The Aftermath of Postmoderism

Raymond Williams, "When was Modernism,"
Toni Ross, Art in the 'Post-Medium' Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the art of Jeff Wall

As the titled suggests in "When was Modernism" Raymond Williams central dialogue is focused on pinpointing the moment, decade, movement, person, etc. that birthed this idea of Modernism in the ideology of society. First, Williams breaks this idea of modernism into the evolution of several key movements within art and literature; the Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Cubism. Finding threads and flaws in each movement respectfully Raymond comes to the conclusion that Modernism is dependent on the revolutionaries involved within their respective movements; "the earlier novelists, it is widely acknowledged, make the latter work possible; without Dickens, no Joyce."
Further on he goes on to attribute an ideological, cultural and social, shift at the time (brought upon by Industrialism) as a key factor for ushering Modernism into the limelight. It wasn't just thoughts of Freud and his defining of Psychoanalysis, but it the key to Modernism lies within shifting attitudes toward aesthetics and an integration of visual advertisement within the Western culture. These attitude shifts and birth of the mass, visual advertisement was a direct result of the technology of this time. Williams cites the invention of photography, cinema, Radio, television, reproduction, and recording as a catalyst for these ideological changes and the importance of the image within the dominating culture of the time and how important a critique of these images were.


Art in the "Post-Medium" Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the Art of Jeff Wall by Toni Ross was a little harder for me to unpack. She is most clearly and obviously concerned with aesthetics. Like Williams, she understood the importance of the attitude-change on aesthetics within this new Industrial/Post-Industrial world and how this change was directly linked with Modernism. Ross digs down deep in an effort that seems to defend aesthetic beauty from its criticizers, to elevate the beautiful into a state of importance and relevance. She does this, very eloquently, through her description of the Sublime and the creation of "The Thing." She uses the work of Jeff Wall to illustrate her idea that while the moment of "beauty for beauties sake" has passed, the beautiful still holds sway over the conceptional and can be just as valid as abstraction. Beauty and aesthetic are still ingrained and very much a part of the present cultural ideology and to ignore its power over everyday life and its role within our history would to be doing ourselves a great discredit. I think she verbalizes this argument most clearly in her ending quote, "...the medium comprises both an aggregation of historical codes and expectations, and the aesthetic, sensory registration of their failure. By sustaining the minimal illusion of an internal excess of symbolization, the work begs a reaction foreshadowed in Kant's account of aesthetic judgement: to speak of the singular within present constructions of social reality."

The Blasé Attitude vs. Get A Studio! The theory of work

The flaneur, the slacker, and the lazy...let's take a walk...OR, Why Virginia Woolf was right about getting a room of your own.

Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,"
Daniel Buren, "What is a studio?,"
Max Weber, "Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism"
Jean Baudrillard, "Ethic Labour, Aesthetic Play,"
Jan Vanwoert, "Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform"



"A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"
The focus that Robert Smithson hopes to unravel in his photographic and written journey into the heart of his hometown Passaic, New Jersey is one of the effects that time and history play within our perception of aesthetic sensibility.
"Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs."
Smithson speaks of his present day Passaic as a "ravaged present that almost appears to be part of the past." That the eternal city of Rome lives on in the burnt out shells of suburbia wasteland. Stripped of its grandeur, its aesthetic, its sacred monuments and mirrored back on itself the historical is twisted and demented into the polluted steams, worn parking lots, and unused sandboxes. The quote from the text that baffles and delights me most is where Smithson talks about this idea of the future...
"I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past..."
Does he mean that, in the end, the monuments of our past glorious cities are not what shape our future but in the junk beside the road? "In the false mirror of our rejected dreams." In the past over, the ugly and grotesque that within time is transformed into a metaphor of what lies behind us and what exists before us?

"What is Studio?"
The idea that the Studio and Museum/Gallery are in conflict with one another while also acting as the crutch that either supports itself upon is an interesting one and what I believe to be the core argument for Daniel Buren in "What is Studio." I guess deep down this realization is one that I can relate to and that I understand, but before this reading had never given great thought to. The studio is vital to artistic practice because it is a private place where personal struggle, history, thought, etc can manifest unscathed (or seemingly so) by the outside institution of the Museum, the prejudiced eye of the public. It is not until the artist voluntarily welcomes the public until its sacred space does it become a place of consumption and distribution. This talk of the studio space and its function within the grand sphere of artistic success got me thinking about the photographers studio; what is it? Where is it? Is a photographers studio always a room? The darkroom? The digital lab? Is it where I store my prints? To me a studio is somewhere where creativity is unhinged and where reality blurs into the "mirror of our rejected dreams" that Smithson speaks of. After much thought I decided that my own personal photographic studio exists within a particular person, my niece Juliana, who I have been photographing for 6 years now. It is interesting to consider that when exhibiting my work that I am in fact opening her up into the world public opinion and consumer culture. This is something that I have come to realize that I really need to understand and grapple with in order to be aware of the weight of this realization.

I digress...

"Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform"
Cutting to Jan Vanwoert's essay on performance and exhaustion, I am struck dumb by the resonance that Jan Vanwoert's words have upon me in my present state. I almost feel that this text was written specifically for me, specifically for now. Within the realm of academia the pressure to perform is unabashed, demanded of you openly between students and teachers alike. The expectations of academia are structured set for a specific amount of production and information to be generated within the course of a week, a class, a year. I feel utterly exhausted and berated with this structure of performance that I have constructed for myself in response to what I feel those who are there to teach me are expectant of me and my work. I know that over the course of three weeks I better have at least 9 rolls of 12 frames exposed and 12+ prints on the wall when my critique week rolls around. I better know right then and there what it is I took away from last critique and how I applied that to the images I'm showing for this critique. What are you interested in? Who inspires you? Why should we care? Make us care. What is in this images? Make a choice. Sometimes I feel as though I perform so much I've lost complete sight of what it is I was trying to say in the first place or even myself. I've gotten so used to and so good at performing I'm not quite sure if I really know myself beyond the performer any longer. I know it is said to "not make photographs for critique," but how else would they have me do it and would that satisfy?

I am finished writing. I am exhausted and too tired to perform. I can't because I can, I can because I care.

Race, Postcolonialism, Globalism, and the idea of the other...

Gayatri Spivak, "Who Claims Alterity,"
Coco Fusco, "Racial Tim, Racial Mark, Racial Metaphors," in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self



Both the readings this week by Spivak and Fusco were concerned with archetypes that have been created by the Cultural Apparatus' we have existed in since the dawn of civilization and how through social injustice, colonialism, political ambition, and a desire to control the masses these methods for controlling have become magnified. For Spivak she is most concerned with the ideology of class while Fusco focused on race. Both these constructed instance of society seem to be made for the purpose of defining the "other." For the class, race, religious affiliation, etc in power this "otherness" could be used to create differences between their own bourgeois culture and those of the lower mass. Although these ideologies of race, class, gender, etc were used as a means for control I believe they now hold their own power within our present day culture; a power that has run rampant and can no longer be wrangled with even those residing in a ruling class position. Presently we have created so many other modes of control for defining the "other" and for lulling the masses that these archaic archetypes have been exposed for what they really are, but because we have begun to identify ourselves within them instead of only relating them to alterity they will not suffer to be broken down and discarded. This is where our problem lies; how do we break free from what is so ingrained within our perceived essence without tearing us apart in the process? These modes of alterity and stereotype have festered like a tumor upon the body of humanity and where once a benign growth hindered now a cancerous mass grows. This is precisely why I believe Spivak speaks about the alteration of history and how we must undo this hallucination.

Subjectivity: Psychoanalysis, Identity Formation, Feminist Critique

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror-Phase"
Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"
Jonathan Weinberg, "Things are Queer"
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Margaret Olin, "Gaze"

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror-Phase"
Jacques Lacan's interest lies in the relation of the "realized self" within the reality that contains it. He seeks to explain stages in the development of conscious by dividing them into two, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. "The [Symbolic] concerns the subject's entry into, and formation by the world of language. The [Imaginary] involves a pre-linguistic stage of consciousness focused around the visual recognition of images." It is through the mirror-phase, or the realization of the ego through the reflection of the individual, that signifies an identification and transformation into a recognized I. Before this Mirror-Phase we can only see ourselves as fragmentations of the body and without consciousness, but once we see ourselves as an image a representation of our body, only then can we begin to fully come to consciousness and become an individual. Thus our entire concept of reality, individual, and consciousness is centered around imagery and representation; we only know ourselves through our reflection.

Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"
"One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman."- Simone de Beauvoir
I feel that this one statement quoted by Butler into her text clearly symbolizes the main point in dealing with her ideas of Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Butler explains that gender is not something that is innate with us, but is a construction formed within the cultural apparatus. She explains that there is a vast difference between sex and gender; that sex is specifically the genitalia, while gender is the expected performance of the idea of sex. She speaks in terms of quotations of "the body is an 'historical idea' rather than 'a natural species'" and that "...any gender, is an historical situation rather than a natural fact." So even though sex is something of the body and is physical we conform even our bodies into an historical idea/situation by the fact that we can only define our sex within the terms of the constructed gender.

Is the construction and performance of gender a form of survivalism? Did we develop these specific constructions of what it means to be "man" or "woman" through the means of continuing the lifespan of our species? And if so is this survivalist tactic outdated?

Jonathan Weinberg, "Things are Queer"
In "Things are Queer," the main concern for Jonathan Weinberg is the role that "queerness" manifests within the realm of reality and its historical relevance to the ideas of sexuality and gender. He uses the work of photographer Duane Michals, specifically his series Things Are Queer, to begin to formulate an opinion that "The queer [...] is not a matter of specific sexual identities but of the world itself. The world is queer, because it is known only through representations that are fragmentary and in themselves queer. Their meanings are always relative, a matter of relationships and constructions. [...] things themselves are not queer, but rather what is queer is the certainty by which we label things normal and abnormal, decent and obscene, gay and straight." The idea of homosexuality does not fit within the construct of gender or the cultural definition of sex, therefore it was deemed as something abnormal, amoral, obscene, wrong, queer.

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Laura Mulvey utilizes film to begin to dissect the role that men and women play within out society. In its most simplistic terms Mulvey equates the male to the spectator and the female to the spectacle; men are voyeurs who continuously look upon the female for her abnormal and terror-inducing castration and therefore lack of a penis. The phallus has gained its power within society and across culture only in its degradation of the feminine; without the absence of it within one form of humanity its presence cannot hope to hold such importance. "The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic." By merely existing within this patriarchal society she a symbol of the power of the penis and the weakness its absence creates; no words have to be spoken to her offspring her mere being is a lesson more powerful than words. She goes on to explain male unconscious as "two avenues of escape from [...] castration anxiety: preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object[...]; or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous..." Mulvey then directly relates this to film, as the film gives the male (the spectator) exactly the power to do this. Because the male is more often than not cast as an active protagonist that the audience, or spectators, can directly relate him to while the female is frozen within her role as mere icon, or something to be viewed (the spectacle). These two avenues of consciousness are then transferred onto her easily through the methods of voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia.

How are we then to change this? If the phallus holds so much power and that power is based solely on the woman as the manifestation of absence of the penis (or power) then isn't the power really within the woman? For without her the power of the male (or phallus) would cease to exist. But, how do we break this power without destroying ourselves?

Film Still of Mia Sara (as Lily) in the movie Legend where she brings about "darkness" by disobeying Jack's (Tom Cruise) command not to touch the unicorn. Thus her disobedience brings about the apocolypse which is then only righted by Jack as the "knighted savior" who rescues both Lily (who is captured because of her beauty) and the world.

Drawing of the confrontation between Eowyn and the Witch King in Lord of the Rings where before she delivers the final blow the Witch King says, "No man shall kill me" and Eowyn states, "I am no man, I am a woman." Thus the man-made prophecy is fulfilled that only by not being a man may she posses the power to do anything of worth. Her action of striking down the Witch King is only defined by her lack of a penis.