PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN IMPORTANT PRACTICE OF POSTMODERNISM
B127348
History of Art 2
March 26, 2018
After entering into the world of art-photography, postmodernism quickly acquired orthodoxy. No area in which postmodernism has been advanced so consistantly and has triumphed so absolutely as in the realm of contemporary photography (2). As the world itself suggests, postmodernism is a break with the former modern movement. Photographic activity in particular has challenged modernist’s notion of what is art.
In 1977, Douglas Crimp organized the first postmodern photography exhibition “Pictures” at Manhattan, New York. He located these work at the exhibition within the avant-garde tradition of radical innovations. Although postmodernism seems to be a continuation of avant-garde tradition in a sense that it challenges previous styles and thus advances the history of art (3), postmodernist practices are in no way resembles those of avant-garde.
The modernism of avant-garde challenged history and reason by being untimely and incomprehensible. Conventional art concerned with presenting the world as it is, while for avant-garde, it is about representing before the actual presence. It is hard to recognize and process the language of avant-garde. With the academic institutionalization and canonization in the late 1950s, modernism was no longer perceived as ugly. Avant-garde’s attacking of traditional sensibility and search of innovation itself gradually became a tradition. (p16) For the younger generation of the 1960s, modernism became a set of dead classics. (65) Unlike modernism, which was denied by older Victorian and Post Victorian bourgeoisie, postmodernism was at one with the official culture of Western society. Although postmodernism has its own offensive language, it is institutionalized thus can no longer offence anyone.
A comparison between Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes reveals the intention of postmodernist movement. The former can be taken as a clue for a vaster reality. The viewer is able to reconstruct the original situation in which the work emerges and grasp the symbolic content of the work. History and the social endow a layer of meaningfulness to the meaninglessness of the materiality of the shoes. (67) However, nothing is codified in the Diamond Dust shoes. It is just a random collection of dead objects. The viewer does not have a clue of the larger lived context. Warhol’s work conforms with this idea that there is no reality outside of representation. Just as French philosopher Roland Barthes claims that we can never have an experienced unmediated by language, Crimp claims that our visual experience is mediated by representational and cultural codes. There is nothing outside of the text, and there is nothing out of representation. (6)
Postmodernists also claim that there is no subjectivity. Subjectivity and free will are considered to be cultural myth which can be deconstructed.*7 Therefore, there is no subjective expression in postmodern art. The concept of expression is based on a presupposed separation of the inside self and the outside world. In The Scream, Munch externalizes the word-less feeling of alienation through an outward dramatization of the inward feeling. But postmodernists do not believe in this hermeneutic model, they consider the theory of the inside and outside to be ideological.*70 In the postmodern world, there is no longer bourgeois ego and the psychopathologies of that ego. The end of ego leads to the end of style, and end of unique personal brushstroke. *72 Such circumstance bred the practice of pastiche. Unlike parody which is an imitation of the style of an artist with intentional exaggeration for an ironic effect, pastiche does not contain a satiric impulse. Parody was popular in bourgeois society which was dominated by ideas of the ruling class. Yet in the late capitalist society of stylistic heterogeneity without a criterion, parody lost its worth.*73
Another concept which has been challenged by postmodernism is the concept of aura. It is closely related to artistic expression, which refers to the detectable presence of the artist and his or her originality. It is considered to be something that cannot be reproduced. So, In the age of mechanical reproduction when art can be easily reproduced and assessed, artistic authenticity seems to diminish with the proliferation of copies. For painting and sculpture, it is not too hard to distinguish between the original work and a mechanical copy because their materiality is distinct. But it is a very different situation for photography. The original work and a mechanical copy of that can be easily undistinguishable. In a special issue of the Art Journal of 1982, art historian Rosalind Krauss published a journal ‘Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’, an article that focused on nineteenth and twentieth-century photography. In the Journal, Krauss proposes the adoption of Michel Foucault’s methodology to examine photographs. In her interpretation of Foucault, either a ‘scientific discourse’ or an ‘aesthetic discourse’ can apply to a photograph. To illustrate her point, she compared the Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, 1868 by Timothy H. O’Sullivan and a lithography after which published in 1878. At the end of the journal, she claims that both belong to the realm of empirical science and that it is a mistake to assign the photograph to the sphere of art. (6) She adopts the traditional notion of author as an expressive subject. Because Krauss interprets O’Sullivan’s photographs as objective stereography, she thinks it is unnecessary to recognize the author. It is not the case that mechanically-made work cannot have aura and only painting can. Some photographs have aura too. But for art historians, the aura of photograph is not the unique hand of the artist, it is the natural presence of reality. *174 Since museums are built upon the concept of aura and uniqueness of artwork, the intensified depletion of aura in the age of mass production can be a fatal blow to the museum. To defend itself, museum in the 1970s started to embrace expressionist painting and photography-as-art. But the ‘intrusion of reality’ does not guarantee an aura for a photograph, a photograph has to be subjective to claim its place in the museum. Postmodern photographic activity does not try to recuperate the aura but pose a question on the legitimacy of the aura. For postmodern photographers, there is no real originality. Photograph is always a representation of something in the world. *177 And because there is on originality, it should not be the case that some works have aura and some do not.
Although postmodern artists have lost faith in their creativity, they become powerful pasticheur, manipulating existing images and corrupting their established meanings.*7In Richard Prince’s show, ‘Cowboys’, he appropriated a set of advertisement pictures of Marlborough cigarette. He did nothing to change these images except change their sizes. The use of pastiche as an instrument of radical practice can also be seen in Sherri Levine’s rephotographs of works by modernist photographer Edward Weston. Her representation of Weston’s works meant to illustrate that they are not original at all; they are only copies of the world as Levine’s rephotographs are copies of his.
At the beginning of the First World War, modernist idiom began to break down (5); Artists who initiated the modern art movement were calling for a return to the traditional values of high art. Picasso converted to the classical simplicity and equilibrium, and the futurists reject nonrepresentational modes and the practices of collage to resurrect realism.*8 The world of painting adopted a new attitude of authoritarian classicism and aspiration of new aesthetic orthodoxy. *6 Photography took the baton of dismantling the dominant ideology from the avant-garde. As a larger and more general political act of deconstruction, postmodern photography enables us to see and understand the working of ideologies which oppresses us.
Postmodernist photography intentionally chooses the most powerful images in our culture, which are the images of advertising and the mass media, and recontextualizes these image to let them to reveal their ideology. *11 Postmodernist photography does not adopt the same strategy used by avant-garde. It deconstructs ideology by preventing the viewer from matching each photograph with the correct theory. (8)
In the contemporary society, photographs also have substitute paintings as a mode of visual representation. Because in terms of the precise reproduction of the appearances of things, photograph functions way more efficiently than painting. *3 The idea of transparent representation assured photograph of controversy. Iconographical codes, which are visual codes of recognizability, are generally more apparent in paintings and sculptures. For example, the representation of female nudes and landscapes.*19 Their historical specificity is easier to see as well. Thus, it is not hard for one to see that the reality reflect by a painting is consciously constructed. However, the materiality of photograph makes it prone to be considered as ‘authentic’ and transparent reflection of reality. Poststructuralists like Barthes and Derrida say that anything that a person think of has already been encoded by language and culture. Not even a photographer can transparently record the reality and a viewer can never extract reality from looking at a photograph because all the information is coded. Cindy Sherman uses the presumed honesty of photography against itself. She took self-portraits of herself appearing in disguises which refer to the stereotypes of women.*178 Again, imageries in her work is no created by her, but existing pictures chose by her. It shows the self does not have its supposed autonomy; it is nothing more than a discontinuous series of copies. She restates the point that unmediated representation is impossible. But our enjoyable historical impulses (9) make it hard for us to realize that point. While looking at a photograph, we tend to suspend our awareness of the photograph’s status as a photograph to focus on the subject of the photograph. When we do so, photography do provide us with an experience of something ‘real’. Although it is not an unmediated experience, we tend to have the illusion. The fact that we easily implicate ourselves in the photograph or allow it to evoke past experiences makes it hard for us to distance ourselves and to analysis in the strategy of deconstruction.
The photograph, product of the nature and craft, is the ideal medium to convey the postmodern idea that representation is the primary way for us to understand the world and mediate our experiences. Postmodernist photography provides a concrete sensory experience for its viewer while alluring the viewer to suspects the reality of representation.
Figures of authority
The politics of postmodern photography
Postmodernism, the cultural logic of Late Capitalism(p64-
Bibliography
Buchloh, B. (1981). Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting. October, 16, p.39.