Modernism Definition

Modernism refers to the broad movement in Western art, architecture and design which self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present, and placed an emphasis on formal qualities within artworks and processes and materials

Modernism, which gathered pace from about 1850, proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is therefore characterised by constant innovation and a rejection of conservative values such as the realistic depiction of the world. This has led to experiments with form and to an emphasis on processes and materials.

Modern art has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.

Postmodernism Theories and Texts

Postmodernism theories and texts from raybloggs

Criticism of Postmodernism (James Rosenau)

Rosenau (1993) Rosenau identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

 

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.

 

2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.

3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.

4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.

5. By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.

6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.

7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Postmodernism at the V&A

Everything is a Remix Episodes 1-4

Bricolage Definition

Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.

Postmodernism Definition 3

"Postmodernism is cultural movement that came after modernism, also it follows our shift from being a industrial society to that of an information society, through globalization of capital. Markers of the postmodern culture include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox. Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism"


"Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch."

Postmodernism Definition 2

Label given to Cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:


Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony

Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media

Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:

• Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
• Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
• Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
• Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality

Postmodernism Definition

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (i.e experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (check out your Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. 
Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. 
Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (e.g. using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).

Moe Explains Post-Modemism

Postmodemism

John Fiske (1987) - believes that a representation of a car chase only makes sense in relation to all the others we have seen. For example, people will often say “its something like off a film”. Therefore we make sense of the world around us through the experiences that we have. 

Levi-Strauss developed the concept of bricolage. He saw any text as constructed out of socially recognisable ‘debris’ from other texts. He saw that writers construct texts from other texts by a process of:

• Addition 
• Deletion
• Substitution 
• Transposition 

Example: Inglorious Bastards

• A film based in Nazi Germany, where a bunch of Jews go around killing Nazi’s. 

Quentin Tarantino (director) deleted the battles within the film and added in different concepts. He substituted battlefields for cinema/bar interiors. 

Gerard Genette developed the term transsexuality and developed five sub-groups, but only 4 apply to film.

• Intertextuality - quotation, plagiarism, allusion
• Architextuality - designation of the text as part of a genre by the writer or the audience
• Metatextuality - explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another
• Hypotextuality - the relation between a text and a preceding hypertext - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation)

Postmodernist Theory

Baudrillard developed the idea of simulation and simulacra 

Simulation: the process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented… the representations become more important than the “real thing”. 

4 orders of simulation:

• Sings thought of as reflecting reality: representing @objective truth;
• Sings mask reality: reinforces notion of reality;
• Sings mask the absence of reality; e.g. DisneyWorld, Watergate, LA life; jogging, psychotherapy, organic food
• Signs become… 

Simulacra - they have no relation to reality; they simulate a spinal tap, Cheers bars, new urbanism, Starbucks, the Gulf War, was a video game, 9/11 has become the coverage, not the event. 

Hyperreality - a condition in which “reality” has been replaced by simulacraargues that today we only experience prepared realities - edition war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the Jeremy Kyle Show.

The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.