Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide
    Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide
    Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide
    Ebook321 pages2 hours

    Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide

    By Chris Garratt and Richard Appignanesi

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    What connects Marliyn Monroe, Disneyworld, "The Satanic Verses" and cyber space? Answer: Postmodernism. But what exactly is postmodernism?

    This Graphic Guide explains clearly the maddeningly enigmatic concept that has been used to define the world's cultural condition over the last three decades.
    Introducing Postmodernism tracks the idea back to its roots by taking a tour of some of the most extreme and exhilarating events, people and thought of the last 100 years: in art - constructivism, conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol; in politics and history - McCarthy's witch-hunts, feminism, Francis Fukuyama and the Holocaust; in philosophy - the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Heidegger.The book also explores postmodernism's take on today, and the anxious grip of globalisation, unpredictable terrorism and unforeseen war that greeted the dawn of the 21st century.

    Regularly controversial, rarely straightforward and seldom easy, postmodernism is nonetheless a thrilling intellectual adventure. Introducing Postmodernism is the ideal guide.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateJun 5, 2014
    ISBN9781848317604
    Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide

    Related to Introducing Postmodernism

    Titles in the series (75)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Burnrate Of The Contemporary

      Aug 21, 2019

      The main goal of a progressive contemporary artist should be to attempt to understand the world they live in – only then can meaningful change occur. The early twentieth-century Modernists wanted to totally change the present to work towards a possib

      3 min read

    • Article

      Tadao Ando

      Oct 25, 2021

      Se rifletto sulla storia dell’espressione artistica e architettonica, rimango tremendamente affascinato dai movimenti sorti in Europa all’inizio del XX secolo, agli albori del Moderno. L’introduzione del Cubismo da parte di Pablo Picasso catalizzò nu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Voyages Through Time

      Nov 4, 2022

      Voyages Through Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      Art History

      Jan 29, 2021

      Art History
      4 min read

    • Article

      Dragons, Hydra and the 21st CenturyTest

      Sep 1, 2018

      TestBack in 1993, when ArtAsiaPacific published its first print edition, the Internet had just broken out of its shell as the World Wide Web and was still a duckling learning to swim in the waters of global communication. Today, the Internet and its

      4 min read

    • Article

      Poetic Anachronisms

      Nov 3, 2017

      Poetic Anachronisms
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Singular Modern Master

      May 26, 2022

      SOMETIME IN THE 1950S THREE SMART, somewhat diffident students enrolled at the Architectural Association, then as now one of the country’s leading schools of architecture. Each were in their own way outsiders and rejected the prevailing orthodoxies o

      4 min read

    • Article

      Surreal World

      Nov 1, 2021

      Surreal World
      7 min read

    • Article

      ROOM to GROW

      Apr 26, 2021

      ROOM to GROW
      6 min read

    • Article

      Galleries Of The World

      Mar 5, 2018

      Galleries Of The World
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Companion to Curation

      Nov 4, 2020

      If there was ever a book that should be top of the bibliographic list for students studying art institutions and curatorial practice(s) of the past, present and future, this is it – A Companion to Curation edited by well-known Australian artist acade

      6 min read

    • Article

      Letture

      Feb 16, 2022

      Autori / Authors Marco Biraghi, Adriana Granato Casa editrice / Publisher Hoepli Il libro curato da Marco Biraghi e Adriana Granato ha il merito di fare venire voglia di scoprire e riscoprire gli edifici del capoluogo lombardo (dal Dopoguerra a oggi)

      5 min read

    • Article

      Letture

      Jul 23, 2021

      Letture
      4 min read

    • Article

      Talenti / Talents

      Mar 25, 2021

      Talenti / Talents
      2 min read

    • Article

      Who Runs The Art World: Money, Power And Ethics

      Feb 28, 2018

      BOOK REVIEW ANN FINEGAN IN THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, editors Brad Buckley and John Conomos have assembled an impressive set of authors, including Amelia Jones, John Welchman, Bruce Barber and Gregory Sholette. The front cover features a performance

      3 min read

    • Article

      Dreaming & Dwelling

      Dec 8, 2020

      Dreaming & Dwelling
      7 min read

    • Article

      OK Doomer: Why Spengler Matters

      Apr 27, 2023

      PERIODS OF UPHEAVAL ALWAYS bring their own prophets, divining doom or salvation for those around them and for the world at large. We have our fair share today, with various tellers of dire fortune warning of imminent environmental apocalypse, technol

      7 min read

    • Article

      Fourth Plinth Project, London The Spur, New York

      Feb 24, 2021

      In London and New York, public art is driving a critical action stimulating reflection and creating a dialogue with the context, raising fundamental issues for the community La storia dell’arte pubblica moderna occidentale, in accordo con la fondame

      10 min read

    • Article

      Carta Del Director

      May 22, 2023

      Nos encontramos en un drástico momento de cambio con derroteros inimaginables, cambioc onsecuencia de la superpoblación, del cambio climático, de la disrupción de la pandemia, del reordenamiento geopolítico del mundo, de la desigualdad y del hiperdes

      2 min read

    • Article

      Multipolar Horizon

      Jan 2, 2022

      Multipolar Horizon
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hopeful Interruptions

      Jan 5, 2024

      Hopeful Interruptions
      4 min read

    • Article

      Imperatives To Reimagine

      Jul 4, 2022

      Imperatives To Reimagine
      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Schlock Of The New

      Sep 22, 2021

      Have you noticed that, as a group, prophets tend to be a grumpy lot? From Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, right down to Carlyle, Ruskin, Spengler and beyond: gloominess and bad weather as far as the eye can see. There are many reasons for this, beginni

      3 min read

    • Article

      All Sweetness And Light

      Nov 24, 2022

      All Sweetness And Light
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Introducing Postmodernism

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Introducing Postmodernism - Chris Garratt

      First, let’s consider the WORD…

      What do you mean postmodern? The confusion is advertised by the post prefixed to modern. Postmodernism identifies itself by something it isn’t. It isn’t modern anymore. But in what sense exactly is it post…

      -as a result of modernism?

      -the aftermath of modernism?

      -the afterbirth of modernism?

      -the development of modernism?

      -the denial of modernism?

      -the rejection of modernism?

      Postmodern has been used in a mix-and-match of some or all of these meanings. Postmodernism is a confusion of meanings stemming from two riddles…

      -it resists and obscures the sense of modernism

      -it implies a complete knowledge of the modern which has been surpassed by a new age.

      A new age? An age, any age, is defined by the evidence of historic changes in the way we see, think and produce. We can identify these changes as belonging to the spheres of art, theory and economic history, and explore them for a practical definition of postmodernism.

      Let’s begin with art by tracing the genealogy of postmodern art.

      PART ONE: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN ART

      We could begin by visiting an installation by the Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b.1939), entitled On two levels with two colours (1976), which features a vertically striped band at the floor levels of two adjoining gallery rooms, one at a step up from the other. Empty rooms, nothing else…

      HOW DID WE GET TO THIS? DO WE WANT TO STAY? HOW DO WE LEAVE, IF WE WANT TO?

      Buren’s installation is not necessarily a representative example of art in the postmodern age. But it is a good place to start from, in the sense of where modernism itself has arrived at through a persistent history of innovation.

      What’s Modern? The Shock of the Old

      Modern comes from the Latin word modo, meaning just now. Since when have we been modern? For a surprisingly long time, as the following example shows.

      Around 1127, the Abbot Suger began reconstructing his abbey basilica of St. Denis in Paris. His architectural ideas resulted in something never seen before, a new look neither classically Greek nor Roman nor Romanesque.

      Suger didn’t know what to call it, so he fell back on the Latin, opus modernum. A modern work.

      JUST A MINUTE…HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELVES MODERN IF YOU’RE REVIVING SOMETHING THAT’S ANCIENT?

      BECAUSE NATURE AND REASON HAVE SHOWN US THAT THE CLASSICAL IS THE ONLY TRUE AND PERENNIALLY MODERN STYLE.

      Suger helped to inaugurate an immensely influential architectural style which became known as the Gothic.

      Gothic was in fact a term of abuse, coined by Italian Renaissance theorists, meaning a northern or German barbaric style. The ideal style of Renaissance architects and artists was the classical Greek, or what they called the antica e buona maniera moderna – the ancient and good modern style.

      Ever since then, architects have been arguing about what best represents a perennial style – classical, gothic, modern or even postmodern.

      Dialectical Antagonism

      At least since medieval times, there has been a motivating sense of antagonism between then and now, between ancient and modern. Historical periods in the West have followed one another in disaffinity with what has gone before. A rejection of one’s immediate predecessors seems almost instinctively generational.

      The result of this historical dialectic (from the Greek, debate or discourse) is that Western culture recognizes no single tradition.

      History is carved up into conceptual periods –

      and so on. These antagonistic periods are Western culture’s sets of tradition, a sort of periodic table of tradition.

      Tradition in the West is constituted and indeed energized by what is in combat with it.

      Another peculiarity of Western culture is its strongly historicist bias, a belief that history determines the way things are and must be.

      WHAT WE PRODUCE IS ALWAYS MILES AHEAD OF WHAT WE THINK.

      Darling. it’s arrived…WORKLESS WASHDAYS at last!

      Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism provided the classic historicist formula.

      Marxism established a structural difference between society’s traditional or cultural institutions and its economic productive forces. Rapid-paced progress occurs in the infrastructure, the economic sphere of productive activities which supports but also subverts the superstructure, the social sphere of ideology which includes religion, art, politics, law and all traditional attitudes. The superstructure evolves more slowly and is more resistant to change than the economic infrastructure, especially in the modern industrial age of advanced capitalism.

      The ways we think – or better, those assumptions we take for granted – are pre-established by superstructural ideologies.

      TOO CRUDE, TOO MECHANICAL. IF THINKING IS ALL PRE-ESTABLISHED BY IDEOLOGY, WHERE DOES THE FREEDOM TO THIHK SCIENTIFICALLY COME FROM? AND WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR FREEDOM TO CRITICIZE? THE TAIL DOESN’T WAG THE DOG.

      Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve…we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

      Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

      What’s MODERNISM?

      The Marxian formula is still useful for understanding the different speed-lanes of change in the traditional and productive spheres of society.

      Modernism, in the infrastructural productive sense, begins in the 1890s and 1900s, a time which experienced mass technological innovations, the second tidal wave of the Industrial Revolution begun nearly a century before.

      New Technology

      •the internal combustion and diesel engines; steam turbine electricity generators

      •electricity and petrol as new sources of power

      •the automobile, bus, tractor and aeroplane

      •telephone, typewriter and tape machine as the basics of modern office and systems management

      •chemical industry’s production of synthetic materials – dyes, man-made fibres and plastics

      •new engineering materials – reinforced concrete, aluminium and chromium alloys

      Mass Media and Entertainment

      •advertising and mass circulation newspapers (1890s)

      •the gramophone (1877); the Lumière brothers invent cinematography and Marconi the wireless telegraph (1895)

      •Marconi’s first radio wave transmission (1901)

      •first movie theatre, the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon (1905)

      Science

      •genetics established in the 1900s

      •Freud launches psychoanalysis (c.1900)

      •discovery of uranium and radium radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies (1897–9)

      •Rutherford’s revolutionary new model of the atom overturns classical physics (1911)

      •Max Planck’s quantum theory of energy (1900) revised by Niels Bohr and Rutherford (1913)

      •Einstein’s Special and General theories of Relativity (1905 and 1916)

      It isn’t difficult to see how these innovations extend logically to postmodern scientific and information developments. Two examples…

      1. The foundations of postmodern cosmology – atomic theory, quantum and Relativity – were laid down between the 1890s and 1916.

      2. The modern copper telephone wire replaced with the postmodern fibre-optic cable increases the information data-load 250,000 times over (the entire contents of Oxford’s Bodleian Library transmitted in 42 seconds).

      Modernism in the cultural or superstructural sense occupies the same period in the early 1900s – the heroic first phase of modernist experimentation in literature, music, the visual arts and architecture.

      Picasso’s Big Bang

      Despite the telephone, telegraphy and other such technological novelties, a photographic glimpse of everyday life circa 1907 looks to us entirely remote from modernity. Nothing prepares us – or indeed the good folk of 1907 – for the first truly modernist painting, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.

      Those angular deformities and staring African mask faces depict prostitutes, partly expressing Picasso’s own panic about syphilis but, more importantly, proclaiming a new anti-representational model of [de]FORM[ation].

      WHY HAS THIS VIOLENCE TO REALISTIC REPRESENTATION IN ART COME ABOUT?

      The Crisis of Representation

      Some art historians have argued, to an extent correctly, that the invention of photography ended the authority of painting to reproduce reality. Painting pictures of reality had simply become obsolete. Technological innovation in the infrastructure had outstripped the superstructural traditions of visual art. Mass production (photography) replaced hand-crafted originality (art).

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1