Post-Modernism and the Loss of Beauty

Much of the project of Modernism was an attempt to critically evaluate (and possibly replace) fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment.  Post-Modernism was a re-evaluation of Modernism (with a critical review of Modernism’s project and solutions) and the Enlightenment. By challenging what is real, Post-Modernism confronted claims of objectivity as put forth by science.  By challenging grand-narratives, Post-Modernism denied a shared unifying cultural language and mythos.  What I want to look at now is the challenge to beauty.

The Modern artists inherited from the Enlightenment 200 years of evolving aesthetic theory that placed beauty as the prime concern and pinnacle achievement in the arts.  Some thinkers (notably Kant and Hegel) claimed beauty as either a universal truth or an  objective truth, while others (Hogarth) believed it to be a subjective state that was reducible to a set of attributes that could be used to judge a work of art as beautiful.

In the 20^th century the central concern for artists shifted from creating beautiful works to expression.  Recording the objective look of the outer world was replaced with giving expression to the subjective inner states. Some artists challenged beauty by looking at its opposite the grotesque, while others argued for judging work based on formalist criteria. Though there was not a single direction the critique of beauty took, it was not an all out abandoning of the idea of beauty.  Modernism didn’t have a problem with beauty as an idea but, rather, it argued about what was beautiful and proposed new alternatives.

Post-Modernism challenged the notion of beauty head-on. Some thinkers (Adorno) took a political approach and linked aesthetics to larger cultural concerns regarding authority and power.  Others looked at psychology and reinvestigated the nature of the sensation that was, at an earlier time, called a response to beauty.   Lyotard used the term the sublime (a state of pleasurable anxiety), Freud called it the uncanny (a state of feeling uncomfortable at experiencing something familiar and foreign at the same time).  Either way each identified the initial reaction as something terrible or frightening not exalted or pacifying.  Post-Modern artists (such as Chris Burden) exploit this through performance pieces that put the artist in danger and cause unease in the viewer.   This is a true loss of beauty.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of Narrative

 
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.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of the Real

 

What I have been tracing so far in previous posts are two things: the various critical issues confronting art during the 20^th century and the emergence of Post-Modernism. What I want to look at here is the broad landscape of Post-Modernism.

There are many diverse thinkers in Post-Modernism, three in particular (Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard) steadily influenced artists from the 1970s to today.  Derrida analyzed language and turned it back on itself to reveal hidden assumptions and motivations (deconstruction), Lyotard focused on the loss of authority brought on by vast amounts of information available in the marketplace, and Baudrillard asserted what we experience is a simulation brought on by the real undercut by the interchangeability of signs. What each thinker shares is that they all challenged pre-Modern notions of what is real (an objective state of things knowable through investigatory acts such as science). These abstruse ideas filtered into the artworld as investigations of media, advertising, words and images. 

Post-Modern art tends to move away from painting and sculpture and towards photography, video art, text-based art and performance art.  Photography has taken up where Realism left off; namely, by doing social documentation. Video art explores the arena of image and simulation. Text-based art emphasizes words and ideas separated from actions and images. Performance art tries to reclaim the value of human action with antics that often are undermined by their own confusing and meaningless gestures. When painting is practiced narrative with a fixed meaning is often set aside for open-ended collage.

These thinkers and artists see the seemingly constant bombardment of disembodied voices and panoply of images cause us to live a life among manufactured and mediated experiences.  When all we experience are phony pre-made superficial images then what is real?

Photorealism and the Aesthetic of the Lens

Photorealism evolved out of Pop artists’ reliance on photographs but took photo-based painting to a new level.  The Photorealists abandoned irony and overt social commentary preferring a meticulous rendition faithful to the photographic reference.  Complicated street scenes of Manhattan with numerous storefront reflections of skyscrapers, pedestrians and city buses were a common theme.  Also, they reintroduced the figure and portrait as a serious subject matter though they preferred the quotidian character over the mythic or ideal. 

By taking fleeting, complicated or incidental subjects they by necessity became wedded to the photograph.  In doing so, they followed in the footsteps of any artist in the past that used an optical aid or device (such as a mirror, black glass, camera lucida or camera obscura). More specifically, there were artists of the past who used photographs as an aid in making paintings: Gerome and the Orientalists of the late 19^th century France, Modernists from Picasso to Max Ernst to Dali and commercial illustrators of the 20^th century.  Though there was artistic precedence, Photorealists did something new. 

By staying faithful to the photograph, they painted not what the eye saw but rather what the camera saw.  Previous artists used the photograph as a tool to assist with the details of a pose or an aspect of architecture.  It was a way to lend specificity to an artwork that was otherwise based on painting from observation (or at least painting from principles of observation). The Photorealist took the photograph as that which should be painted. In doing so they replaced the search for the truths of Nature with something else, a mechanically produced flat copy of reality.

The Photorealists preferred the aesthetics of the lens to that of sight. What one sees is a complicated coalescing of electromagnetic signals as visual input which has been transferred as chemical information to a brain where it is recognized in consciousness. The camera is dead, fixed and inert where as sight is alive, changing and active.

By preferring the lens over the eye, the Photorealists separated themselves from the unfolding history of representational art.  They removed themselves from the empirical concerns and discussions of previous artists.  No longer did they ask “what are the principles of Nature, what does the eye see and how does one depict it?”.  By choosing an image as the final arbiter over any visual conundrums, they, in a manner unimaginable to previous Realists, successfully excised Nature from painting.

John Currin

In John Currin's latest show at Gagosian Gallery, he has all but abandoned the exploration of the grotesque and the lascivious.  It is a small show with large paintings that look more like Norman Rockwell and feel less like Otto Dix.  With the exception of two large paintings, the work could be done by a contemporary realist painter enthralled with the art of the past.  Indeed Currin has stated his affection for Northern European painting and it is clear, once again,  in the forms of the female figures.

Some of the forms tend towards decorative arcs that are less natural than they are mannerist but it is easy to overlook this as, in this exhibit,  he has shown himself to be a superb painter.  A good example of his talents is in the way he paints drapery;  he works with varying degrees of thickness to allow the paint to advance or recede.   Up close one can make out the warm red ground (imprimatura) and the similarly toned outline that in some cases peeks through the tiny space where one object stops and another starts.  With the figure he tends towards elegant understatement allowing the forms to disappear into lush silvery and creamy tones of paint.  I think he paints legs very well, striking a nice balance between action and rest.

But there is more to a painting than how the paint is applied and in those areas Currin excels, too. The spaces are clearly defined, the illusion is strong.  If the light is inconsistent it is not glaringly so.  The forms tend towards the unnatural but it is only in the most awkward caricature that it is bothersome (fortunately not much on display in this show).

The work holds together as group but unlike other years, most paintings contain a single isolated figure. Currin's strong sense of social commentary or ironic narrative is missing in most and is only clearly seen in three paintings (albeit large with two or three figures).  Currin is a deft postmodernist who sometimes must defend his desire to paint well.  But looking at his work throughout his career, it is clear that Currin is able to pick and choose the best pieces of paintings or periods to from which to borrow.

There are several things from which a traditionally minded painter can learn.   For example, what's nice is that Currin uses these selected elements to construct a world.  Everything exists in a believable setting unlike many Post-Modernists that, say, work with collage.  The collage highlights the artist's selection but by retaining the look of the selected element the work lacks cohesion.  This tendency to construct a world is actually an optimistic endeavor. It shows a way out of Post-Modernism (with its collapse of narrative and refusal of a harmonious whole ) and it is called mythopoesis.

Claudio Bravo

Claudio Bravo's recent exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea shows this masterful painter in top form. The exhibition includes over 50 paintings half of which are large trompe l'oeil paintings of wrapped or wrinkled paper. The remaining are beautifully modeled still lifes of an assortment of objects and three small landscapes.  Unfortunately, his figurative work is missing in this show.

Bravo's career as a gallery painter coincides with the rise of Pop art.   Bravo paints beautifully with a strong emphasis on optical fidelity.  Sometimes the work tends towards a slickness that is hard for me to discern where it originates. The majority of his work avoids difficult themes and tends towards the pleasingly decorative. 

To be fair he has created very large religious or humanist themed paintings in the past that rival those by the best western artist.  Add to this that Bravo is prolific and he strikes me as the type of artist that must always be painting.  It is understandable why he doesn't paint such demanding works daily.  In either case, with his reliance on what his eyes see and his desire to make beautiful paintings, Bravo confronts Post-Modernism head on and denies its hold over him.

The objects in the paintings tend to look expensive and often Bravo places them besides disposable objects such as styro-foam packing blocks.  This lends a touch of whimsy to his work but more than that he has captured, in one particular way, what it looks and feels like to be alive now.  His vision is sharp and clear eyed, there is no irony or ambiguity. He traffics in the beautiful and what is lacking is a sense that he must apologize for it.  With his paintings Bravo participates in the unfolding tradition of western painting and clearly shows that it is a worthwhile endeavor.

Post-Modernism: Crisis Confronting Empiricism

A fundamental tenet of postmodernist theory is that reality is unknowable or, rather, what one experiences is a series of words or ideas (often referred to as signs) that make reference to things in the world. What we know is the sign but not what it points to (i.e. the thing in the world).

This is an old problem in philosophy concerning the limits of knowledge: if what one knows is knowable only through one’s senses then how does one have knowledge of the thing itself (not just a set of properties one perceives)? In fact some philosophers deny that there is a thing itself as we never have any direct experience of it.

 For instance, if I look at my desk I see certain attributes regarding its color and its proportion. If I change position, the color and proportion of the desk change as well due to perspective shifts. The dilemma is what does the desk look like. How can I know what the real desk looks like if all I experience is thousands upon thousands of different views?

This issue was brought to the forefront just as Empiricism was gaining a foothold. Indeed one can see a visual depiction in Cubist painting. Post-modernism, however, took the dilemma to heart and used it as a basis for generating art.