Late modernism
In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and postmodernism, although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer,[1] Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe,[2] Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.
The jargon which encompasses the two terms late modernism and postmodern art is used to denote what may be considered as the ultimate phase of modern art, as art at the end of modernism or as certain tendencies of contemporary art.
There are those who argue against a division into modern and postmodern periods. Not all critics agree that the stage called modernism is over or even near the end. There is no agreement that all art after modernism is post-modern. Contemporary art is the more-widely used term to denote work since roughly 1960, though it has many other uses as well. Nor is post-modern art universally separated from modernism, with many critics seeing it as merely another phase in modern art or as another form of late modernism.
As with all uses of the term post-modern there are critics of its application, however, at this point, these critics are in the minority.[1] This is not to say that the phase of art denoted by post-modernism is accepted, merely that the need for a term to describe movements in art after the peak of abstract expressionism is well established.[3] However, although the concept of change has come to consensus, and whether it is a post-modernist change, or a late modernist period, is undetermined, the consensus is that a profound change in the perception of works of art has occurred and a new era has been emerging on the world stage since at least the 1960s.
In literature, the term late modernism refers to works of literature produced after World War II.
Differences from postmodernism
Late modernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against, trends in modernism and reject some aspect of modernism, while fully developing the conceptual potentiality of the modernist enterprise.[9] In some descriptions post-modernism as a period in art is completed, whereas in others it is a continuing movement in contemporary art. In art, the specific traits of modernism which are cited are generally formal purity, medium specificity, art for art's sake, the possibility of authenticity in art, the importance or even possibility of universal truth in art, and the importance of an avant-garde and originality. This last point is one of particular controversy in art, where many institutions argue that being visionary, forward looking, cutting edge and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and that postmodern therefore, represents a contradiction of the value of "art of our times".
One compact definition offered is that while post-modernism acts in rejection of modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, and to eradicate the boundaries between high and low forms of art, to disrupt genre and its conventions with collision, collage and fragmentation. Post-modern art is seen as believing that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody and humor are the only positions which cannot be overturned by critique or later events.
Many of these traits are present in modern movements in art, particularly the rejection of the separation between high and low forms of art. However, these traits are considered fundamental to post-modern art, as opposed to merely present in one degree or another. One of the most important points of difference, however, between post-modernism, and modernism, as movements in art, is modernism's ultimately progressive stance that new works be more "forward looking" and advanced, whereas post-modern movements generally reject the notion that there can be advancement or progress in art per se, and thus one of the projects of art must be the overturning of the "myth of the
Where did this new academy begin? At its origins the avant-garde myth had held the artist to be a precursor; the significant work is the one that prepares the future. The cult of the precursor ended by cluttering the landscape with absurd prophetic claims. The idea of a cultural avant-garde was unimaginable before 1800. It was fostered by the rise of liberalism. Where the taste of religious or secular courts determined patronage, "subversive" innovation was not esteemed as a sign of artistic quality. Nor was the artist's autonomy, that would come with the Romantics.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New[12]
As with all uses of the term postmodern there are critics of its application. Kirk Varnedoe, for instance, stated that there is no such thing as postmodernism, and that the possibilities of modernism have not yet been exhausted.[13] These critics are currently in the minority.[1]
Radical movements in modern art
Radical movements in Modernism, Modern art, and radical trends regarded as influential and potentially as precursors to late modernism and postmodernism emerged around World War I and particularly in its aftermath. With the introduction of the use of industrial artifacts in art, movements such as
Fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism as the precedent
In the early 20th century, following Henri Matisse and André Derain's impact as Fauvist painters and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque's monumental innovations and the worldwide success of Cubism and the emboldening of the avant-garde, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His point was to have people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art, because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "Readymades." The Fountain, was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada.
Dadaism can be viewed as part of the modernist propensity to challenge established styles and forms, along with Surrealism, futurism and abstract expressionism.[16] From a chronological point of view Dada is located solidly within modernism, however a number of critics have held that it anticipates postmodernism, while others, such as Ihab Hassan and Steven Connor, consider it a possible changeover point between modernism and postmodernism.[17]
High art and culture
The ignition point for the definition of modernism as a movement was the austere rejection of popular culture as kitsch by important post-war artists and taste-makers, most notably Clement Greenberg with his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, first published in Partisan Review in 1939.[19] During the 1940s and 1950s Greenberg proved to be an articulate and powerful art critic. In particular his writing on American Abstract expressionism, and 20th-century European modernism persuasively made the case for High art and culture. In 1961 Art and Culture, Beacon Press, a highly influential collection of essays by Clement Greenberg was first published. Greenberg is primarily thought of as a formalist art critic and many of his most important essays are crucial to the understanding of Modern art history, and the history of modernism and Late Modernism.[20]
Jackson Pollock: abstract expressionism
During the late 1940s Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made at the mid-century point. Pollock's move — away from easel painting and conventionality — was a liberating signal to his contemporaneous artists and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process — working on the floor, unstretched raw canvas, from all four sides, using artist materials, industrial materials, imagery, non-imagery, throwing linear skeins of paint, dripping, drawing, staining, brushing, essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.
Neo-Dada, collage and assemblage
Related to
Leo Steinberg uses the term postmodernism in 1969 to describe Rauschenberg's "flatbed" picture plane, containing a range of cultural images and artifacts that had not been compatible with the pictorial field of premodernist and modernist painting.[21] Craig Owens goes further, identifying the significance of Rauschenberg's work not as a representation of, in Steinberg's view, "the shift from nature to culture", but as a demonstration of the impossibility of accepting their opposition.[22]
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, between modernism and postmodernism. Both used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high modernism.[23]
Abstract painting and sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s
In abstract painting and sculpture during the 1950s and 1960s
Minimalism and post-minimalism
By the early 1960s
Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism, examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism.[31] He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."[32]
In the late 1960s the term
Minimalists like
Process art
By the late 1960s however,
Pop art
The term "pop art" was used by
In general pop art and minimalism began as modernist movements, a shift in the paradigm and a philosophical split between formalism and anti-formalism in the early 1970s caused those movements to be viewed by some as precursors, or transitioning to postmodern art. Other modern movements cited as influential to postmodern art are Conceptual art, Dada and Surrealism and the use of techniques such as assemblage, montage, collage, bricolage and art forms which used recording or reproduction as the basis for artworks.
There are differing opinions as to whether pop art is a late modernist movement or is
One way that Pop art is postmodern is that it breaks down what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide" between high art and popular culture.[40] Postmodernism emerges from a "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism."[41] Although to presuppose that modernism stands for "high art" only, and is in any way certain as to what constitutes "high" art is to profoundly and basically misunderstand modernism.
Performance art and happenings
During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push the boundaries of
During the same period — the late 1950s through the mid-1960s various
Fluxus
Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by
Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.
Andreas Huyssen criticises attempts to claim Fluxus for postmodernism as, "either the master-code of postmodernism or the ultimately unrepresentable art movement – as it were, postmodernism's sublime."[43] Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dadaist phenomena within the avant-garde tradition. It did not represent a major advance in the development of artistic strategies, though it did express a rebellion against, "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War."[44]
High and low
As a kind of response to Clement Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch[45] in 1990 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik curated High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition attempted to elucidate the extent that artists and high culture drew on and from popular culture. Although universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp and Hilton Kramer together in a chorus of scorn.[46] The exhibition is remembered today as a benchmark of the conflict between late modernism and postmodernism.
Movements associated with Postmodern art
Conceptual art
Installation art
An important series of movements in art which have consistently been described as postmodern involved
They are often designed to create environmental effects, as
Intermedia and multi-media
Another trend in art which has been associated with the term postmodern is the use of a number of different media together.
Appropriation art and neo-conceptual art
In his 1980 essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,
Neo-expressionism
The return to the traditional art forms of sculpture and painting in the late 1970s and early 1980s seen in the work of neo-expressionist artists such as Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel has been described as a postmodern tendency,[52] and one of the first coherent movements to emerge in the postmodern era.[53] Its strong links with the commercial art market has raised questions, however, both about its status as a postmodern movement and the definition of postmodernism itself. Hal Foster states that neo-expressionism was complicit with the conservative cultural politics of the Reagan-Bush era in the U.S.[32] Félix Guattari disregards the "large promotional operations dubbed 'neo-expressionism' in Germany", (an example of a "fad that maintains itself by means of publicity") as a too easy way for him "to demonstrate that postmodernism is nothing but the last gasp of modernism." These critiques of neo-expressionism reveal that money and public relations really sustained contemporary art world credibility in America during the same period that conceptual and feminist art practices were systematically reevaluating modern art.[54]
Institutional Critique
Critiques on the institutions of art (principally museums and galleries) are made in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke.
Late modernist painting and sculpture in the 21st century
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Anthony Caro, 1996
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Ronnie Landfield, 1999
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Ryan McCourt, 2002
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Richard Serra, 2006
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John Baeder, 2007
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Anish Kapoor, 2008
At the beginning of the 21st century contemporary painting, contemporary sculpture and contemporary art in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralism. The "crisis" in painting, sculpture and current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently, magnificent and important works of art continue to be made albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit. Frank Stella's La scienza della pigrizia (The Science of Laziness), from 1984, is an example of Stella's transition from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality and an excellent example of Late Modernism.
See also
- High-tech architecture
- History of painting
- Western painting
- Late modernity
- Modernist project
- Remodernism
- Postmodern art
- Classificatory disputes about art
- 20th-century Western painting
Notes and references
- ^ a b c The Citadel of Modernism Falls to Deconstructionists, 1992 critical essay, The Triumph of Modernism, 2006, Hilton Kramer, pp. 218–221.
- ^ Man of his words: Pepe Karmel on Kirk Varnedoe – Passages, critical essay, Artforum, Nov. 2003 by Pepe Karmel
- ^ Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism, seventh paragraph of the essay. URL accessed on June 15, 2006
- ISBN 9780812200072– via Project MUSE.
- ^ Cheryl Hindrichs, "Late Modernism, 1928–1945: Criticism and Theory" Literature Compass, Volume 8, Issue 11, pages 840–855, November 2011; J. H. Dettmar "Modernism". David Scott Kastan. Oxford University Press 2005.
- ^ Morris Dickstein, "An Outsider to His Own Life", Books, The New York Times, August 3, 1997.
- ^ Late modernist poetics: From Pound to Prynne by Anthony Mellors; see also Prynne's publisher, Bloodaxe Books.
- ^ Late modernist poetics: From Pound to Prynne by Anthony Mellors.
- ^ The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss, Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (July 9, 1986), Part I, Modernist Myths, pp.8–171
- ^ The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss, Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (July 9, 1986), Part I, Modernist Myths, pp.8–171, Part II, Toward Post-Modernism, pp. 196–291.
- ^ The Shock of the New Robert Hughes, Publisher: Knopf; Revised edition (August 13, 1991),
- ^ Hughes, Robert (August 13, 1991), "The Future That Was", The Shock of the New (Revised ed.), Knopf
- ISBN 0-226-22480-5
- ISBN 0-7486-0936-9
- ISBN 0-7190-1450-6
- ISBN 0-415-28064-8
- ISBN 1-57181-130-3
- ^ Russell T. Clement. Four French Symbolists. Greenwood Press, 1996. Page 114.
- ^ Avant-Garde and Kitsch
- ^ Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism, URL accessed on June 15, 2006
- ISBN 0-7453-0003-0
- ^ Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, London and Berkeley: University of California Press (1992), pp. 74–75.
- ISBN 1-57230-221-6
- ^ Ratcliff, Carter. The New Informalists, Art News, v. 68, n. 8, December 1969, p.72.
- ^ Barbara Rose. American Painting. Part Two: The Twentieth Century. Published by Skira – Rizzoli, New York, 1969
- ^ Walter Darby Bannard. "Notes on American Painting of the Sixties." Artforum, January 1970, vol. 8, no. 5, pp.40–45.
- ISBN 2-605-00308-6.
- ^ Michael Fried. "Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion." Artforum, vol. 5, no. 8. April, 1967. pp. 37–41, Cover Illus.: Six-Ninths Blue, 1966
- ^ Aldrich, Larry. Young Lyrical Painters, Art in America, v. 57, n. 6, November–December 1969, pp. 104–113.
- ^ "Shade acrylic canvases in which geometric shapes are juxtaposed". Betty Parsons Gallery. The New Yorker. Oct. 3, 1977 p.8
- ISBN 0-262-56107-7
- ^ ISBN 0-262-56107-7
- Art+Auction, March 2007, V.XXXNo7.
- ^ The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss, Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (July 9, 1986), Sculpture in the Expanded Field pp.287
- ^ The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss, Publisher: The MIT Press; Reprint edition (July 9, 1986), Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979). pp.290
- ^ Source: "Guggenheim Collection – Glossary – Process art". Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2007-07-28. (accessed: March 15, 2007)
- ISBN 0-393-04401-7
- ISBN 90-5701-311-8
- ISBN 0-7453-0003-0
- ISBN 0-415-28064-8
- ISBN 0-415-24307-6
- ^ "Carolee Schneemann Foundation". www.schneemannfoundation.org.
- ISBN 0-415-90934-1
- ISBN 0-415-90934-1
- ^ Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961
- ^ Kirk Varnedoe, 1946–2003 – Front Page – Obituary – Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Marcia E. Vetrocq
- ^ Marcel Duchamp
- ^ David Tudor
- ISBN 0-631-23213-3
- ^ Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, London and Berkeley: University of California Press (1992), p. 54
- ISBN 1-57230-221-6
- ISBN 0-7190-5211-4
- ISBN 0-495-00480-4
- ISBN 0-19-284239-0
Sources
- The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005, ISBN 0-15-666370-8
- Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), Kirk Varnedoe, 2003
- Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, Irving Sandler
- Postmodernism (Movements in Modern Art) Eleanor Heartney
- Sculpture in the Age of Doubt Thomas McEvilley 1999
- The Originality of the Rosalind Krauss
- Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961, ISBN 0-8070-6681-8
External links
- History of Painting
- History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary Art
- Robert Hughes from Artchive
- Concerning the Spiritual in Art Wassily Kandinsky
- Malady of Writing. Modernism you can dance to An online radio show that presents a humorous version of modernism