25th of June 2019
Postmodernism – What surrounds the photography
Read Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodern controversialism’ on the OCA-Student Website. This essay was first published in October 15 (Winter 1980) and is also available in Crimp, D (1993) On the Museum’s Ruins. Massachusetts: MIT Press. As with all the readings you’ll be asked to do for this course, make notes on what you‘ s read – and it’s relevance to your practice (if any) – in your research folder. See also: www.afterwalkerevans.com/ and www.aftersherrielevine.com/
Postmodernism is a controversial movement, which is hard to pin point a definition. It spanned around two decades from the 1970s up until the 1990s. Similar to Modernism, it changed art completely, but in this instance it was a force against the modest ideals. ‘Anything goes’ is a saying that comes to mind with postmodernism, there was a complete mix of ideas. One characteristic was the bringing together of ‘cultural hybrids’, this created unique artworks. If Modernism is a utopia, postmodernism is a dystopia. Postmodernism become the norm for consumerism, this was its downfall.
Postmodernism is a rift that has emerged from modernism. According to Douglas Crimp, “Photography had overturned the judgement – seat of art is a fact that modernism found it necessary to repress, and so it seems that we may accurately say that postmodernism constitutes a return of the repressed” (Crimp, p. 108). Postmodernism is about ‘plurality’, it is diverse. It is about plurality but not pluralism. Pluralism is a fantasy, it promotes the thought that art has been liberated. Crimp wants to discuss ‘plurality of copies’.
During the 1970s postmodernism took one form in performance art. It was made for the viewers not for the artist. It was the ‘suggested aesthetic mode’. Crimp wanted to explore the shift from the presence, similar to that in performance art, to the presence that is achieved by absence. Which becomes representation. The author, Henry James, is able to use this latter, in his ghost stories. Even though the ghost is there, but it is actually an absence. So it is present and absent at the same time. This presence by absence can be achieved by representation, by using technology, something can be reproduce so it is present by in itself absent. This can be seen in the Two Fencers by Jack Goldstein and also in Surrender by Robert Longo. The use of holograms created a presence which was lifelike but it was also eerie absent figure. There is a distinction from the original. “Such presence is what I attribute to the kind of photographic activity I call postmodernist” (Crimp, p. 111). Crimps view is different from Walter Benjamin’s, in the sense of the quality of the presence. Benjamins aura relates to the presence of the original work. For Benjamin aura is diminished when more copies are made. Benjamin believes that only particular photographs have aura. Mainly photographs from its discovery, before around 1850. The aura comes from firstly the exposure times and secondly the subject. Aura is not really effected by the photographers presence but rather in the subject being present.
Many have tried to get aura back. This has been tried using two forms, the first in expressionist paintings and the second in photography being recognised as art. But Crimp states that what is needed is a Connoisseur. Photographs don’t always get into museums. A connoisseur can authenticate a photograph. “The photographic activity of postmodernism operates, as we might expect, in complicity with these modes of photography-as-art, but it does so only in order to subvert or exceed them” (Crimp, p. 117). This is related to aura, but it doesn’t bring it back, it changes it. Mass-advertising has effected our culture by manipulation. It is able to disguise its direction. “In our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost” (Crimp, p. 124).
Bibliography
Crimp, D. (19993) On The Museum’s Ruins. Massachusetts: MIT Press, p. 108-124.
Irvine, M. Approaches to Po-Mo. At: faculty.georgetown.edu/Irvine/theory/Pomo.hmtl (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Tate. Art Term – Postmodernism. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
V&A. What is Postmodernism? At: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/what-is-Postmoderism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Georgina's Contextual Studies 