Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
Jean Francois Lyotard, Into to The Postmodern Condition
Douglas Crimp, "Appropriating Appropriation"
It seems to me that the only intelligent discourse that we are capable of performing as human beings is that of resemblance. Everything else is mimicry, representation, mirror, resemblance. Through our own obsession we have broken everything in this world to representation of representations. As ancient beings we struggled to etch the world around us on the walls of the caves we sought shelter in; our faith in gods who held the stars up in the sky, kept the ground from breaking apart...we were made in their likeness and image. Our need to represent evolved into drawings on the pottery we used for practical means in every day life, to statues which adorned our places of ritual and worship, to the finely crafted paintings of the Renaissance, and many other instances within our timeline. Photography changed everything because of its ability to represent perfectly what was in front of the lens, but even that did not fully satisfy. We sought to represent reality to itself and to appropriate our own existence. Succeeding we destroyed reality only to recreate it as a "hyper-reality" where image became more sacred than touch. What does it even mean anymore to see something; something directly in front of you, something that you could reach out and touch? Is the image of a rainbow or the physical rainbow in the sky more valid; more important? Do questions like these even matter in this hyper-reality...
In Jean-Francois Lyotard's Introduction to The Postmodern Condition he opens with "[s]cience has always been in conflict with narratives." And I wonder what exactly he means by that, is it that science opposes myth and story. What narrative does not eventually turn into fable; what was once thought science begin to morph into a narrative. Can we continue to take the world around us and photograph it, paint it, form it into words and put it into little boxes and claim that we have found the truth, or is it just a couple of hundred of years that separates science from the fable and vise versa? I am not claiming that science is not truth or valid, because to me personally I consider it very truthful. But, if the truths of the ages (from 10,000 B.C. to 1776 A.D.) have succumbed to fable what would kept science of the 20th century from doing so as well? It is in this desire of representation that we begin to deconstruct our reality again and again and in ways never thought imagined. "I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse [...] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative; such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth" and "I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives [...] to the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it." So it is to my understanding through Lyotard that postmodernism is a representation of modernism to itself; postmodernism holds the mirror up in from of modernism to reveal its faults, flaws, and message.
When we can no longer be contented with representing just objects that we observe in reality but with the invention of photography we have been seduced by the representations of ideas, faith, art, culture, etc to themselves. The reasoning between why we believed that artistic practices and everyday life are separate from one another are beginning to crumble because of this obsessive nature to always need to represent some thing in reality to some thing else (when we could no longer have the physical we turned to the metaphysical, the philosophical, the political, etc). What I first thought to be a simplistic, almost pitiful, reaction to the world around us has evolved over time (and through my understanding in writing this blog) into a highly intelligent approach to figuring this structure, this cage, that we have created for ourselves. Art is the ultimate form of resemblance and it is only through it that we can begin to tell of the texture and color of the bars which surround us. But, in a way we have created our own monster; art is a response to objects in life, then to ritual and religion, then dictated by politics, to a weapon used against the ideological apparatuses that have erected all around us, and finally to reality itself whereas it is true if we merely turned things upon themselves...objects, ritual and religion, politics, the cultural apparatus, and reality are merely responding to art itself.
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