NOTES: Hal Foster’s Repost (1982)
I
a. He immediately states that term Postmodern either means anti-modernism or a synonym to pluralism.
b. We are in a reactionary period, and although postmodernism is used as anti-modernism, it should be perceived deeper than that.
II
a. What we define postmodernism as heavily relies on what the definition of Modernism is.
b. Historically, Modernism is from 1860-1930, postwar maybe ‘late’ modernism.
c. Should the etymology of Modernism be aligned with Foucault’s definition of Modernism or rely on Kant’s self-criticism as Greenberg does?
III
a. Postmodernists attack Modernism from its late period (Greenberg and Fried mostly).
b. Modernism is then defined as the pursuit of ‘purity’.
c. “The concept of art… [is] meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts” and that “the art object itself can be sustained (metaphorically) for its referent.” The arts must be atomized to fully realize itself.
d. “Each art has a code and nature”
IV
a. This is the simplified perception of Modernism (Modernism = purity) given by the Postmodernists.
b. Foster aligns this pursuit of purity with the same modes of operation that is witnessed in the ‘commercial commodity-production of industry’.
c. Hence demarcation of artistic practices/division of labor, specialized artist/professionalism, etc.
V (Renato Poggioli)
a. Avant-garde is equivalent to ‘transcendental historicism’. This is because they were on the quest of progress, believing that they can emancipate art from being bound to any other referent that was not about itself. Form= the one and ONLY content.
b. However this pursuit has the contraction of actually historicizing itself because its goal is to fit itself in a universal convention.
c. “Late modernism only reworks this contradiction: art is avant-garde insofar as it is radically historicist- the artist delves into art-historical conventions in order to break out of them.”
VI
a. Postmodernism goal is therefore to keep the radical spirit of Modernism, however rid of the historicism.
b. The discourse of Modernism perceived time as a ‘totality’.
c. “In art, of course, the subject of this historicism is the artist and its space is the museum; there, history is presented as a narrative- continuous, homogenous, and anthropocentric- of great men and masterworks.”
VI
a. Modernism: artist=original, artwork= unique. Postmodernism sees this as exhausted.
b. Postmodernism does not naturalize, or ‘reify’ the mediums of art, the all blur together meaning the artwork is not solely defined by its medium.
c. “Postmodernist art occurs in alternative spaces and in many forms, often dispersed, textual, or ephemeral.” POMO ART IS LIMINAL.
VII
a. This ‘field transformation’ is the first condition of postmodernism.
b. The modern attempt to make a concrete definition of each medium was on the condition of ‘pure negativity’, sculpture was sculpture because it was not-landscape, not-architecture.
c. “Art historical context will not suffice as meaning, for postmodernism is articulated not within the mediums but in relation to cultural terms. These forms are conceived logically, not derived historically, and so must be regarded in terms of structure.”
d. We are not on a historical progression to finding the essence of what art is, but our historical appropriations of the way we logically formulate and define art is the origins of our perceptions. If this is the case, then our definition of art is evolving, not progressing. This alludes to the fact that we will never reach an ending point; change is eternal.
VIII
a. Krauss sees this transformation takes place in the ‘expanded field, Crimp sees it as a return to ‘theater’, and for Owens, an ‘eruption of language’.
b. Every sign is ‘allegorical’ and deconstructive in nature; nothing is stable or singular.
IX
a. Fried sees the introduction of theatrical elements in minimalist sculpture (the viewer must actively engage with the object to feel its full effects) as degenerate to art. Fried defines theater as “what lies between the arts”.
b. This means minimalism could be credited as the pinnacle in the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism.
c. In this case-now that art is defined by its content rather than by solely its medium- art becomes textual.
d. Roland Barthes: “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”
e. Not a ‘book’; complete, sealed and original, but a ‘text’; open, multi-coded, simulacrum.
f. This is the ‘death of the artist’, the denial of an existing individual originality.
X
a. Postmodernism then can be parallel with Poststructuralist.
b. Krauss: An artist manipulates old signs with a new logic.
c. Crimp: Not a singular representation but strata of them. Underneath one picture lies another and so on.
XI
a. The expanded field is “generated by making the set of oppositions problematic between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended.”
b. In postmodernism, the term is opened, not bounding it down to one definition, yet this practice still does remain in a field.
c. Therefore the definition is expanded rather than deconstructed. Krauss here is relying on structualist terms.
XII
a. Postmodernism is not only demystifying or unreifing ‘myths’, because this demystification is already again mystified, since everything is a myth through this lens (for to call it real would be totalizing and making a concrete referent to what reality equates to.)
b. Therefore, according to Owens, postmodernism ‘changes the object itself’.
c. Art contingently rests in a web of references; it is temporal and spatial at once.
XIII
a. Postmodernism is thus a rupture in the aesthetics of Modernism. (I think Foster is only referring to the arts here. I argue that the Modernism to postmodernism shift is also a change in ideologies.)
b. Postmodern art cannot be translated through criticism; therefore criticism is not its supplement.
c. Derrida: “That there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or play of signification henceforth has no limit, one must reject even the concept and word ‘sign’ itself- which is precisely what cannot be done.”
XIV
a. As a methodological tool, postmodernism must use the same very concepts it calls into question. This makes me think of how postmodernism rejects the black and white picture painted when totally relying on binary oppositions, however their method is proving the Postmodern rupture from Modernism heavily relies on the use of binary oppositions.
b. The Postmodernists justify this by claiming there really is no “outside”, therefore they must use these methods.
c. This provided, the Postmodernists empower the use of bricolage in a way to create a kind of newness to aesthetics.
d. “So if postmodernists art is referential, it refers only to ‘problematize the activity of reference.” METAREFERENCE.
XV
a. “Postmodernism does exploit late modernist dogma, only to reconfirm its reduction to which late modernism is then subjected”
b. Is postmodernism’s ‘deconstructive impulse’ really a new form, wasn’t it inherent in modernism from the beginning? Duchamp’s ready-made, Picasso’s fetish for African masks, etc.
c. Owens still sees a difference: “The deconstructive impulse must be distinguished from the self-critical tendency of modernism. This is crucial to the postmodernist break, and no doubt the two operations are different: self-criticism, centered on a medium, does not tend (at least under the aegis of formalism) to the essential or ‘pure’, whereas deconstruction, on the contrary, decenters, and exposes the ‘impurity’ of meaning.”
XVI
a. For postmodernism to be considered as a break, there must be a change in forms on knowledge and material conditions.
b. “Rather than reduction, what is needed is a revision of modernism: an opening of its supposed closure.”
c. “It [postmodernism] may be less a break with modernism than an advance in a dialectic in which modernism re-formed.”
*Hal Foster closes in his Postscript by stating that the whole essay only takes into account Postmodernism as a rupture rather than a “restructuration”. He wishes not to look at the problem of postmodernism as a “major” conflict, but as a series of “minor” ones.