What relevance does Postmodernism have to my practise? Well I use aspects of critical theory when I think about making work. I think about authenticity and representation of minorities. I particularly make work that deals with the concept of the hidden history or patriarchal notions of presented reality. I make work in the 'directorial' style as Crimp describes it.
'Creating one's fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.' Crimp (1980).
As well as pushing a LGBT identity minority aspect I try to show that what is presented is not always real. Photography is a power tool often used by the Patriarchy to represent the masses. It is not real in the sense that it 'presents' a view of the world that contains the inherent bias of the originator. I suppose this could be considered a Postmodern viewpoint. The message is more important to me. I'm not particularly concerned with authenticity - although I haven't done much in the way of appropriation work - my calendar for G&M springs to mind.
In Crimp's essay it was interesting to read his thoughts on Richard Prince's appropriation art - the Marlborough cowboys. I think this is the first time I've properly understood about the notion of a copy without an original. Crimp also touches on Sherrie Levine and the rephotographing of Edward Weston's work. Levine's explanation to a friend who said that 'they only make me want to see the original' makes perfect sense to me. The original is about something else entirely and as Levine pointed out that 'of course, and the originals make you want to see that little boy. But when you see the boy, the art is gone.' These ideas around visual culture can be so difficult to grasp sometimes. Sometimes they are under our noses and so obvious that we can't see them. At other times they are elusive and slippery.
Notes:
- Postmodernism represents a specific breach with Modernism, with those institutions that are the preconditions for and shape the discourse of modernism:
- The museum.
- Art History.
- Photography - in a more complex sense because modernism depends on both its presence and absence.
- Postmodernism is about art's dispersal, its plurality. The plurality of copies.
- 1979 young artists beginning to exhibit in New York. The genesis of their concerns were what had been pejoratively labelled the 'theatricality' of minimal sculpture and the extensions of that theatrical position into the art of the 1970s.
- The aesthetic mode that was exemplary during the 1970s was performance art - all those works that were constituted in a specific place and for a specific duration; works for which it could be said literally that you 'had to be there'; works, that is, that assumed the presence of a spectator in front of the work as the work took place, thereby privileging the spectator instead of the artist.
- presence - the being there necessitated by performance.
- The kind of presence that is possible only through the absence that we know to be the condition of representation.
- Representation - signs, symbols for something else.
- Third definition - the notion of presence that is about being there, being in front of, and the notion of presence that Henry James uses in his ghost stories, the presence that is a ghost and therefore really an absence, the presence that is not there, I want to add the notion of presence as a kind of increment to being there, a ghostly aspect of presence that is its excess, its supplement.
- Postmodernism
- Jack Goldstein - Two Fencers
- Robert Longo - Surrender
- The peculiar presence of this work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from ever the possibility of an original. Such presence is what I attribute to the kind of photographic activity I call postmodernist.
- This quality of presence would seem to be just the opposite of
- what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he introduced the notion of aura into the language of criticism.
- Aura has to do with the presence of the original, with authenticity, with the unique existence of the work of art in the place in which it happens to be.
- The withering away of the aura, the disassociation of the work from the fabric of tradition, is an inevitable outcome of mechanical reproduction.
- The impossibility of experiencing the aura of such pictures as the Mona Lisa. Its aura has been utterly depleted by the thousands of times we've seen its reproduction. No degree of concentration will restore its uniqueness for us.
- It would seem though, that if withering away of the aura is an inevitable fact of our time, then equally inevitable are all those projects to recuperate it, to pretend that the original and the unique are still possible and desirable. And this is nowhere more apparent than in the filed of photography itself, the very culprit of mechanical reproduction.
- Aura possible in some photographs - so called 'primitive' phase - era before 1850 and commercialisation of photography.
- The aura in these photographs then is not to be found in the presence of the photographer in the photograph in the way that the aura of the painting is determined by the presence of the painter's unmistakable hand in his or her picture. Rather, it is the presence of the subject, of what is photographed, 'the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character of the picture'.
- So for Benjamin the connoisseurship of photography is an activity diametrically opposed to the connoisseurship of painting. It means not looking for the hand of the artist but for the uncontrolled and uncontrollable intrusion of reality. What reality? The photographer's version?
- The absolutely unique and ever magical quality not of the artist but of his or her subject. It is the artist (photographer) that captures and distorts reality to provide these moments!
- Benjamin thought it misguided after the commercialisation of photography to simulate the lost aura through the application of techniques imitative of painting.
- Sherrie Levine - re-photographs of Edward Weston's son.
- Sherrie Levine - Edward Weston - son - praxiteles - classical sculpture.
- 'they only make me want to see the original'
- 'of course, and the originals make you want to see that little boy. But when you see the boy, the art is gone.'
- The desire that is initiated by that representation does not come to closure around that little boy, it is not at all satisfied by him. The desire of representation exists only insofar as it can never be fulfilled, insofar as the original always is deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place.
- And representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation.
- It was Weston of course, who said that the photograph must be visualised in full before the exposure is made. Levine has taken the master at his word and in so doing has shown him what he really meant. The a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world, and Weston only copied it.
- a priori - relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.
- Nature poses as the antithesis of representation. 'having been there'. The presence of deja vu, nature as already having been seen, nature as representation.
- Levine's photographs
- photography as art spectrum. The furthest reaches of straight photography. The photographs she appropriates operate within that mode but also because she does not manipulate her photographs in any way.
- The opposite end of the spectrum is the photography that is self consciously composed, manipulated, fictionalised, the so-called directorial mode, in which we find such auters of photography as Duane Michals and Les Crims.
- The strategy of this mode is to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself. Creating one's fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.
- Cindy Sherman
- her photographs function in this mode in order to expose an unwanted aspect of that fiction. The fiction of the self.
- Her photographs show that the supposed autonomous and unitary self, out of which those other 'directors' would create their fictions is itself nothing other than a discontinuous series of representations, copies, and fakes.
- she is created in the image of already known feminine stereotypes; her self is therefore understood as contingent on the possibilities provided by the culture in which Sherman participates, not by some inner impulse.
- as such her photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist's true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct.
- there is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; these are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do.
- Mass advertising - whose photographic strategy is to disguise the directorial mode as a form of documentary.
- Richard Prince steals the most frank and banal of these images, which register, in the context of photography as art, as a kind of shock. Their rather brutal familiarity gives way to strangeness, as an unintended and unwanted dimension of fiction reinvades them. By isolating, enlarging, and juxtaposing fragments of commercial images, Prince points to their invasion by the ghosts of fiction.
- Prince is showing emerging fictional narratives created by the viewer?
- Focusing directly on commodity fetish, suing the master tool of commodity fetishism, Prince's rephotographed photographs take on Hitchcockian dimension; the commodity becomes a clue. It has, we might say, acquired an aura, only now it is a function not of presence but of absence, severed from an origin, from an originator, from authenticity.
- In our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost.
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