, or even further back – and is applied to arriere-garde
groups such as the Stuckists. The Stuckists are a Muswell Hill based-group
who call for a return to traditional painting techniques and more old-fashioned
ways of exhibiting. (Founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomas, their
1999 manifesto includes the points “artists that don’t paint
aren’t artists” and “post-modernism, in its adolescent
attempt to ape the clever and the witty in modern art, has shown itself
to be lost in a cul-de-sac of idiocy.”7
It certainly seems to be the ideas of modernism which have ended up
prevailing, in spite of postmodernisms attempts to usurp it. For example,
Takashi Murakami’s manifesto, published in the year 2000, has the
title “The Super Flat Manifesto.” Whilst Clement Greenberg
and his ilk would probably have taken issue with Murakami’s “post
pop” aesthetic and consumerism bent (he has his own store of repackaged
products), Murukami’s claims that “super flatness is the stage
to the future” could have come straight from Greenberg’s own
mouth. Does this leave the idea of postmodernism – supposedly responding
were modernism failed – redundant, and what room does this leave
exactly for a post-post-modernism? Of course, not all latter twentieth-century
artistic thought sees modernism as a success. In 1984, Suzi Gablik published
the oft-confrontational text “Has Modernism Failed?: The Instability
of Art in Our Time.” Gablik was riding on popular art critic feeling
of the 1980’s – the return to painting and sculpture in this
period was a key part of postmodernism. Almost as an extension of the
word, “postmodernism”, a lot of further prefixes and reconstruction
(if not so much deconstruction…) of existing words appeared. Italy
had the “Transavantgarde” (which included artists such as
Clemente, Cucchi, Chia, Paladino and Nocola De Maria), whilst Germany
saw the “Neo-Expressionists” (including Baselitz, Kiefer,
Penck, and Lupert). Postmodernist art was forming its own language,
filled with increasing artistic and semantic difficulties. Even dance
was beginning to “get in on” postmodernism, with the first
piece choreographed by Micheal Clarke appearing in 1984.To talk about
a post-post-modernism complicates this further; but might it be necessary
when looking at the wider state of art today?
In 1970, the art critic Peter Burger was talking about “the neo-avant-garde”
in relation to what was basically postmodernism. Postmodernism since
1990, however, has become increasingly international, and since 2000
there have been attempts to further the term to make the current state
of art relevant, hence the use of “post-post-modernism” and
“metamodernism.” Pehaps metamodernism might be a better title
to use due to its non-sequential nature, but it does have a more specific
meaning. It was coined in 2010 by the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermalen
and Robin Van der Akker as an intervention in the wider post-modernism
debate. Their “Notes on Metamodernism” article asserts that
the 2000’s are characterised by the emrgence of a sensibility that
oscillates between, and must be situated beyond, modern positions and
postmodern strategies. Metamodernism has its own vernacular almost as
much as postmodernism in general, with terms such as “informed
naivety”, “pragmatic idealism” and “moderate fanaticism,”
but put simply it is a consistent repositioning between mindsets –
neither modernism not postmodernism, but elements of them both. (Meta,
it is worth noting, is a reference to Plato’s Metaxy, which intends
a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond.)
In 1974, when Peter Burger was writing, we were arguably in the transit
of postmodernism. Some of Burger’s writing also brings us back
to Jameson, with that Marxist influence. To give it some context, the
historical avant garde had a dislike of bourgeoisie autonomy, with its
separation of art and life. They were pushing for a dialectic of thesis
to antithesis. In Marxism, however, something else appears, the synthesis.
The sublimation of art into life was a call to arms of the avant-garde.
It could all to easily lose its critical distance, so Burger is arguing
for a return to artistic autonomy. This may seem like the obvious conclusion
of writing from a Marxist dialectic viewpoint, but in a post-deconstruction
age which would remove the binary, this can make Burger appear a bit
old-fashioned. Art is capable of both sublimation and autonomy. An artist
can certainly act subversively by deconstructing capitalism – it
is unsurprising that more postmodernist-rooted critics like Jameson
and Foster take their intellectual cue from Derrida.
Foster talks about parlax and deferred action – if you shift your
position, the view shifts. Deconstructively shifting, we get a retroaction;
a resistance to culturally dominant forms of retroversion.
So, were are we today? If we are in a state of post-post-modernism,
however do we define it? Defining mere modernism and postmodernism has
proved difficult enough. The simplest, most core principal of post-post-modernism
is perhaps the desire to transcend postmodernisms “attempts at
wit” so fiercely attacked in the Stuckist manifesto.
We have looked throughout this essay at possible candidates for artists
who could be classed as “post-post-modern,” but as a definition
has become clearer, and the term more widely used, it is easier to pinpoint
those that could have this label – some have even used it themselves,
like the landscape architect and planner Tom Turner. He argues for a
post-post-modern turn in his own field, rejecting the flexible ideals
of postmodernism, and saying that “the built environment professions
are witnessing the gradual dawn of a post-post-modernism that’s
seeks to temper reason with faith.” More specifically, Turner endorses
the use of timeless organic and geometrical patterns, such as those
used by the American architect Christopher Alexander.
Another key thinker on this issue is Ben Davis, with his influential
essay on the theme. Davis begins his essay by citing a number of other
thinkers. Following on from his own belief that “the conviction
that the notion (postmodernism) means anything serious is now gone”
he tells us “last year, relational aesthetics guru Nicholas Bourriard
officially declared that we were now in a new era “altermodernism”.
Svetlana Boym as called for a new movement, “off-modernism”
to get around postmodernisms deadlocks. Rosalind Krauss has officially
abandoned the position, in favour of ‘the continuance of modernism.’”
He then cites the aforementioned Hal Fosters more recent claims that
“postmodernism has run into the sand.” Davis core issue with
postmodernism is the same one we keep returning to; the muddy nature
of its definition, which for him has “a lack of historical mooring,”
and for him is purely idealist. A term which does look at historical
mooring is some way is another term for post-post-modernism, post-millenialism,
introduced in 2000 by the American cultural theorist Eric Gans. We shall
not focus on Gans to much as he is less concerned with visual culture
and more with ethical, socio-political terms, but he makes some valid
points. Postmodernism for him is derived from identifying with a peripheral
victim, and disdaining the utopian centre occupied by a perpetrator.
Post-millenialism instead turns to “non-victimry dialogue”
that will “diminish the amount of resentment in the world.”
Perhaps a more relevant “post-post-modernist” expression for
this particular essay, however, is “performatism,” also coined
in 2000, by the German-American Slavist Raoul Esheman in his book, “Performatism,
or The End of Postmodernism.” For Eshelman, works defined this
epoch are constructed in such a way as to bring about a unified, aesthetically
mediated experience of transcendence. Performatism does this by creating
closed works of art that force viewers to identify with simple, opaque
characters in situations and to experience beauty, love, belief and
transcendence under particular, artificial conditions. He cites such
examples as the Sam Mendes film “American Beauty,” a captivating
mix of the dreamlike and the realist, and Sir Norman Fosters renovation
of the Berlin Reichstag.
Many of the ideas classed as post-post-modernism seem faintly whimsical,
from the quirky charm of Wes Anderson films to Micheal Clarke’s
latest venture beyond the postmodern, an endearingly off-key ballet
that took residence in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. But there are more
cynical schools of thought, too – in 2006, British scholar Alan
Kirby introduced “psuedomodernism.” Like Lyotard, Kirby turns
to technology, but technology is far more negative for him – it
has given us instant but shallow participation in culture. He perhaps
summarises the theory best when he says “in pseudo-modernism, one
phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads.” This
is a viewpoint shared by Simon Reynolds when he says “the avant-garde
has become the arriere-garde,” so, in a way nobody could have once
predicted, is technology causing us to go backwards?
If this was not negative enough, he says its “typical intellectual
states…are ignorance, fanaticism, and anxiety,” its “silent
autism,” superseding “the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism
of postmodernism,” and he sees no aesthetically viable works coming
out of it.
Writers like Kirby and Reynolds have given us a lot to be negative about,
but the truth is, whilst we may not be in a glory age of the avant-garde,
we are still producing artistically interesting works, many of which
could be called post-post-modern. But the term is sequential, and awkward,
even more difficult to define than its predecessors. It, is however,
also very established – the respected publication Adbusters recently
entitled a whole issue “the post post modern issue.” It clearly
is possible to talk about a post-post-modernism, but do we really want
to? There are two ways to view this – with pessimism over the way
some forms of the expression certainly encourage that “the avant
garde is becoming the arriere garde,” or perhaps we should all
follow Tom Turner’s urge – to “embrace post post modernism…and
pray for a better name.”
Amy Britton
NOTES
1. The Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909
2. The Duchamp Book, Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, 2008
3. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p15
4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p34
5. “Annihilating Reality”, Genesis P-Orridge
6. Drawing their name from Yorkshire slang for erect penis, Throbbing
Gristle dealt with the abduction, rape and murder of children, the Holocaust
and graphic, torturous deaths in chillingly detached terms
7. The Stuckist Manifesto, 1999, Reprinted in 100 Artists Manifestos,
Penguin Modern Classics
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Expressionism to Postmodernism – Styles and Movements in 20th
century art, ed. Jane Turner, Macmillan Reference, 2000
Has Modernism Failed? Suzi Gablik 1984/2004 Thames and Hudson
Modern Art Micheal Kerrigan Flame Tree Publishing 2005
100 Artists Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists Selected
by Alex Danchev Penguin 2011
The Duchamp Book Gavin Parkinson Tate Publishing 2008
The Return of the Real Hal Foster The MIT Press 1996
The Negation of the Autonomy in the Avant-garde Peter Burger in Postmodernism:
A Reader ED Thomas Docherty London 1993
‘Modernist Painting’, Clement Greenberg in Frascina, Francis
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