POSTMODERNISM IN ART: AN

INTODUCTION

Consumer Culture: Art and Temporality

Background: Wesselmann, Tom (1963) Still Life #30

Consumer Culture: Art and Temporality

Avant-garde and Kitsch Pop in Britain: the Independent

Group Pop in America: Rosenquist ,

Wesselmann, Lichtenstein and Warhol.Brillo Boxes and the end of art?

Simulation and Simulacra: From Baudrillard to Koons

Avant-garde and Kitsch

“Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would either be resolved or beside the point... ‘Art for Art’s’ sake and ‘pure poetry’ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.” (Greenberg 1992, p.5)

(First published in 1939)

Avant-garde and Kitsch “Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and

academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates ... Insensitivity. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times [...] Formal culture has always belonged to the [powerful and cultivated]; while the [great mass of the exploited and poor] have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.” (Ibid, p. 10)

Pop Art“Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture” (Huyssen 1986, p.vii)

Eduardo Paolozzi, BUNK! (1971)

This is Tomorrow (1956)

Richard Hamilton (1956) Just What is it that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?

The allure of American popular culture.

Eduardo Paolozzi (1970) Hollywood Wax Museum

Commodities and sensuality

Richard Hamilton (1957) Hers is a Lush Situation

Peter Blake (1961) Self-Portrait With Badges

“Topicality and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word, which means a system that is static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness to the variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding values.”

Lawrence Alloway (1958) The Arts and the Mass Media

Nixon/ Khrushchev ‘Kitchen Debate’ (1959)

Pop Art in America

James Rosenquist (1960-1) President Elect

Tom

Wes

selm

ann

(196

2) S

till L

ife N

o.24

Roy Lichtenstein (1967) Brushstrokes

Andy Warhol (1962) Marilyn Diptych

Brillo boxes and the end of art?First Exhibited in the Stable Gallery, New York. 1964

“Art was no longer possible in terms of a progressive historical narrative. The narrative had come to an end... [This], in fact, was a liberating idea, or I thought it could be. It liberated artists from the task of making more history. It liberated artists from having to follow the ‘correct historical line’” (Danto 1992, p.10)

Clockwise from top left: Caravaggio (1602-3) Doubting Thomas. Potsdam. Jackson Pollock (1952) Blue Poles number 11. Turner, JMW (1842) Streamer in a Snowstorm. Tate London. Diego Velazquez (1656) Las Meninas. Prado Madrid

“What Warhol’s dictum [that anything could be art] amounted to was that you cannot tell when something is a work of art just by looking at it, for there is no particular way that art has to look. The upshot was that you could not teach the meaning of art by examples.” (Danto 1992, p.5)

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Baudrillard: Simulacra

APPLE

Robert Rauschenberg (1963) Stop

Simulation

Louise Hopkins (1999) Europe Map (Green)

Simulation and simulacra

“[Reality, the Real,] no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all.”

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double... A perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all is vicissitudes.” (Baudrillard [1983] 2001, p.170)

Jeff koons (1981-87) New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10-gallon Displaced Tripledecker

Koons

Jeff Koons (1986) Rabbit

Jeff Koons (1988) Michael Jackson and Bubbles

References Baudrillard, Jean ([1983] 2001) Simulacra and

Simulations, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Poster, M (ed.) Cambridge, Polity Press.

Danto, Arthur C (1992) Beyond the Brillo Box: The visual arts in post-historical perspective. London, University of California Press.

Greenberg, Clement (1989) Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston, Beacon Press.

Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism, London, MacMillan Press LTD.