In my last post I investigated Post-Modernism and the loss of the real. Here I wanted to examine the loss of narrative.
What advertising and media are to the loss of the real, technology is to the loss of narrative. There are two points to consider: the creation of private experiences and the loss of shared narratives. We’ll take a look at each in turn.
As technology increases, the theory was that people turn inward and surround themselves with what they want to experience. Each person tailor makes his environment and has increasingly less to do with a shared experience with another. In Post-Modern parlance we do not inhabit a public space and we are locked into private language.
Objects and events in the 1980s and 1990s seem to fit in with this theory. Here are some examples: Sony Walkman (which allow a single person to listen to the music of his choice and to tune out the public), arcade or computer games (the player gets lost in an artificial world without other real people), subcultures each with their own language, fashion and music (new wave, punk, heavy metal, etc.) and virtual reality. Virtual reality was a very interesting creation as it embodied everything the theorists (Baudrillard and Jameson) claimed was occurring in our culture: people through technology would fall into their own private synthetic experiences.
These experiences may be new and thrilling but they were insubstantial and fleeting. People would be stuck living in a fractured personal space. This is a symptom of a larger issue addressed in Post-Modernism (mainly by Lyotard); people no longer live with the shared narratives of the past. These so-called grand narratives are the beliefs that drive cultures. Some examples are: belief in reason as put forth by the Enlightenment, belief in God, belief in progress and belief in nationalism.
These critical ideas concerning narrative played themselves out in the visual arts through artwork that was fractured or disjointed (Bruce Nauman) and through the expression of private narratives (Matthew Barney). Video art and collage became common. The video art when being literal sometimes took the form of a documentary or a diary. It expressed a private narrative with its focus on the microcosmic details of a single life. The collage art (such as R.B. Kitaj or Jeff Koons) was always open-ended and not given to a single interpretation. The very form of the collage denies a single narrative.
Many times these grand narratives are present in a culture but go unrecognized. People believe them and accept them but aren’t necessarily consciously aware of them. To the Post-Modernists, by the time a grand narrative becomes recognized it is beginning to lose its hold over a culture.
This Post-Modernist proposal is quite a blow to representational painting as this was throughout history the art form that gave visual shape to the grand narratives of a culture. Later, we will look at how some artists have attempted to re-introduce grand narratives in their work.