Postmodern wreckage in Kate McIntosh’s Worktable and Peter McMaster’s Gold Piece

Abstract

The important work of postmodern deconstruction turned the foundational authorities of our time -- truth, history, reason, the self and God -- to wreckage. A current body of ‘post-postmodern’ scholarship identifies a counteractive reconstructive impulse in contemporary artworks that consciously place postmodern cynicism, irony and relativity in paradoxical tension with anachronistic paradigms like hope, truth and God. In this article I look at two pieces – performance installation Worktable by Kate McIntosh and one-to-one performance Gold Piece by Peter McMaster – which, in their staging of wreckage, might be described as ‘post-postmodern’. I propose that they use the ‘scene’ of wreckage to pursue coherence as a state that is ‘in process’, that is worked towards even while it is ultimately unachievable. Drawing on theories of ‘thingness’ and ruins and using Ihab Hassan’s outline of postmodernism (Hassan 1981), I first explore how Gold Piece and Worktable are deconstructive, in both a material and semiotic sense, and therefore can be aligned with a postmodern mode. I then propose four ways in which the pieces are nevertheless reconstructive in terms of their view of wreckage as: a form of brokenness (distinct from ‘thingness’ and ruin) which instigates reconstructive work; an instigator of agency and an opportunity for renewal of the self; intimately linked to performance’s own capacity for reconstruction; an attempt at reconstructing—in the sense of ‘fixing’ or ‘making fast’—performance’s ephemerality. I finish by returning to post-postmodern theory to argue that the reconstructed objects which mark the end of the pieces are material symbols of an ‘impossible possibility’: the visible fault lines, imperfections and odd assemblages reveal the irrevocability, inevitability even, of breakage, yet, at the same time, point to an enthusiastic impulse to reconstruct, to restore and to work towards wholeness.