Re: Defining "post-modernism" -- WAS--- First define "post-modern"photography, dammit

[Don Sweet <don@sweetlegal.co.nz>]

Hi Jack

I see postings to this list a bit late sometimes, but despite that (and the
fact I am rather out of my depth) I would like to respond to some of your
comments.

Isn't it more plausible that the rise of PM ideas has directly contributed
to the recent success of war rhetoric and god-bothering as election
strategies?  PM arose 30 or 40 years too soon to be a reaction to all that.
PM is now big business, and part of what used to be called the
Establishment.  So is gangsta rap.

Cindy Sherman is more distinctively a performance artist than a
photographer. When it is her pose that carries her message,  the photo
becomes a mere record of the way she looked while she was acting as a piece
of auto-sculpture.

David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge sets out his theory on the use of
camera technology by famous painters since the Renaissance, specially
evident in the foreshortened paintings by Mantegna, Carvaggio etc.  He also
explains the revolution led by Cezanne in terms of a rejection of
photographic perspective.

I thought that trying to use the power of artistic expression in an
aspirational way - to improve the human condition - was the goal of
modernists.  The essence of PM seems to be to reject modernism by
challenging all assumptions as to what may be noble, beautiful or
worthwhile.  The technique is deconstruction, which is valuable, and has
some uses in the healing sciences.  But in PM it can be used in such a
nihilistic and cynical way as to mock everything, clearing the way for
secular missionaries and crackpots, shock and awe, and the boy wonder and
tonto.

I'd like to connect this back to alt photography, but I have no idea how.

Don Sweet

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jfulton" <jfulton@sfai.edu>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca>
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 6:26 AM
Subject: Re: Defining "post-modernism" -- WAS--- First define "post-modern"
photography, dammit


> >
> > As for postmodernism, I find this all rather amusing.  I've
> > searched for years for a good definition of postmodernism, and all
> > I've found is lists of things that might characterize it, lists
> > that tend to contradict each other when lined up side by side.  I
> > get the feeling that postmodernism is anything anybody wants it to
> > be.  In which case one can't fault anyone's list of postmodernist
> > photographers, even if many of them don't seem to qualify by one's
> > own understanding of what "postmodernism" means.
> > Katharine
>
>
> This is more a 'rattling on' than anything . . . and not a critique
> of Katherine either . . but more thoughts on PoMo for it is not easy,
> really,
> to grasp . . neither is the Post Structuralist movement it came from.
> One reason for Cindy Sher-person's success is a critique of "the way
> things are/were" in regard to women as portrayed in
> movies. The role of a woman was cliched yet employed for centuries w/
> some exceptions like George Sand, the Bronte sisters,
> Mary Cassat, etc.
> WWII was a sort of climax of the thinking of "through the valley
> death rode the five hundred" by Tennyson reflecting upon
> Roger Fenton's now famous, and then famed, photograph. That charge of
> the light brigade created soldiers worn and torn with
> difficulties facing them upon returning home such as our present Iraq/
> Afghanistan and Viet Nam soldiers have encountered. Some
> forty years later Rudyard Kipling wrote a sequel as a sort of plea to
> provide social welfare for the soldiers. This has not changed
> and is omnipresent today just as the attitude toward women did not
> change . . but, possibly, through PoMo intervention (one might
> say) social attitudes can be conscripted to change prevalent beliefs.
> How the he** we ended up with these dopes running our country
> today will be a lasting puzzle to me but is one the reasons for the
> rise of PoMo ideas.
> Second . . staying on the theme of war, from the Crimean to the
> Franco-Prussian, WWI and II, it was a European battle field littered
> with the bones of boys. Art, via photography, began fascinating
> protests right around the time of Manet. Remember the shooting of
> Emperor Maximillian? Done a few years after the charge of the light
> brigade. You might not know that Manet was a ridiculed person of
> his time for his 'daring' art, particularly that image of Olympia.
> Photography was the source for Manet and ideas such as foreshortening.
> The 'Dead Toreador' is similar to Mantegna's 'Dead Christ' some 400
> years earlier so there is a hint of history and an acceptance of
> modernity (photography) in Manet's rendering. One of Manet's best
> friends was Marcel Proust who wrote, as you all know, of the decadence
> and ultimate failure of bourgeois society. They were, to a degree,
> flaneurs.
> Then Picasso/Braque break the space opened to them by Cezanne.
> William James, Proust and James Joyce, then Ezra Pound open
> the mind to waterfall-like pouring out of thought. Talk about cross-
> disciplinary. Then Europe is basically broke and we have a depression
> and Japan is still a feudal society and WWII brings us the cure-all A-
> Bomb and Abstract Expressionism is born.
> You, your parents, their parents and their grandparents have all
> been living in anger, represented by war, by killing and, oh well, you
> all know. Remember God is Dead in the 60's? Everything has been
> questioned pretty much since the 60's: freedom of speech, sex, drugs,
> diversity, the rich etc. What remains is a continued distrust of
> leadership. It is echoed in our society by overwight and under-
> educated children,
> the egregious SUV and multi-trillion $ debt on credit cards and
> society. No wonder PoMo is little understood for it is a critique of
> all this
> BS feeding off our veriest self. At the least it is a philosophical
> look at greed and excess. Perhaps some of the art which I really
> despise such
> as Richard Prince and Jeff Koons, does point out just how dumb we are
> and art collectors agree: we are dumb, so they buy it. Francis Bacon
> just
> sold big at Sotherby's. Koon's large valentine went for, what? Twelve
> Mill? To me the invidious aspect of this art is that it fools the
> people.
> Manet didn't but they very much thought he was not for them. They
> like Koons. We're in trouble . . that's what PM says as well.
> Jack