"Scruton"izing Post Modernism

The British born philosopher Roger Scruton is a formidable opponent to Post-Modernism.  Having come to a conservative viewpoint while witnessing the student riots of '68 in Paris (which among other things saw the destruction of countless works of irreplaceable paintings and sculpture from the collection at the Ecole de Beaux Arts), Scruton has spent a career writing and critiquing the left's approach to cultural criticism. 

I particularly find this description  of post-modernism  to be illuminating:  "The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true." (from Arguments for Conservatism, pp. 106, 115, 117.)

An interesting recent article about Scruton's new book "Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet" appeared in the Guardian.  Here's the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/28/green-philosophy-roger-scruton-review?

End of Year Hiatus

Posting will resume again in January, 2011.

Norman Rockwell, "Telling Stories" Exhibition

Recently I had a chance to visit the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. to see the Norman Rockwell exhibition “Telling Stories, Works from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.”   Over 50 works were on display from each decade of Rockwell's professional career and it was very kind of Lucas and Spielberg to let their collections travel.

The focus of the exhibit was how Rockwell told stories, specifically through the characters depicted in the paintings.  Both Lucas and Spielberg acknowledge Rockwell’s gifts in this arena and as filmmakers he constantly inspires them. The curators let the work stand on its own and as a viewer I was invited to take a look and enjoy Rockwell’s stories.  Here are some thoughts on what made Rockwell a successful storyteller.

1. Careful Planning: Rockwell was devoted to his craft and solved all the pictorial problems before making the painting.  Many times he made fully developed charcoal drawings completed at actual size (approx. 40"x50”) for the Post cover paintings.  Rockwell resolved all the drawing issues in the charcoal study.

2. Composition: He was great at composing pictures.  There is always a center of interest and several ancillary areas that assist in developing the theme as well as lead the eye around the painting.

3. Character: What drove Rockwell was his desire to let the characters tell the story.  Rockwell got out of the way and let the characters take over.  Additionally, he imbued all the shapes and forms of his figures with personality.  As a result, the people feel unique and lifelike.

4. Conditions: Rockwell was adept at selecting and depicting the needed objects, locale and circumstances (the proper conditions) to effectively tell the story.  He was sensitive to the fact that the simple items and small experiences make up each day and then eventually, once strung together, make up a life.

5. Clarity: The people in his paintings always display clearly what is on their minds.  Additionally, their clothing always registers the effects of the body’s action upon it.

Through Careful Planning, Composition, Character, Conditions and Clarity Rockwell painted people, places and things with purpose.  It’s clear that he was telling a story in paint and he was a success at it.

Replacing Post-Modernism

In the previous post I noted the end of Post-Modernism was due to its preference for critique and ironic commentary over offering a replacement worldview to Modernism, (one concerned with solutions to the fundamental topics of inquiry). In the wake of the collapse of Post-Modernism, there are several possible movements that could replace it.  These different approaches may be categorized as such:  a return to tradition, a return to nature, a return to the past, a return to sentiment and a return to narrative.

A return to tradition concerns the propagation of a set of beliefs and habits that have existed for several generations for the most part unchanged.

A return to nature is typified by a direct personal interaction with nature, a discernment of nature’s principles and an awareness of psycho-physiological responses.

A return to the past is characterized by a tendency to openly explore historical models and solutions.

A return to sentiment is marked by a change in attitude from ironic critique to sincere belief.

A return to narrative is epitomized by the telling of stories and myths.

In future posts I will investigate how each tendency is being manifested in contemporary representational art.

End of Post-Modernism

Modernism was a critique of the Enlightenment that tried to replace Enlightenment projects with new beliefs. Post-Modernism, however, doesn't offer a replacement. It is just critique. As a result a void is left after Modernism has been stripped away by Post-Modern critical theory. To fill this void people have built new critical theories that replace Post-Modernism.

One such critical theory is called  Post-Colonialism.  It holds that the world is divided between victors and victims, particularly in the form of subjugation by racist colonial powers. Post-Colonialists use tools of deconstruction to reveal hidden meanings as well as the hidden vertical power bias inherent in cultural structures.

Post-Colonialism offers a narrative and it is one of exploitation.  This gives people something to do, namely fight against exploitation and not just be ironic.  Post-Colonial action trumps passive Post-Modern ironic critique.  Large narrative trumps interest in minutae & nothingness (an example in the visual arts is Kara Walker). Post-Colonialism for good or ill fills the void left by Post-Modernism. This is the end of Post-Modernism.

Interestingly Post-Colonialism is a return to the past. In future posts, we will see how others have returned to the past in an attempt to get beyond Post-Modernism.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of the Past

Classically the purpose of history was to evaluate facts and to asses causes and effects in order to describe and possibly understand events and the intentions of significant actors.  Each historian had their own procedures and opinions about what constituted facts, causes, effects and so on.  Some believed in  a linear time scale and others insisted that time was cyclical.  Regardless of the differences they proceeded by looking at the past in order to understand past events and their connections to the present (the time in which the historian lived).  Post-Modernism breaks with this belief in a significant way.

Some Post-Modernist thinkers (i.e. Baudrillard) assert that the field of events is flattened so that countless events exist simultaneously.  The idea is that there are innumerable amounts of information and data, so much that one cannot evaluate it or comprehend it. Competing and contradictory ideas exist simultaneously. A person exists with this information or data events but has no proper relationship to them. A person as a subject becomes lost to these events.

This Post-Modern attitude is expressed differently within each artistic discipline but some general characteristics are: a mixing of previous styles, use of irony or ambiguity and a preference for the artificial or synthetic over the organic or natural.

If the past is considered it is only as a reference wherein some superficial aspect is picked up and used by the artist.   The beliefs, traditions and sustaining ideas of the past are unattached from their proper context.    All is simultaneous synthetic data events and meaning is impossible.   A result of this attitude is that the present is cut off from the past. This is the loss of the past.

Post-Modernism and the Loss of High Art

 

In previous posts I have been tracing the loss of the real, of narrative and of beauty as outcomes of Post-Modernism. In this post I wanted to continue this idea and look at the loss of high art.

As is often the case with Post-Modernism we need to briefly turn our attention to Modernism and review Modernism’s relationship to beauty.

With Modernism there was a tendency to critique beauty by looking at its opposite, namely the ugly or the grotesque. In conjunction with this, there was a critique of artistic control through randomness and a critique of reason through practicing automatic art, championing art born from dreams or from the insane.

With Post-Modernism these art practices mentioned above become authenticated as independent activities, free from a critique of beauty. Instead of existing in a vertical structure beneath beauty, they exist as equals in a horizontal relationship to beauty.  No longer is beauty held up as the pinnacle by which artwork is judged.

Pop art began the great winding down of the project of Modernism and helped to usher in Post-Modernism. With Pop art there was widespread embrace of the objects of commercial activity as well as the introduction of irony.  The everyday objects available from the market were introduced in an ironic fashion, in many cases just to test the openness of Modern Art theory, the buying public and supporting institutions.

One project of Post-Modernism was to dismantle the authority of institutions such as academia and museums.   Once this final arbiter of taste was removed, there was no vertical relationship by which all art could be judged.  By accepting and promoting every day objects as art (such as comic strips, previously called low art) there was no high art from which to judge all art objects.

Some Post-Modern art activities include conceptual art, performance art and lowbrow art.  Conceptual art often uses deconstructive techniques to attack the institutions of art and make explicit power relationships in cultures.  Conceptual art also works with abstract relations that many times challenge any working definition of art.  Performance art highlights the significance of every human endeavor or act.  Many times performance artists work in a scatological way with the body and its material products (Mike Kelly).  Lowbrow art most clearly foregrounds the loss of high art by putting forth objects that were consistently deemed low art, such as underground comics (R. Crumb) or punk aesthetics (Raymond Pettibon). 

None of these movements are interested in beauty nor appealing to previous generation’s views of taste with its resulting evaluations of what is high art. With Post-Modernism comes the flattening of the field of art and an expanding of the definition of art to include most activities. This is the loss of high art.