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Post Modern and Contemporary Art Modern and Postmodern Art

VAHT 43022 Clarifying the Distinctions between
8.00-10 Modern and Postmodern Art

Lesson Objective What is postmodernism?

• to understand the 3 approaches to postmodernism
• to understand the difference between modernism and
postmodernism
• to know the basic theories of the postmodern
You have 10 minutes to research the
term postmodernism.
Make a note of all definitions you find,
ready to feedback to the class.

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Postmodernism is a notoriously difficult Historical

concept to define.
Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism.
There are 3 approaches: Therefore to understand postmodernism from a
historical point of view, we need to first
Historical understand modernism.
Stylistic
Theoretical So …

What is modernism? Think…architecture

• Experimenting with representations of reality
• Early part of the 20th century The

• Value judgments (e.g. High culture= good, low simplification

of form and
culture = bad)
• A lot of what is generally accepted as ‘the the elimination

norm’ of ornament

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Art
Nuclear family

Experimenting with
representation
of people

Architecture…
playing with
So is that’s modernism, what is
the idea of
postmodernism?
conventions of

Think… buildings –

making us

think about

how it is

constructed

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Alternative models in society

Art… e.g. family
What is art?
This?

Or
this?

So how can we define postmodernism?

Where did it develop?
Modernism believed that the lives of people
Subject of postmodern media texts:
would improve thanks to science and a world
• Postmodern texts embody scepticism towards the ideas and ideals of the
modern era, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason certainty, based on logic.
personal identity and grand narratives (more on this later) It was a time of optimism and carried over from
Style of postmodern media texts:
Victorian Era, through the Edwardian and
• Postmodernism takes pleasure in playing with convention, pointing
out nature of how everything is a construction. right up to 1914…

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The turning point… The birth of post-modernism

The terrible carnage of the First World War sowed seeds This idea of a loss in the goodness of people and
of doubt as to whether the world was becoming a
better place. a suspicion of science and a world of logic and
The fact that science was turned to creating weapons of order was compounded by two main events of
mass destruction and killing on an industrial scale as a the Second World War…
trademark of the war, a wave of pessimism swept
across Europe.

The birth of post-modernism

The Holocaust These events brought about the movement and
theories which are loosely titled post-
modernism and post-modernist.
The dropping of Atomic bombs on Japanese
cities.
By 1968 these ideas reached fruition.

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Theoretical Approach
Some distinctions…
• Modernists believe that people were capable of original thought.
Main theorists:
• Post-modernists that the majority of the world basis its views on
what is presented to them through the media – this is called ―hyper-
reality‖ – a reality mediated through media. • Lyotard
• Modernists believed that a work of art bears a universal truth or • Baudrillard
meaning.
• Post=modernists believe that works of art are open to many different • Jameson
interpretations.
These 3 theorists offer interpretations of
postmodernism which will help us in
considering postmodern media.

Jean-François Lyotard
10 mins to research theorists (1924-1998)

• Rejection of ‘grand or meta-narratives’

Find out what postmodern theories these
theorists came up with. • These are large-scale theories and philosophies of
the world, such as the progress of history, the
know-ability of everything by science, and the
possibility of absolute freedom.

• Therefore, all ‗grand narratives‘ should be viewed

with suspicion.

• The truth therefore needs to be ‗deconstructed‘ so

that we can challenge dominant ideas that people
claim as truth.

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Jean Baudrillard
(1929-2007)
• There is no longer a distinction between reality
and its representing image, or simulacrum.
• Hyperreality – there is only surface meaning;
there is no longer any original thing for the
sign to represent; the sign is the meaning.
Stylistic Approach
• Postmodernism comprises of a set of core ideas
and key concepts that work collaboratively to
shape it.
• •
• The more of these ideas and key concepts it
embellishes, the more of a post-modern text it
becomes; these are largely derived from the above
theorists.
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Frederic Jameson (b. 1934)
• Historical viewpoint – postmodernism is a development of modernism.
• Postmodernist works are often characterized by lack of depth, which has been
replaced by a surfeit of surface.
•
Jameson catalogs key features of postmodern culture, as self-referentiality,
irony, pastiche, and parody.
• Jameson refers to this cultural recycling as historicism—the random
cannibalization of various past styles – erasing historical depth.
Key concepts
• generic blurring • eclecticism
• intertextuality and bricolage
• death of representation
playfulness e.g. parody and
pastiche •
• Hyperreality •
uncertainty and the loss of
context
• hyperconciousness