Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Postmodernism Notes

Postmodernism
  • In the middle ages, it was unusual to encounter anyone with different beliefs
  •  In Postmodern age, it’s common to encounter people with many different beliefs
  • All the world’s cultures and rituals intermix and are all over mass media & cyberspace
  •  “we live increasingly in a world of interconnected differences-differences amplified and multiplied at the speed of electricity”
  •  Postmodern intellectuals have attempted to map the mix of identities, realities, cultures, races, gender roles, technologies, economies, cyber-spaces and mediascapes of our rapidly changing postmodern world
  • These postmodern artists or architects simply take note of the new mix of messages, symbol, cultures and media, and then create a video, song, painting or building that reflects the Postmodern condition
  • 3 cultural periods of which a unique cultural logic dominates
  •  The Age of Realism – the era of the bourgeois, historical novel
  • The Age of Modernism – modernist culture expressed its dissatisfaction with the world; themes of alienation, rootlessness, lack of identity, solitude, and social fragmentation
  •  The Age of Postmodernism – reflect the dislocation and fragmentation of language communities – splintered into small groups – each speaking a “curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or dialect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else.”
Jean Baudrillard – Hyperreal and Imaginary
  • Disneyland – presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of LA and the American surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation
  • Conceals the fact that real childishness is everywhere


Frederic Jameson – Postmodernism
  • Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes: 2 ways of reading it
  • the raw materials/initial content
  • surface of color à utopian gesture
  • 2nd reading: the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World; the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning endowment of history and of the social
  • Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes: random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas
  • Differences between the high modernist and postmodernist moment between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol:
  • The emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense
  • role of photography
  •  color: bright utopian vs deathly black and white
  • a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes

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