Frederic JamesonPostmodernism, or the Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism1982

CAPITALISM/kápit’lizm/ noun.

1. A) An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods depend on invested private capital and profit making. B) the possession of capital or wealth.

2. Polit. The dominance of private owners of capital and production for profit.

Late Capitalism:

Competitive Capitalism vs.

Corporate Capitalism

POSTINDUSTRIAL, adj., relating to or characteristic of a society that no longer relies on heavy industry [Oxford Dictionary of American English]

Postindustrial society as a

"society of information… Power now resides with those who control the networks for the processing, retrieval, and transmission of information." Craig Owens, quoted in Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), p.377.

:

"…television, film, advertising and photography are the dominant modes of discourse in American culture. [Deconstruction art] wants to enter the media directly, utilizing media’s existing genres (documentary, drama, popular music, comedy, discussion, etc.) without trying to create novel, innovative forms for their own sake. In place of esthetic innovation, it will employ textual deconstruction, narrative and distancing devices as strategies for dealing with ideologically loaded content."

Dan Graham in Nancy Foote, ed., "Situation Esthetics: Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience" (1980), quoted in Sandler, p.380.

Just What is it that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?

1956 “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London)

Characteristics of Pop Art

Qualities of truly "modern art," according to Richard Hamilton (1957):

1. Popularity 2. Transience 3. Expendability 4. Wit 5. Sexiness 6. Gimmickry 7. Glamour

It must be low-cost, mass produced, young and Big Business.

[quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art Since 1945(London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., third edition, 1995), pp.129-130.]

“I imitate 1. Objects and 2. Created Objects, for example signs, objects made without the intention of making ‘art’ and which naively contain a functional contemporary magic. I try to carry these even further through my own naivete, which is not artificial. Further, i.e., charge them more intensely, elaborate their reference. I do not try to make ‘art’ of them. This must be understood. I imitate these objects because I want people to get accustomed to recognizing the power of objects, the didactic aim.”

-- Claes Oldenburg

quoted in Lucie-Smith, pp.145-146

“...I came to feel that with the Brillo Box, the true character of the philosophical question of the nature of art had been attained. Closely connected with this, I began to believe, appropriating a famous thesis of Hegel’s, that with the disclosure or discovery of its true philosophical nature, art attains the end of its history--that the exhibition in the Stable Gallery marked what I somewhat impishly called the End of Art.”

--Arthur C. Danto

"Warhol’s art uses the visual strength and vitality which are the time-tested skills of the world of advertising that cares more for the container than the thing contained; Warhol accepts rather than questions our popular habits and heroes. By accepting their inevitability, they are easier to deal with than if they are opposed."Samuel Adams Green, Andy Warhol, catalog for the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Oct.8-Nov.21, 1965, quotedin Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art Since 1945, p.152.

“Why, I would ask myself, would artists push their bodies to such extreme physical and psychological limits? Intuitively, I knew that women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, and the Vietnam War were all part of the reason. But I also sensed that the masochistic bond between performers and audiences was a key to the situation.”

Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p.xii.

Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, The Dematerialization of Art (1968)

“Dematerialized art is post-aesthetic only in its increasingly non-visual emphases. The aesthetic of principle is still an aesthetic, as implied by frequent statements by mathematicians and scientists about the beauty of an equation, formula or solution: ‘Why should an aesthetic criterion be so successful so often? Is it just that is satisfies physicists? I think there is only one answer--nature is inherently beautiful’ (physicist Murray Gell-Mann)... Order itself, and its implied simplicity and unite are aesthetic criteria.”

Michel FoucaultThe Subject and Power

1982

"Anti-authority struggles"

• struggles which question the status of the individual: …they assert the right to be different, and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way…

• opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification: struggles agains the privileges of knowledge… [T]hey are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representation imposed on people.

• [T]hese present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we?

“The main objective of these struggles is not so much an attack on a specific institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather on a technique, a form of power…

This form of power applies itself to everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects.”

“There are two meanings of the word "subject": subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.”

“My work is all my personal history... I can’t separate my art from my life.”

Felix González-Torres

“I don’t want the public to feel... I want the public to be informed, moved to action. ‘Feeling’ is too easy.”

“In a way I’m trying to negotiate my position within this culture by making this artwork... Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I exist: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art.”

Modernism Postmodernism

Celebrates human craftsmanship

Plays to an elite audience

Draws upon classical culture

Idealizes nature

Cerebral and reflective

Seeks to create wisdom, beauty , and refinement

Time as a continuum of past, present, and future

Celebrates technology

Idealizes craftsmanship while replacing it with computer-driven effects

Plays to a mass audience

Draws primarily upon popular culture

Visual and sensate

Seeks to generate sensual stimulation, not intellectual admiration

Time as an ongoing present