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I believe the most important insight that I am going away from our class Issues in Contemporary Art is regarding postmodernism and its effect on society and on me. Throughout the course, I have been struggling with the questions: What is the meaning of art? And what is its role in society? Specifically, what are the roles of classical or “high” art, “low” or “low brow” art, Outsider art and Anti-Art? The more I learn about the recent history of Art, especially the past 40 or 50 years, I can see that the recent rapid changes in society since the 1960s and the explosive growth of communication media has given voice to a vast range of previously unheard voices, challenging the ‘way it was’.

The role of art has radically changed over the past few decades and the onset of great technological changes in the late 20th century have propelled our society into a strange in-between place when it comes to the consideration of art. The rise of post modernity in America has crumbled our foundations which are based on the “Classical” world and overarching metanarratives ( ‘grandes histoires’) based in Western European culture and thought. The “incredulity towards metanarratives”, as spoken about by Jean-Francois Lyotard in the Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, p. xxiv), has given rise to micronarratives (‘petites histoires’) which encompasses the individual beliefs of the whole breadth of humanity’s cultures, sects and personalities into one continually and ongoing conglomerating assemblage. This idea of inclusiveness, though positive in ways, also has a fragmenting affect on society. Can we even be called a ‘society’ or ‘community’ when those two words are defined by the ideas of shared heritage, history and culture?

The topic is such a broad and complicated one that there is no way to tackle in 10 pages what philosophers, scientists, theologians, artists and the mob have been wrestling with for the past 30 or 40 years. However, in seeking to the answer the question “How has post modernity affected art and media in the United States?” my focus will be on some key ideas and how they affect me and the environment that I see around me. Whilst reading my journal entries and as I began to formulate an idea about the question that I would like to ask and answer, it began to dawn on me that post modernity and especially the idea of the Simulacrum were eminently influential in my day-to-day life and thoughts. And that many of the issues that I was wrestling with in my journal entries were related to the effects of post modernity.

Issues such as how the opening of the floor for discussion of long-held beliefs and positions will impact the art world. Issues such as the question of true and right ownership of art and artifacts, balanced with the needs of a global community and in consideration of the creating cultures’ rights. Also, the way in which the commodication of art has changed the who buys and owns art, the effects of informational overload, the changing dynamics of race, gender and sexuality, and how all of these factors affect us in a deconstructionist, “no opinion is better than any other” kind of world.

By distilling the experience of my life through the filter of Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of Simulacrums and Hyperreality I became aware of a layer of reality that was not visible to me before. It became apparent to me that my view of reality was not really MY view at all.

I am a simulacrum child

I did not go and see

Something and ask

‘What is that?’

I read IT in a book

I saw IT on TV

I saw IT in a movie

Before I knew what IT was.

I found many possible answers to my questions in the writing of Jean Baudrillard. The ideas of Simulacra and Hyperreal seem quite plausible to me. I feel as if the Hyperreal infects my senses and my perceptions are ripe with distortions because of the injection of images through literature, media and the internet. This is especially the case in my view of food. For example, when I think of peas and carrots, my mind does not envision farm land and earthy, acrid scents or the dirty, imperfect appearance of these vegetables when they are growing in the field. Instead, my mind envisions “Ho, ho, ho, Green Giant!” and a bowl full of perfectly green peas and bright orange carrots, evenly mixed and sitting harmoniously distributed on a nice clean, white plate. This disconnect between mind and reality applies to food products, but also to other consumer goods and even extends to political and religious ideas prepackaged, marketed and made shiny, bright and new to be consumed by the media-captivated masses.

This idea of Simulacrum and Hyperreal extends to the world of art in that art students are educated and indoctrinated and processed through universities which teach about those images which are metanarratively dictated to represent the “best” of the world’s art history. This creates a filtered lens through which all future encounters with art will be colored. Society has become so accustomed to this manner and method of indoctrination that it’s hardly possible to be considered a “legitimate” artist or curator without this kind of indoctrination, let alone finding an important post in any kind of renown gallery or museum.

We have become disconnected from subjective, individual and “real” perceptions and are moving towards a more conformist, Hollywood or politically produced idea about the world which is provided by the mediums of literature, radio, Internet and not only television and video streamed to your living rooms, but also straight to your phones. Although there appears to be many choices provided through these mediums, they are more often than not, recycled ideas, stories and ichacters which simulate imagination. These are reframed, recolored, rerecorded and re-presented to the public as something new. All the while—messages about the important value of name-brand commodities and logoed consumer goods that are being injected between the stories to place them intrinsically into our consciousness. This strategy of indoctrination in the absolute importance of a consumer society is now being perpetuated through multiple-generations. Semi-indoctrinated parents are now passing down to their children an even greater need to consume and purchase these symbolic goods which will provide a pseudo-identity. And within the context of this pseudo-identity child-citizens are allow them to express themselves in the context of a culture which values & cherishes the Sign Value of products over the Use Value of objects.

We also see the mainstreaming of indigenous and aboriginal cultural artifacts and artistic styles. No sooner are designs and styles discovered that they are picked up by some astute traveler or researcher who then processes, commercializes and integrates them into society. We see all types of unique cultural artifacts cut and pasted into our television commercials, clothing lines and just about every consumer good. Large corporations are most excellent at taking an ethnic specialty like India’s chicken makhani and reverse-engineering the flavors, creating a process to replicate it, and creating an ethnically designed package and producing them in bulk. Though this copy cannot match the original, people have become so anesthetized and have less and less time to produce something wholesome, genuine and nutritious that this “something” has become better than nothing.

Baudrilliard’s ideas about the growing discontinuity between the Use Value and Sign Value of an item like clothing can clearly be seen happening now. A pair of shirts might both be of similar Use Value; the one made by a designer like “Abercrombie” holds a radically different Sign Value. And although two artist-curators might have the same technical and intellectual capabilities, the one with the higher degree or more prestigious school is “ranked” higher. One might ask who is to say what is better or what is right? This brings up issues about who or what Is in power and about conformity and rebellion and non-conformity.

The idea of non-conformity versus conformity, outsider versus insider is not new in the world of Art (or politics). In fact, it has been an ongoing concern from at least the beginning of the 20th century when the Dadaists rebelled against the status quo. Since then, there have been several waves of these Artistic Revolutions, with sporadic lulls of quiet creation. Along with the rise of Simulacra and Hyperreality, this century has given rise to the idea of Anti-Art.

The Age of Anti-Art

By Glenngo Allen King

What was bequeathed to us.

the mourners,

after the Atomic death

was a facsimile of the material

world:

Man was to animal

as Art was to death

(A shadow in a vast arena

of monuments and masters)

the last hours of insurrection

and above all

the Absolute lie

assured us:

We live on a constant diet

of annihilation

like ill-fed beasts

caged in procreation

Since the early 20th century, the ideas of Art and Anti-Art have been wrestling themselves towards a kind of resolution. Not so much a clear victory by one side or the other, rather the two co-exist as a form of yin-yang, male-female, positive-negative relationship which exists in spite of and in need of the other. With the onset of post modern thinking we might also need to consider whether yang-yin, female-male, negative-positive might be a better arrangement or perhaps, yin-yang, female-male, positive-negative. Because, Postmodernism asks us to analyze and question such relativities and dynamics, we must reconsider all of our usual presumptions. Classical-Dadaism, Abstract–Photorealism, Modern-Post-Modern, Minimalism-Post-Minimalism have danced through history opposing, pushing, pulling and goading the other side towards extremes and back again.

Stewart Martin offers some interesting insights into the absolute necessity of this dance between Art and Anti-Art. His claim is that for Art to thrive there must be Anti-Art to both challenge and revive it. “Anti-Art is the anti-traditional form which art must necessarily risk if its autonomy is not to depend merely upon the authority of tradition.” He writes, before suggesting that Anti-Art not only “affirms it , but to establish whether it is in fact new and not just a parody of the new, relying on the authority of tradition.” (Martin, pg.198)

A recurring and visible pattern throughout recent history is the way in which the “outsider” or “Anti-Artist” gradually becomes accepted and enters the mainstream culture. This legitimizes their art, and their once, outrageous rebellious ideas join the mainstream thought, giving rise to a new generation of Anti-Artists looking to break away and grow beyond. One example is Sol LeWitt who’s conceptual art helped moved art off of canvases and into the realm of thought. Although once considered “outside the box”, he became a renowned artist whose art was commissioned throughout the world. Another example is Sally Mann, whose work was once considered borderline pornographic and whose work is now considered most insightful and a documentary of the very intimate and personal family relationship.

Not only was Anti-Art about rebellious and unfamiliar ideas, it encompassed the adaptation of the artist to a changing world. Changing technologies affect the way artists work and call into question the relevancy of a medium when challenged by a newer, overlapping medium, for example: painting by photography, photography by movies. This not only applies to the medium, but the method of production. A growing industrial revolution in the mid-twentieth century brought mass production and the rise of machines which could take the place of the singular artist, his brush and skill. Helen Molesworth discusses this break from the traditional methods and the use of alternative methods of production. She write that not only were the Dadaists breaking the cultural ideas of what art was, but that the “the strategies of montage, the readymade, and chance are not only mechanisms for making art objects, they are also abdications of traditional forms of artistic labor.” Molesworth’s early example of this is Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1907) in which Picasso uses actual chair caning in the painting/sculpture, instead of painting them in. This is an example of what Molesworth was stressing in her article, which is that the traditional role of the artist was changing. Instead of reproduction by skill and paint, the new roles of the artist included “To shop, to edit, to arrange, these were new forms of labor, ones not yet as familiar and administered as they are today.” And it is indeed apparent that the role of artists, and American society overall, has shifted in large part from utilizing a skill to create and manufacture something towards shopping, rearranging and marketing it in a new way. (Molesworth, pg.179)

An interesting scientific fact that might have some relevance to this discussion is that in particle physics, there is matter and then there is its antithesis, anti-matter. Whenever the two meet, they annihilate one another—releasing a brief, but incredibly intense burst of energy. What an appropriate analogy to the reaction of Art and Anti-art, in that through their interactions they simultaneously destroy one another’s “purity” or “rigidness” and leave the forum open for the rise of the next dichotomy of tradition versus new ideas. Stewart Martin makes a wonderful point of this when he states that “The idea that art must negate itself in order to maintain itself institutes the insistent anti-traditionalism of Adorno’s concept of avant-garde art’s historical temporality: its modernism. For Adorno, the new transforms traditionalism’s foundationalism of the past into the paradoxically anti-foundational foundation of the destruction of tradition. In this sense, the new becomes normative for art” (Martin, pg. 203) as we see in the case of artists like LeWitt and Mann.

The song “Schism” by Tool also summarizes this idea of beauty coming from the interaction of Art and Anti-Art when they sing “The poetry that comes from the squaring off between, and the circling is worth it, finding beauty in the dissonance”. This is a whole-heartedly Dadaist comment, but one which explains the rich and wide variety of art which the world has been gifted with through the clash between traditional and non-traditional, western versus non-western, formal and indoctrinated versus informal and unschooled. We see this continual rebirth, remixing and reuse of past styles and ideas which can be likened to a flowing river which might shift from side to side, and rises and recedes, but always, always moves forward.

Finally, no discussion of Post modernity could be complete without considering the effects and examples of an information overloaded, Hyperreal society which gorges itself on media overload through the Internet, television and radio. I feel that it is certainly true that my view of the world is not my own. My “world” is a world provided for me by the accumulation of the marketing materials of food, clothing and consumer goods, as well as the ideas of the motion picture, book publishing and television broadcasting industries. Although there is some small portion of my persona that was derived from my family, friends and loved ones—they were also indoctrinated with the Simulacrum of an idealized American life.

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” – Umberto Eco

The Hyperreal & Simulacra that Baudrilliard talked about has so infected and covered our society that we have begun growing up in the state where we are not even aware of the affect that media has cloaked reality from us. A truly awakening event happened as I read Beginning Postmodernism by Tim Woods. On page 67 I read about a remark in the novel White Noise “No one sees the barn … Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn … We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one.” Woods points out that “the real barn disappears behind the image of the barn” and I now realized that my whole life has been images of real, or as Baudrillard calls it: the “Hyperreal”. This tendency is so well-embedded in me that even being conscious of it, I can’t help it. Looking at the world around me it is clear to me the effect that this had on the creation of media, entertainment and in the art world. There is a self-referencing nature to society’s art and it seems to be a growing trend.

Appropriation Art is quite ‘appropriate’ for this new world because many artists don’t create new works, instead they shop the world’s banks of images and ideas with their mind’s eye and select pieces to crop and rearrange. Looking at artists like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince we can see the recycling of iconic images artwork. Their art is not the unique capturing of a moment, but instead a re-edit of something that is already in circulation within the society. This recirculation of images and ideas underscores the point that Molesworth was making about the new role of artists to shop, edit and reorganize. Rather than generate wholly unique creations, artists reorganize existing ones. Instead of creating a handmade urinal out of porcelain, DuChamp purchases and reorganizes a manufactured one and presents it as art.

Not only does this occur in the context of reusing old ideas and images, and the reuse of manufactured goods, but it also occurs in newly, uniquely manufactured items that draw on other ideas already in circulation within society such as in the case of Jeff Koons, whose balloon animal sculptures are uniquely created for the artist by contractors, but they draw upon images which already existed for some time (i.e. balloon animals). This also occurs in street art like in the case of Shepard Fairey’s Andre the Giant has a posse campaign, where a popular television icon is merged with an art project to create something new from something old.

As the acceleration of the infiltration of the Hyperreal penetrates our society, it creates a society dependent on past images to generate its future ones. It creates this loop of self-referential mimetic imagery and storytelling that Baudrillard suggested “neutralized reality” (Camille, 1996) and leaves us with a “system [that] becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum; not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.” (Poster, 1988)

We see examples of this in the popular television shows Family Guy and South Park in which jokes and scenes allude to popular television shows from the past, historical books and quotes and modern events. In many cases, the references make no sense unless the viewer is within our society and has been immersed in the medium of television, movies, literature and music of our society.

As we find ever more ways in which to archive images and stories from the past we are insured that we will continue to be enslaved by references back to it. Through CDs, DVDs, the Internet and ever expanding hard drives, it becomes more and more possible to archive and categorize and collect the ideas, images and stories of thousands of cultures and the stories of millions of people.

In conclusion, post modernity has had a deep reaching and continual impact on our society. In a country such as our which strives for heterogeneous homogeny, we have found ourselves in a seemingly contradictory situation. Our society is straddled between trying to be a unified body and at the same time, opening the floor, so to speak, to all the different voices that make up that body. This has produced a more fragmented, but also a more inclusive culture. On the negative side is a growing monopolization of our imagination by the media giants, big business and political powers. These entities inundate the population with messages promoting each of their views and interests.

References

Camille, Michael. Simulacrum. Critical Terms for Art History, pp. 31-44. ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996.

Eco, Umberto. Reflections on the “Name of the Rose”. Revised edition. Martin, Secker& Warburg, Ltd. 1989.

King, Glenngo Allen. The Age of Anti-Art. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 548-549. St. Louis University. 1990. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3041742.

Lyotard, Jean Francois. The postmodern condition. Translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1984

Martin, Stewart. Autonomy and Anti-Art: Adorno’s Concept of Avant-Garde Art. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory [serial online]. June 2000;7(2):197-207. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA.

Molesworth, Helen. From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again. October [serial online]. Summer2003 2003;(105):177-181. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA.

Poster, Mark. Jean Baudrillard – Selected Writings. pp. 166-184. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988

Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. New York: Manchester University Press. 1999.