Postmodern Art Research Articles

Questioning Paradigms of Social Reality through Postmodern Intertextuality

María Elena de Valdés does an analysis about an important part of the postmodern movement: the questioning of legitimizing authority with a concomitant surge in writing from the previously marginalized sectors of society. In postmodern literature the writing is an exploration of the implicit, the testing of authority and the accepted and, finally, the cultivation of the creative metaphor as a paradigm for creation out of conflict. Postmodern art in all its manifestations is always pointing out difference, differences within any grouping, differences made visible by positioning of the singular in relation to the others.

Continuing Education and the Postmodern Arts of Power

University continuing educators have recognized that political-economic and institutional changes are making social activism more difficult to sustain. This article argues that to build more effective and vigorous forms of social activism, continuing educators need to understand how systems of oppression are changing. In postmodern societies, patterns of oppression are shifting from centralized, explicitly coercive projects of political domination and economic exploitation, to decentred, subtle processes of constructing individuals with the capacity and the desire to govern themselves. To encourage a different mode of thinking about the nature of oppression and power, some aspects of the work of Michel Foucault are interpreted. To provoke a more creative approach to social activism through university continuing education, the article connects Foucault's abstract.

The Death of Art: On Kuspit's The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist

The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Donald Kuspit, 1993, New York: Cambridge University Press, 175 pages. which his reviews of hundreds of works of visual art have appeared in major art magazines and in Art Criticism, the journal he edits. Kuspit is an art historian, philosopher, and art critic who is trained in psychoanalysis and well-versed in postpsychoanalytic thought. He employs concepts from Freud, Fromm, Winnicott, and Kohut-along with his own contributions to psychobiography and psychodynamic personality theory-to explicate the shift that has taken place from avant-garde to postmodern art. His approach to criticism focuses the same kind of attention on visual art and artists that has long been given to literature and writers. The book brings together a cultural critique of capitalism and of postmodemism with a penetrating psychological analysis of the cult phenomena that pervade the contemporary art world. Kuspit is keenly aware of the narcissistic dangers that abound for artists who attempt to shape an identity while living in a culture that values celebrity over authenticity, and surface over substance. Kuspit's writing is rich and expressive. His method is more aligned with what Baudelaire called poetic as opposed to mathematical criticism (1846/1964, p. 38). It is criticism that attends to what the artist evokes-not just what the artist's work signifies. Because he is as comfortable in the art world of Soho as he is in the academic settings of Cornell University and The State University of New York at Stony Brook where he teaches, his style is both hip and scholarly. Kuspit begins with the assumption that most avantgarde art has a therapeutic intention. He further posits that As an artist and psychologist, I have certain expectations for the art criticism I read, expectations that are not easily fulfilled. I look for writing about art that enhances my experience of art works and that deepens my understanding of artists, without doing injustice to either. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to do injustice to both. At its worst, art criticism can unwittingly reduce the experience of the sublime and beautiful to mere perception, of creativity to ordinary behavior. It can also carry interpretation too far, committing deterministic reductions and intentional fallacies and risking either romanticizing or pathologizing the artist. (Positivism and Freudianism have both taken a toll on our understanding of modern art.) What I need, therefore, is balanced art criticism that is both sensitive to the subtle phenomenology of aesthetic perception and that leaves the psyche of the artist intact. Good art criticism also meets more general needs. It helps us understand why we like what we like. It gives meaning to our preferences and interests. Moreover, it puts things in context: It creates a historical and cultural backdrop for what we see. It also allows us to see more, or more clearly. It reveals a previously hidden order of perception or a new perspective, orienting us toward experiences in the world-and in ourselves-that we might otherwise miss. The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist meets many of these needs. It does so because Kuspit has successfully integrated aesthetic and psychological perspectives. The book makes explicit Kuspit's theory of 20th-century art, a theory evolved over several decades during neo-avant-garde, or postmodem art at once mocks and denies the possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and

Postmodern Exhaustion: Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and the Aesthetic of the Beautiful

Since publication of his first novel, V, in 1963, Thomas Pynchon's novels have stood as paradigm of literary, postmodernism. Rife with ontological disturbance, fragmented consciousness, unknowable cabals, disrupted narration, and technological wizardry, Pynchon's work has set standard for postmodern novel. In particular, his distinctive metaphysical cosmos and apocalyptic vision both defines and is defined by category that has emerged in recent years as pivotal term in various debates on postmodern: sublime. Several prominent theorists of postmodernism, most notably Jean-Francois Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, have argued that sublime is definitive postmodern category, marking limits of representation that are transgressed in postmodern art, and also suggesting apocalyptic doom prefigured in that art.(1) Pynchon's work has always been fundamentally concerned with terrain of sublime: his fascination with what one critic terms the Other Kingdom,(2) his efforts to present unrepresentable, and his obsession with mysterious, gnostic realms that constantly threaten and oppress his characters have led Harold Bloom to describe him as the greatest master of negative sublime at least since Faulkner and West.(3) When Pynchon's long-awaited fourth novel, Vineland, appeared in 1989, most prominent Pynchon critics were dismayed with work. Frank Kermode described Vineland as disappointing book, and David Cowart complained that Pynchon had made no effort to surpass Gravity's Rainbow.(4) Indeed, Vineland does not operate under same literary and philosophical assumptions as does Pynchon's earlier work; yet to describe this as a disappointment or decline in Pynchon's powers is to fail to understand importance of novel, and also to fail to see major aesthetic shift announced in its pages. For Vineland quite consciously refuses Pynchon's earlier poetics, and demands new terms and new categories by which it may be interpreted. The differences between Vineland and Pynchon's previous writings are remarkable. The mysterious, always-unknowable cabals and conspiracies so characteristic of Pynchon are largely absent from novel; principal villain is given a name and a face, and his defeat is possible by novel's close; impossible quests of Pynchon's earlier characters give way in Vineland to longings that are more limited and that can be realized; and threat of apocalypse -- perhaps dominant characteristic of Pynchon's earlier novels -- recedes before a conclusion that emphasizes survival and regeneration. In Vineland individual, family, and community are restored and reconciled, offering a dramatic contrast to overwhelming isolation and estrangement depicted in V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. The novel closes in a series of scenes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and regeneration. With Vineland, philosophical terrain of Pynchon's writing shifts dramatically from metaphysical and ontological to social and ethical. That most Pynchon critics seem reluctant to embrace this dramatic shift in his writing reveals a gap in current critical practice, an inability to grapple with very issues that Vineland dramatically depicts. Yet concerns of this novel do suggest a critical vocabulary that could account for work, although a vocabulary that is hardly in fashion today. The aesthetic of beautiful -- long traditional contrary to aesthetic of sublime -- defines very terrain Pynchon explores in Vineland. The integrity of individual, relations between individual and social realm, preservation of community, and emphasis on reconciliation, regeneration, and forgiveness, all fall within domain of beautiful. The dramatic shift in Pynchon's fiction can be understood as a movement from an aesthetic of sublime to an aesthetic of beautiful. …

Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant- Garde (review)

Reviewed by: Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde Charles Altieri Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde. Daniel Herwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. 353. $34.95. Herwitz’s challenging book develops three basic arguments. The framing thesis is that for much of twentieth-century avant-garde art “what makes an artwork an artwork is the rigorous character of the theory” prefiguring it. This theorizing does not simply lay down aesthetic ideals. Rather it attempts to “reveal the philosophical structure of art” as a condition enabling formal traits to reconfigure our fundamental psychic and social investments, and hence to give abstraction a utopian revolutionary force. Herwitz develops three elaborate examples: Russian Constructivism and the work of Mondrian illustrate how art can anticipate in the Cartesian quest for “total perceptual clarity in which form is transparent to the eye and perceptual knowledge indubitable,” while John Cage clarifies a corresponding, but thoroughly skeptical, recasting of those utopian projects. In each discussion Herwitz’s eye is even better than his lucid mind, making this philosophical art criticism of a very high order. We see clearly how theory becomes fully “determinate in the context of one’s visual experience of the art work”—in the way Gabo renders material dynamic force utterly transparent and transpersonal, Moholy-Nagy gives visual body to biological universals, and Mondrian proves “that the Platonic ‘ought’ can converge with the world’s ‘is’” by making good on his ambition to have art exemplify the law of harmonization constituting the “hidden, inner form of life, its true reality.” Having shown what theory can do, Herwitz devotes the rest of his book to clarifying the price we pay for the dominant role it confers upon itself. Therefore his second basic argument engages Arthur Danto’s influential claims that modern art is itself a fundamentally philosophical enterprise devoted to rendering in self-referential visual form what it takes to be the pure essence of art; his third argument makes Danto’s problems exemplary for dilemmas increasingly evident in postmodern art. According to Danto, modern art elaborates its own inner logic following a Hegelian process until it culminates in Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, where only theory can establish what distinguishes art from ordinary perception. With Warhol the entire modernist project collapses, because the essence of art is manifest as nothing more than the working of institutional practices, so anything is possible and nothing philosophically substantial or exemplary. But, Herwitz shows convincingly, Danto’s claims fail to consider the different levels of theory operating within this art. Consequently Danto equivocates between treating theory as a separate abstract domain and treating it as woven into how we understand the modes of seeing involved in art practices; he completely separates the philosophical from the revolutionary ambitions of the avant-garde; and he ignores the complex features that make Warhol’s work [End Page 170] significant as a singular visual experience that makes “a racket out of underdetermination.” Ironically Danto’s mistakes stem from his being seduced by the abstract theory shaping the avant-garde tradition he wants to describe. In contrast, Herwitz’s superb readings of Warhol show how he brings to the fore a competing strand of the avant-garde’s legacy that engages the intricate space that objects occupy for consciousness and “replaces theory by indecisiveness, complacency, and play.” Danto’s blindness carries general force because it exhibits “a set of conceptual connections” that survives in postmodern work, even though theory’s utopian possibilities have been reduced to an ethos of suspiciousness. We now see a good deal of theoretical art that has lost the visual, has submitted to the rule of theory while insisting on its fundamental undecidability with reference to truth claims, and has tried to “replace concepts and hard visual work” by relying on “personalities (and ideologies and kitsch).” Using as his primary examples Lyotard, Baudrillard, and the exhibition The Forest of Signs (spring 1989 at MOCA), Herwitz argues for continuing “the avant-garde’s spirit of resistance in the mode of theory” while trying to drain such continuations of their traces of the avant-garde’s norms of transparent theoretical...

Monkey Kings and Mojo: Postmodern Ethnic Humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor

The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correctforms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations-not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce thefeeling that there is something unpresentable. The post-modern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes or the work he creates is not in principle governed by preestablished rules and cannot be judged according to a determinant judgment, by the application of given categories to this text or work. Such rules and categories are what the work or text is investigating. The artist and the writer therefore work without rules and in order to establish the rulesfor what will have been made.

IMag[in]ing annual reports

Visual images are integral elements within corporate annual reports. Yet, these visual images have been largely ignored in accounting research. We begin to explore the significance of selected visual images appearing in U.S. annual reports during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Our intent is not to produce a general survey of images, but rather to offer different “ways of seeing” images and through these “ways of seeing” to encourage a critical dialogue that focuses upon the representational, ideological and constitutive role of images in annual reports. Our first way of seeing views the image as transparently conveying an intended corporate message. The second way of seeing draws upon neo-Marxist aesthetic literature and considers the ways in which images in annual reports may be mined for their ideological content and may also reveal society's deep structures of social classification, institutional forms and relationships. Finally, we employ critical postmodernist art theory to see images in terms of their constitutive role in creating different types of human subjectivities and realities. We argue that this way of seeing creates the potential for new voices to be heard and the possibility to subvert the dualisms typical of the totalizing theories of modernity.

Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930- 1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 David W. Madden Steven Weisenburger. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 320 pp. In Fables of Subversion Steven Weisenburger challenges a host of traditional notions about satire and postmodern American fiction. In spite of its seemingly limited scope—American novels between 1930 and 1980—Weisenburger offers a serious and probing refutation of New Critical assumptions that have dominated scholarly and popular discourse on the subject. [End Page 848] The study’s introduction carefully lays the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the five remaining chapters. Weisenburger draws a crucial distinction between generative and “degenerative” satirical writing, with the generative mode representing traditional satires. The degenerative mode he describes as “delegitimizing . . . function[ing] to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own. Still more, it suspects that any symbolic practice may entail incursions of power whose logic tends toward either total domination or the final chaos of reciprocal violence.” This degenerative mode is largely a postmodern phenomenon. Drawing primarily on Jean-François Lyotard, Weisenburger emphasizes the postmodern doubt about the modernists’ attempts to use literature as a way of establishing a canon of high art and enlightenment. Instead, postmodern art emphasizes contingency and pluralist approaches, which, “[d]espite all their apparent negativity and nihilism, . . . the subversive carnivals of postmodernism bear witness to the opening of a ‘pagan’ discourse that was always at the heart of modern darkness.” Postmodern satirists “suspect all structures, including structures of perceiving, representing, and transforming,” and their works interrogate the violence and terror inherent in established cultural forms of discourse. Consistent features of the contemporary satire are its deformations of plot, grotesque violence, transtextuality, and excessive attention to details. Weisenburger clearly demonstrates the ways in which Formalist criticism has dominated the scholarship on satire, defining conventions which simply have nothing to do with degenerative, postmodern fictions. Weisenburger refutes the validity of four crucial assumptions underlying traditional criticism—satire is a rhetorical formulation offering a rational argument and appealing to the common opinions of a majority of readers; it requires an extramural object of attack rather than the act of fiction-making itself; satire is a moral or ethical corrective; and it is normative. In each case he demonstrates that the methods and purposes of degenerative satire have nothing in common with conventions drawn from far more conventional satiric models. Finally, the introduction considers research on the grotesque and carnivalesque to clarify the sensibility of degenerative satire. “Carnival definitively illustrates the semiotic processes of dismantling and exposure of [End Page 849] which satire is a part. Amid its disorder, one discovers points of view, specific orderings that are suppressed by or in sharp opposition to authorized representations.” The lineage of writers considered begins with Nathanael West whose works tend increasingly toward the fully accomplished degenerative mode defined in the first chapter. The Day of the Locust is the apogee of West’s satiric practices and a work that “can be read as a narrative about the troubled emergence of a radical, degenerative mode of satire.” Analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and John Hawkes’s The Cannibal emphasize the contemporary development of this sensibility. A chapter devoted to Black Humor presents the most careful and well-argued reevaluation of that literary phenomenon to date. While regarding Black Humor as “the early, literary expression of an emerging postmodernism,” Weisenburger cuts through the hyperbole of many longstanding assumptions to demonstrate that the impulse to joke dominates the fictions of Kurt Vonnegut, J. P. Donleavy, and Terry Southern. James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, a book for some time overlooked by critics and scholars, is seen as an inspired failure, while Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Hawkes’s Travesty are submitted as the most daring and fully realized examples of Black Humor satire. A fourth chapter addresses examples of social and political satire in the 1960s, wherein Weisenburger argues that postmodern American satires have less to do with corrective solutions than the exposition of dissent...

Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left.

Marcuse brings back to center stage one of the most celebrated and controversial philosophers of the turbulent 1960s, the man Time magazine called the guru of the New Left. In Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, and other notable works, Herbert Marcuse crystallized the essence of counterculture philosophy. His neo-Marxist critique of Western capitalism was widely embraced by revolutionaries, hippies, and an entire generation of academics who condemned political, economic, and sexual repression in American society. So complete was Marcuse's identification with the New Left that, with its demise, he and his works fell out of favor. But, as this volume persuasively demonstrates, Marcuse remains vitally relevant for us today. Returning to Marcuse may recall the clash of idealistic exuberance and tragic violence associated with Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury, the Vietnam War, 1968 Democratic Convention, Kent State, and Earth Day, as well as the passionate voices of anti-war and civil rights protesters, environmentalists, feminists, and free love advocates. But this volume does not cater to the simplistic nostalgia of aging baby-boomers. Fifteen leading Marcuse scholars, including Marcuse's son Peter, assess the philosopher's ideas in the radically different theoretical and political contexts of the 1990s. The range of topics covered is distinctly contemporary Foucault and postmodern theories, analytical Marxism and the demise of the Soviet Union, women's studies and feminist psychoanalytic theory, aesthetic consciousness and postmodern art, radical ecology and cybernetic technology and includes Douglas Kellner's revealing first look at the unpublished manuscripts in the Marcuse Archives in Frankfurt. Sure to excite liberal as well as irritate conservative culture warriors, these provocative essays illuminate the outlines of a Marcuse revival and the Next Left as both emerge to confront the complex challenges of our times.

Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway

Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway Vernon Gras (bio) Peter Greenaway’s films share the absurdist premises of Beckett and Pinter but not their minimalist understatement and choked up silences. He likes to do “talkie” films and stuffs them as full of information and citations of past culture as the film’s problem or conflict will allow. Similar to other postmodern artists whose works are informed by the current “loss of center,” Greenaway’s films are filled with quotes and allusions to the cultural monuments of the past in architecture, painting, sculpture, landscape, scientific theory, religion, and myth. He has been criticized by some as an elitist for the heavy load of intellectual freight his films carry. But many critical reactions to his work have been profuse in their admiration of its multilayered richness. 1 In an interview with Joel Siegel in City Paper (April 6, 1990), Greenaway argues that his many cultural allusions are not affectation. Rather, he feels, they help in the development of an introspective approach to film making. He grants that cinema must be realistic, that is, reproduce the external world, but it must also render a multilayer of metaphorical meaning. Thus, Greenaway’s films are far richer in their mise-en-scène than in montage. More attention is given to how a particular scene is framed and shot than to fast cuts, changing camera angles, and the suspenseful development of a story line. The latter he contemptuously refers to as “the Hollywood cinema” and a “St. Vitus Dance use of the camera.” 2 In defending his financially successful The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover from being a Hollywood sellout, Greenaway asserted that “this is a metaphorical film. There’s no way that the American cinema ever deals in metaphor. The only decent metaphorical filmmaker you have here is David Lynch. Americans don’t understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They’re extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else. The whole purpose of my cinematic effort is to explore metaphor and symbol.” 3 It is precisely this thick visual and verbal texture in his films that induces pleasurable anticipation in his followers and perhaps contributes more to the viewer’s interpretive interest than do the storyline of his [End Page 123] characters. With confirmed regularity, Greenaway places his dramatic conflicts into a thick cultural tapestry whose allegorical meanings and oppositions, though enlivened by the surface activities of his characters, usually do more for his films than does the plot. I’m looking for ways of structuring films that coexist with my thematic material but that also have their own identities and interest. In some ways my films are more satisfactorily explained by the esthetic one brings to painting than to movies. The sense of distance and contemplation they require has much more to do with painting. When you go into an art gallery you don’t emote, by and large, like people do in the movies. I know my work is accused of being cool and intellectually exhibitionistic. But I’m determined to get away from that manipulated, emotional response that you’re supposed to have to Hollywood cinema. 4 The recurring allegory, metaphor, or subtext in all his films, underlying their more immediate and superficial action, is the inevitable failure of whatever ordering principles his protagonists engage in. The same self-awareness and reflexivity about their art found in writers like Borges, Calvino, Barth, and Pynchon, find thematic and cinematographic expression in Greenaway. On more than one occasion, Greenaway has admitted fondness for Borges, Calvino, Smollett, and their influence on his work. 5 Like many postmodern writers, Greenaway makes the creative process itself the main issue in his films. It is human creativity, the artistic activity itself—meaning giving—that functions sub voce as the hero. Excluding Prospero’s Books, Greenaway’s major films have depicted this theme as serious actions in a tragic mode. Beginning with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and continuing unabated through A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988...

'And this strength is in me still': Embodying Memory in Works by Jewish Women Performance Artists

Performance art calls for a merging of the boundaries between 'life' and 'theatre', and many of its practitioners engage in what has come to be known as 'autoperformance', wherein the performer adopts a loosely autobiographical persona in order to designate one portion of the ongoing drama of his or her life as a theatrical event. The most popularly known of these autoperformers is Spalding Gray, whose Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box have played to a wide range of audiences. The complexities and contradictions of memory are central to autoperformance for several reasons. Since the 'text' of a performance art work exists primarily in the moment of enactment, its recording and preservation engage us immediately in the postmodern act of redefining textuality as fragmentary or partial. As Peggy Phelan points out, citing Richard Schechner, the 'primary interest' in 'much postmodern performance art' is a result of 'the discourse it promotes after the fact'.' Postmodern art often seeks to confront and reinterpret the past, particularly as it presents itself to us through various texts, in order to reinscribe that past in an ongoing present. One might say that autoperformers use subjective memory to 'play out' the postmodern interest in drawing and reshaping the past as narration transforms it into the present tense. Autoperformance's narratives simultaneously create and confront history by the theatrical insistence on the continuous present tense of the performance moment, combined with the responses to, and integration of, multiple previously-existing 'texts' that range from songs tojokes to diary fragments to excerpts from other theatrical and literary works. Susan Rubin Suleiman's description of a postmodernist aesthetic includes the sense of a need to 'address' the past; Suleiman sees the postmodern as 'that moment of extreme (perhaps tragic, perhaps playful) self-consciousness when the present our present takes to reflecting on its relation to the past and to the future primarily as a problem of repetition'. She asks, in a reference that calls the Holocaust to mind, 'How does one create a future that will acknowledge and incorporate the past a past that

Postmodernist Purity

Postmodernist Purity John McGowan Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in October and Art in America, who died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1990. Just about everything he ever published—plus the syllabi and bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on critical theory, and on visualizing AIDS—has been collected in the volume under review. It makes for sad reading, not just because Owens should still be among us, but also because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain postmodernist discourse haunt this work. Owens’s intellectual trajectory—from Derrida to Foucault to Lacan as the major influence on his work—follows that of much of his (and my) generation in this country. From an aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties inspired by Derrida, Owens moved to a political analysis of modernism that focused on relations of power and from there to a cultural critique of the construction of gender identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. In the process, Derrida and Foucault do not completely disappear, but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist thought had shaped Owens’s discourse in a particularly distinctive way by the mid-eighties. The thread that runs through these various sub-periods in Owens’s work is the problematic of representation. An early (1979) essay on Derrida’s critique of classical aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the editors of this volume take its title: If in ‘The Parergon’ Derrida offers us no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. Still, ‘The Parergon” signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition.” (38) What is the nature of the “necessity” here? Necessary for what and to whom? And how would we know (if) something (was) beyond recognition? A few years later (1982), Foucault has led Owens to be more willing to name names, to suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition, might be desirable. He calls our attention to “the ways in which domination and subjugation are inscribed within the representational systems of the West. Representation, then, is not—nor can it be—neutral; it is an act—indeed, the founding act—of power in our culture” (91). The wholesale condemnation of the West’s representational systems is retained in this shift from Derrida to Foucault, but now Owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of powerful representations and the groups most likely to suffer those harms. Three years later (1985) Owens criticizes Foucault for only telling “half the story”; what “Foucault would excise” is the half “that concerned desire and representation” (204). Here we need Lacan, who teaches us to “regard all human sexuality as masquerade” (214), as a representation of presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is castration. Appropriately enough, the Lacanian essay on “Posing” brings Owens full circle. He ends with a quote from Derrida. “If the alterity of the other is posed, that is simply posed, doesn’t it amount to the same . . . . From this point of view I would even go so far as to say that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the relation which can in no way be posed” (215). The critique of representation, then, keeps coming back to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which cannot be represented. I use the word “desire” deliberately here because, while fascinated by the inscription, formation, and constraints of conventional desire, Owens follows his models in never thinking through his own desire to question and disrupt the conventional. This postmodern discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This blind spot is particularly irritating because Owens recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow tragedy in Marx’s version...

Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno

A very stimulating, educative asset for all scholars of art history, philosophy, music, and literature who are interested in the postmodern paradigm shift. - German Studies Review. An extremely timely and original assessment of the current state of aesthetic theory, or, more precisely, aesthetic practice as reflected in that theory. Using Adorno's analysis of modern music as his starting point, Roberts constructs a model of twentieth-century artistic developments and their theoretical implications that draws on and criticizes a wide variety of important contemporary thinkers. subject touches on many of the central issues now surrounding the heated international debate over - Martin Jay, author of Adorno. crisis of tradition early in the twentieth century - signalled by the collapse of perspective in painting and tonality in music and evident in the explosive ferment of the avant-garde movements - opened a new stage of modern art, which aesthetic theory is still struggling to comprehend. David Roberts situates the current aesthetic and cultural debates in a wider historical frame which extends from Hegel and the Romantics to Lukacs and Adorno, Benjamin and Baudrillard. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno is the first detailed analysis in English of Theodor Adorno's seminal Philosophy of Modern Music, which can be seen as a turning point between modern and postmodern art and theory. Adorno's diagnosis of the crisis of modernist values points back to Hegel's thesis of the end of art and also forward to the postmodernist debate. Thus the paradoxes of Adorno's negative aesthetics return to haunt the current discussion by representatives of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Anglo-American Marxism, and French poststructuralism. Going beyond Adorno's dialectic of musical enlightenment, Roberts proposes an alternative model of the enlightenment, of art applied to literature and exemplified in the outline of a theory of parody. In its critique of Adorno, Art and Enlightenment clears the way for a reconsideration of twentieth-century artistic theory and practice and also, in offering a model of postmodern art, seeks to disentangle critical issues in the discussion of the avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism. David Roberts, Reader in at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is coeditor of the journal Thesis Eleven. He is the author of The Indirections of Desire: Hamlet in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1980) and other books.

The disorder of things: the postmodern art library

Postmodernism has stimulated a ‘new art history’, which challenged, and then displaced, the highly selective canon of the ‘Old Masters’ and ‘Modern art’ with a broader approach, recognising a wider range of art and interested in investigating both the contexts of art, and the nature of art history itself. The new art history is represented on the shelves of art libraries, but a ‘new art librarianship’ must do more than passively reflect this cultural shift. A new art librarianship will expect of art librarians that they should be aware of the ways in which art libraries legitimise certain books and artworks, thus reinforcing the hegemony of the dominant culture, and that they should be prepared to use the power of art libraries knowingly and productively. Instead of imposing order through inflexible classification schemes, the new art librarianship will embrace the ‘disorder’ of a vast complex of knowledge seen from multiple viewpoints, accommodated by hypertext, for example. It is possible that electronic networking will eventually liberate information from the custody of libraries; the new art librarianship will not resist this, but will in parallel with such developments re-value art books, and books as art, as historical artefacts, reviving a more museum-like function from the history of librarianship, while continuing to serve as a manifest symbol of the wealth of human knowledge.

The relative rightness of Pierre Bourdieu: Some sociological comments on the legitimacy of postmodern art, literature and culture

The relative rightness of Pierre Bourdieu: Some sociological comments on the legitimacy of postmodern art, literature and culture

Polanyi and Post-modernism

Post-modernism is receiving much attention, but it is often seen as merely an extrapolation of modernism. Michael Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology offers a useful way of understanding post-modernism. The modern objectivism of critical thought leads to a dead-end dehumanization. Polanyi offers a recovery of the human dimension by demonstrating the ways in which all knowing, especially scientific discovery, requires human participation. An analogy is drawn with post-modern art and architecture, which similarly attempt to recover the human form and traditional or classical ornamentation in a way which goes beyond the sterile abstractness of modernism. As we near the end of the twentieth century, we are increasingly hearing references to something called “post-modernism.” Presumably post-modernism is something beyond modernism. The modern age, which had become so familiar to us, is now history. It has passed almost unheralded, and now we must adjust to something new. Whether this is a source of lament or rejoicing depends on how we understand modernism. Our quest for cultural self-understanding forces us to come to terms with the issues that Michael Polanyi, almost half a century ago, insisted were of greatest urgency. The quest for a definition of post-modernism may remain as elusive as an attempt to get a clear picture of the future by gazing through a crystal ball. What the future will hold must be more than an extrapolation of present trends. We must understand our present situation in historical context, and unless we are to be passive victims of our future, we must work to shape our vision of destiny according to values and ideals which we freely and deliberately choose and openly acknowledge. In order to understand post-modernism, we must get a bearing on modernism. Indeed in the words of Fredric Jameson, “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place”(73). The quest for a definition of post-modernism is a bit like trying to find one’s way out of a fog without navigational aids. The vision of reality offered to us by the modernist accounts of objectivity show us only the fog and not our location in it. It is these accounts of objectivity offered by critical thought which Polanyi explicitly repudiated in his post-critical epistemology. I therefore suggest that using the clues Polanyi offers us, we should be able to see clear of the cultural fog of the false objectivity of impersonal knowing. Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology offers us a coherent vision of what is now being called post-modernism. For Polanyi, knowledge is not an impersonal undertaking but a very personal affirmation of that which we claim to know. Critical thought, which we equate with modernism, attempted to distance the knower from the known. Polanyi’s post-critical knowledge recovers the human dimension of knowledge by demonstrating that even in science, held to be the most precise form of knowledge by the modernists, the scientist relies on tacit unspecifiable clues in pursuit of discovery and any claim to knowledge must be accredited by the community of knowers.

Style, process, surface, context: Consulting as postmodern art

(1991). Style, process, surface, context: Consulting as postmodern art. Journal of Applied Communication Research: Vol. 19, The Agenda for Applied Communication Research, pp. 32-54.

Sacred interconnections: postmodern spirituality, political economy, and art

Sacred interconnections: postmodern spirituality, political economy, and art

Piano as…text

Abstract A cultural icon, the Piano, carries with it a most imposing artistic‐social tradition. The aesthetics of postmodern music, however, has transcended both the musical and social elements associated with the Piano. Nevertheless, the use and impact of the piano in contemporary music continues unabated, its literature grows; leaving us with a paradox that admits itself only as an oxymoron: in postmodern music, the physical piano remains as the ghost of a concept which has been destroyed. This paper examines three compositions which illustrate this paradox by their simultaneous rejection of and dependence on the traditional Piano: Knocking Piece by Ben Johnston, Be Prepared by the New Percussion Quartet, and For Pianist by Christian Wolff. Drawing upon contemporary literary criticism, the goal is to illustrate the function of the piano as a text‐object, and in so doing, place the above three works within the context of the postmodern arts in general.

Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video

Offers a radical synthesis of poststructuralist theory, the postmodern arts, and psychoanalysis designed to enable students and teachers of literature, film and video to understand the mind's workings in the age of television. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of literary and cultural theory.