What was Critical Postmodernism?

Bret Easton Ellis ‘Victor’ - The Rules of Attraction (1987)

The art that put theory to the fore […] was fostered in the academy

It was not cheery stuff…

JULIAN STALLABRAS High Art Lite, 1999, p86.

“…the professional critique of representation pursued by the likes of Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly and Hans Haacke, began to appear to this generation as censorious. Such moral strenuousness and the intellectualisation of pleasure looked bathetic, gruesome even, the work of bodies at war with themselves [...]”

JOHN ROBERTS, “Mad For It!”, Everything, Issue 18, Spring 1996.

October, a magazine founded in 1976 aimed to re-establish a radical avant-garde project on postmodern grounds. The key critics and art historians associated with the journal have included: Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens and Hal Foster.

Douglas Crimp Hal FosterRosalind Krauss

Craig Owens

Barbara Kruger

Ryan Gander Loose Associations (2004)

CHARLES JENCKS The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977)

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, being demolished during the summer of 1976.

Part I Modernist Myths

GridsThe Originality of the Avant-GardeSincerely Yours

Part II Towards Postmodernism

Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Krauss’ Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979)

Postmodernism extends the standard taxonomy of artas sculpture and painting.

Postmodernism is a product of transdisciplinaryrelationships between:

Architecture and not-architectureLandscape and not-landscape

Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty Salt Lake, April 1970

DOUGLAS CRIMP On the Museum's Ruins

Key Artists:

Robert Rauschenberg Cindy Sherman Marcel Broodthaers Richard Serra Sherrie Levine Robert Mapplethorpe

Essay Titles:

Photographs at the End of Modernism. On the Museum's Ruins. The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject. The End of Painting. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism. Appropriating Appropriation. Redefining Site Specificity. This is Not a Museum of Art. The Art of Exhibition. The Postmodern Museum.

Photographs by Louise Lawler

Louise LawlerAllan McCollum, Brice Marden, New Jersey, 1983

Louise LawlerLiving Room Corner,

Arranged byMr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine,

New York City, 1984

Sherrie Levine

After Walker Evans

(1981)

Buchloh’s Canon Marcel Broodthaers Hans Haacke Daniel Buren

PART 1: TOWARD A THEORY OF POSTMODERNISM

The Allegorical Impulse Parts 1 and 2

Representation, Appropriation, and Power

Allan McCollum: Repetition and Difference

From Work to Frame, or Is There Life After “The Death ofthe Author”

PART 2: SEXUALITY/POWER

Honor, Power, and the Love of Women

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism

PART 4: PEDAGOGY

Postmodern Art 1971-1986

Seminar in Theory and Criticism

Allan McCollum,Plaster Surrogates,1982-83.Installation at theMarian Goodman Gallery,New York City, 1983.

Richard PrinceUntitled (Cowboy)

PART 1: SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS

Against Pluralism

The Expressive Fallacy

Contemporary Art and Spectacle

Subversive Signs

PART 2: (POST)MODERNPOLEMICS

Readings in Cultural Resistance

Cover: Krysztof Wodiczko Projection on the AT&TBuilding, Tribeca, New York City, 2nd November1984, 9:30pm-midnight.

Bill Woodrow

“With every spasm Byrne jettisons an illusion of contact, communion, expressiveness. […] Byrne insists that his visible persona isn’t natural. It’s unnatural.”

Carter Ratcliff, David Byrne and the Modern Self: How Do I work This? Artforum 1985.

Unlike many critics, Byrne inhabits the space of postmodernism, and offers audiences ways into that space which, whilst not being confortable, are nonetheless viable and immediately pleasurable.”

Dick Hebdige, “Learning to live on the Road to Nowhere” in Hiding in the Light