Post-Modernism is the term used to describe the dominant trends in visual art today. As a term it is somewhat of a catchall but most critics agree that in the 1970s there was a fundamental shift in art away from the concerns of Modernism. Simply, Modernist artists were interested in creating new forms and, in their embrace of the new, each movement was in a creative dialogue with the past. Not so for Post-Modernists. After Modernism came to an end, there was no tradition to look to for guidance or to push against.
Each dominant movement of Modernism set out to get beyond some aspect of traditional painting: the Fauvist wanted to get beyond the actual color of things; the Cubist wanted to get rid of a stable perspective, the Futurist wanted to get beyond static painting and introduce time into their work, the Dadaist got rid of artistic control and opted for randomness and chance, the Surrealist dismissed rational ordering of our waking life and asserted the primacy of dream images, the Expressionist wanted to be done with subject matter trumping an artist’s response to the subject, the Pop artist got rid of the whole foundation of representational art and the Minimalist wanted to strip away everything but materials and surfaces.
Each Modernist movement chipped away at shared ideas of objectivity as expressed in traditional painting. They did so by exploring the subjective state of the artist. Suddenly there was a shift from accurate depiction of the external world to representing the internal states of the artist. With Modernism how the artist thought, felt, and desired became part of the subject. The notion of a shared perception became suspect and as a result no movement lasted very long.
Post-Modernist art has two main influences: Pop art and Minimalism. From Pop art, Post-Modernist artists inherited the notion of working by means of constructing a narrative by selecting from a pre-designed set of images. From Minimalism, Post-Modernist artists learned that each item is taken at face value and that there is nothing beneath the surface. In short, the Post-Modernist artist is free to trade in superficial images, to construct and combine them in any order and to arrive at any meaning.
Post-Modernism does not look to an objective nature for the source of information (as representational painters in the past may have) nor does it actively rebel against this outlook (as Modern artists did). Post-Modernism has no interest in doing either for to do so would make it part of a tradition. How contemporary representational artists handle the problems of Post-Modernism is the subject for another time.
