Postmodernism in Photography

I'm a 3rd yr Photo Student at Nottingham Trent and I had to read

Crisis of the Real as one of my Seminar texts lat semester. I found

it really interesting and it is one of the only texts that I found

interesting enough to read more than once. I am now starting my

dissertation and I want to continue along the same line, talking

about the artist/photographer Helen Chadwick, her influence on

today's artist and what influence she will have on tomorrow's art

world. I want to ask the questions 'What is next for art? What comes

after postmodernism?' Any thoughts?

My suggestion for one possibility comes from a thread I recently started which, unfortunately, has just expired from this temporary forum. However I can e-mail a transcript to you if you're interested.

 

Basically it concerns what apparently was a very clever hoax perpetrated by the SciFi Channel. They collaborated with director M. Night Shyamalan to make what was supposed to be a documentary about the making of "The Village" seem to morph into something else: A documentary implying that Shyamalan is in touch with the supernatural and that his movies are all autobiographical, based on supernatural occurrences he's experienced.

 

After airing the program the SciFi folks acknowledged it was part of a "guerilla marketing" strategy to hype the movie.

 

(BTW, I'm still leaving open the possibility that Shyamalan's claim that the documentary was a hoax is itself a further hoax.)

 

Another somewhat related incident occurred earlier this year or late last year when a photojournalist in Iraq was discovered to have digitally altered a photo of an armed soldier hovering over a crowd of seated Iraqis to make it more dramatic and aesthetically pleasing.

 

Considering the proliferation of contrived, if not outright faked, "reality" TV shows I think it's a safe bet that at least one form of the future's art will include deliberate efforts to mislead the viewer. We'll see more faked photos passed off as the real thing. The photographer will defend it as part artistic expression and part social experiment.

Wow...that all sounds really interesting..thanks for that...can you send any extra info to couso_podun@hotmail.com

Nothing but a body without organs. Todays artist should give up on trying to invent progress, regret most everything that has happened since about 1917, and finally spit all the pap and pretense back up again. Certain folks during the 19th and 20th centuries opened a void in modern living; everything that has followed since, everything that has attempted something new, seems to have ended up as something that was both a bore and a feeble imitation. Once again we need a reject what is being marketed by the institutions -- what is burying todays certified 'artists' -- and dig deep once again for the real person who may be lurking beneath it all. Todays art seems a little devoid of any such thing as movement. Just MHO. I apologize if it rubs you the wrong way. _J

Is that what's been happening in the world since 1917? I'm sure glad that I wasn't a part of it.

If I have to pitch out Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Anselm

Keifer, and Robert Morris (his 60's work), just to name a few, to get to that person lying

underneath, you can keep him, thanks.

 

If it's a movement you're looking for, you indeed have come to the wrong century.

Welcome to the "dizziness of freedom," as Soren Kierkegaard put it, a bit before all

progress stopped in 1917.

I'm not saying that there have not been any respectable artists turned out by the twentieth century, but that here, in the 21st century we have reached a point where nothing really seems surprising anymore. Most of the significant characters like the ones mentioned above were a bit astounded to find out that they were considered part of something as odorless, tasteless, and sterile as the post modern movement, an accusation that was usually interpellated upon them by the high brow academics who demanded that they belong to some sort of catagorized mindset...Im referring only to the so called big 'movements', the last of which seem to conveniently pinpointed by dada and the Cabarat Voltaire. Where is there to go? Music has seen everything from 4 minutes and 22 seconds of sheer silence to acts of pure cacophony from Merzbow and a zillion others. Beckett, Jarry, Gyson, and all the others pretty much finished off the novel. Its all old hat now. As far as photography and other visual arts are concerned, it just seems that people should just accept things, take off their degrees, admit that there really exists nothing beyond the void, and resume the toil of our similtude of creation. Art is certainly not dead, but its theoretical aspect has been lost to oblivion. Good riddance. The self is quite likely imagined like everything else; however, if one really needs to feel compelled by a motive, i suppose it remains as one last desperate and futile quest.

What a bleak and inaccurate reading of the last century. Not what I get out of it at all.

I agree.

Cindy Sherman is usually put forward as the exemplary 'post-modern' photographer.

Jeremy - it sure sounds like you are living in a Becket anti-novel. Art is a healthy response to the environment: investigative, interesting, novel, confused, curious, joyous, emotional and at grass roots, it's still functioning very well. But it's important not to believe anything that anybody writes about it. It's nearly always wrong, and designed to pump up the person writing it (including this). Categories in art are really mainly devices for increasing prices. So again, it's important not to take them seriously, but see them for what they are. You use words very inventively though, if a little fast and loose.

Art has played a vital function in this past century and in its real lived life. Keep the

theorists in their rightful place. The reality of an overarching theory or movement that can

bind anything

together was always suspect and, as Paul said, always at least partially wrong. Theory has

never and will never point the way forward. It only looks backward and speculates.

 

Postmoderism is the

last gasp by the hounds loosed by moderism. One more attempt to impose

a theoretical structure that can describe the art world and where it is going. Modernism

posited reason and order over chaos and disorder, but pluralism has broken the rational

pot, so to speak, and postmodernism is attempting to build a bigger one to put all the

pieces back inside. We can thank

Beckett, Jarry, Gyson, John Cage, Dadaism etc. for cracking open the language for us in the

west to

escape.

 

We live and create in a hard time and a grand time for artists, for the hope for theory itself

is breaking

down. The

rational structures that feed the beast that you are railing against are failing. They can't

hold back the

barbarians at the gate. It is an absurd question to ask, what is next for art? It first of all

assumes that art is rational and would follow a path that you can chart. No one has ever

answered that question. Even the greatest critics have been wrong and inconclusive

and even manipulative in their theories (See Clement Greenberg on Pollack.)

 

Nothing comes after postmodernism, for it loops back in on itself in an inward spiral,

attempting

rationally to describe the chaos of contemporary culture. Reason can't contain the plurality

and so it must turn on itself to describe its own functions and limitations. If that is the

void you speak of,

I am with you in

facing that empty horizon with one last gasp in the futile struggle.

 

However--artmaking is still alive and kicking. In spite of the fact that it is

the most foolish of careers for one to embark on, hundreds of thousands of Americans call

themselves full time artists. They find an audience, they work, and they struggle in a

society

that offers little or no support. This is also true

elsewhere. Out of this we will find what is next, or it will find us when

we climb down out of our theories and back into life.

 

I personally was born and raised in Kenya and I can assure you that there are plenty of

cultures that are doing quite well in their aesthetic lives completely outside of these

debates.

As

G.K. Chesterton put it, "The poet endeavours to put his(her) head into the heavens. The

philospher endeavours to put the heavens into his(her) head. The philosopher will find that

his(her) head will inevitably split."

What comes after is YOU and your generation. Postmodernism is non-definable crap-speak as was readily proven in another forum which took place here earlier. Your challenge will be to break away from the current school of photography which has trapped itself in stale galleries and crappy magazines edited by photog burnouts from the sixties and seventies whose creativity light bulbs need to be changed urgently. Use the mental toolbox given to you in school as a means of creativity, not conformity.

Although you'll find PoMo in PoMo Photographic art, PoMo is not what PoMo photographic art is about.<p>

 

<a href="http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/pomo.html">The PoMo page</a><p>

 

I'm beginning to believe that many here don't want to know, or don't want to accept what Postmodern photographic think is all about:) Sort of like, if I don't learn about it, it will go away:) By doing this, then many won't have to strain their brain putting content into their photographic images and will be able to continue making pretty pictures there by getting them off the content driven photographic hook:)<p>

 

One more time for the record, Postmodern photographic art about deconstructing the sacred; what ever it is one considers sacred. Lance Armstrong could be the sacred which one deconstructs. A protest photograph, if you will or a photographic critique of some social issue that's in question such as a straight critique of gay issues or vis-a-verse. It's about putting content into photographic images and making the image more then just another empty pretty picture. It's about making the viewer of the image stop and think about what they're looking at as opposed to one passing an image by and thinking, "Gee that's pretty." And pics of homeless don't count:)<p>

 

<a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/1998093">Lost Angel Wings</a><p>

 

Postmodern photographic art is about moving photography in a new (now old) direction away from pictorialism, an off shoot of pictorialism and uses journalistic techniques to do this with but it's more then just recording an image which says; "I was there and here's the pic to prove it."<p>

 

It really isn't such a hard concept to wrap one's mind around but it helps to understand the difference between pictorialism and content driven photography.<p>

 

A pic can be a pretty image and still be in the genre of Postmodern photographic art such as a beautiful sunset with a garbage dump in the foreground. It doesn't have to be profane to be Postmodern photographic art as it can be a beautiful image of a controversial couple in passionate embrace but needs to have content and be thought provoking in nature or design not just a recording of two people.<p>

 

Many have choosen to make Postmodern photographic images controversial because as shock jock photographers, they get more play, but this is not a requirement.<p>

 

Your reaction to the final product, finishes the image and makes it art as what the photographer was thinking when the image was created, isn't important. Again, the viewer's reaction is the final piece of the artistic puzzle and makes it art.<p>

 

Hope the above helps and wishing all the best.<p>

I'll take a tagger with a spray can over a postmodern hotairbag notable any day... :)

Photography is one of postmodern art's numerous granddaddy's, certainly among its most important. Photography's qualities of reproducibility, access to the masses (both as creator and viewer), integral role in pop culture, capacity for historical and social narrative -- this limited set of qualities alone puts it in postmodern art's living room. It could be argued, based on the stength of these qualities inherent in photography, that even pictorialist photos are at postmodern art's doorstep if not in the foyer.

 

Although postmodern photographic content can include "deconstructing the sacred", it is not limited to this any more than postmodern art is in general.

 

I think what will come after postmodernism is an extrapolation of synthesis and complexity to a level that is not a mere extention but truly a new form. The seeds of this are in Chadwick's work and others. Works may autonomously evolve intentionally. Works may be interactive where the interactivity is not a novelty or the focus but elemental in the expression. Scales of time and space may be as much a part of the pallete as anything else and freely tapped. Stir in all of the best ideas from postmodernism and it will be one wild feast.

What's a tagger?

<i>What's a tagger?</i><p>

 

Graffiti artist.

A self-styled artist who uses public spaces such as walls to post or create his or her work. (The quality of this work can vary widely) Tagging is also used to describe spray paint markings for gang areas. Worrying about postmodernism is very low on their priority list.

In which case, I think that what you suggest would be an improvement.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying even then. Why can't you use simple everyday terms such as 'extrapolation of synthesis and complexity' like everyone else?

that most don't seem concerned with the original question of:<p>

 

<i>What comes after postmodernism?</i><p>

 

And why do you think that might be? Is that an indication how little thought some here have given to this question in regard to their photographic efforts? Is this an original, nobody has given this question any thought sort of question?:)<p>

 

Are we eternally stuck in the past with Pictorialism and the end of photography will be pictorialism and nothing more? Shall Postmodern photographic efforts for ever haunt our artistic vision and only a few notables will dare dabble in Postmodern photographic think? Shall photography never mature past this time and point in time where only the brave will enjoy the intellectualism of Postmodern photographic think? Is this all we can expect? Do you folks even think about this stuff?:)<p>

 

Come on, you guys can come up with something.<p>

 

What do you guys think will be the next step in photographic art after Postmodern photographic think?<p>

Read out loud with dreary background music from Chopin or Liszt or wailers from a Greek play.....in an old Lecture Hall with the stuffing coming out of the chairs, missing lightbulbs in the ceiling and smelly toilets. (The lecture is sparsely attended, mostly by pimply philosophy majors that whittle life away at local coffeeshops)

Wow! I want to see that picture:)

Thomas: Some humor here. In the Sixties I went on a trip to St. Ettienne in S. France with a music group. Albert Camus had described this place in less than complimentary terms in one of his papers. When we arrived there, we were roomed in a large vacant abbey with partial electrical power and bedbugs. In the morning breakfast was served by the hunchback of Notre Dame in a Medieval-looking kitchen and it consisted of a chunk of cheese, some bread and a bowl of coffee. In the morning we visited a local youth group and it soon become evident that they were ardent, dogma-driven young communists. But at least lunch in the party headquarters cafeteria was passable. In the afternoon we went to the auditorium. It was brown inside, actually everything was brown with age and dust. Toilets were, er...French, if ya know what I mean...on both sides of the stage were two large fading signs that stated in both French and German: THERE WILL BE NO SMOKING IN THE THEATER BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDANT... :)) Perhaps when Sophie Graduates, she needs to make a photography trip to this place....she's reasonably close.