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."