GSA CCS Year 1 Lecture 19Th February 2007 Tutor: Allan Harkness

GSA CCS Year 1 Lecture 19th February 2007 Tutor: Allan Harkness
Postmodernism & Art : the case of Joseph Beuys
Recommended Reading:
Hal Foster, ‘Introduction’, Postmodern Culture, Pluto Press, 1985
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Postmodernism and its Discontents, Verso, 1988
Lisa Appignanesi (ed.), Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4, Free Association Books, 1989
Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism, Longman, 1992
Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: toward a postmodern culture, Routledge, 1988
Beuys research:
Joseph Beuys: The Revolution is Us, Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1993
Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, New York, 1987
Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1979
Joseph Beuys: Early Watercolours, Schirmer’s Visual Library, No.5
Warhol, Beuys, Polke, Milwaukee Art Museum, 1987
Interviews…in Harrison & Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell, 1990
plus websites of Tate Modern and Walker Art Museum (US), Hessiches Landes Museum, Darmstadt
Modernism - according to Jurgen Habermas is “dominant but dead” , and Postmodernism is not yet a critical, progressive force
- Modernism is in crisis , can be identified within historical limits , has lost its emancipatoryeffect; Postmodernism is not pluralism, nor pastiche pop, but a form of oppositional resistance (Hal Foster)
Hal Foster
- “This apocalyptic belief that anything goes, that ‘the end of ideology’ is here, is simply theinverse of the fatalistic belief that nothing works, that we live under a ‘total system’ without redress - the very acquiescence that Ernest Mandel calls ‘the ideology of late capitalism’.”
- Postmodernism as a “critique of origins, not a return to them…in short, it seeks to questionrather than exploit cultural codes rather than conceal social and political affiliations.”
- Kenneth Frampton, on modern architecture, “calls for a critical mediation of the forms of modern civilisation and of local culture, a mutual deconstruction of universal techniques and vernacular languages.” Why?…“The utopianism implicit in the Enlightenment andprogrammatic in modernism has led to catastrophe - the fabrics of non-Western cultures rent,the Western city reduced to the mega polis.” No surface “stylistic”, superficial answers, nor any hermetic “avant-garde” answers will be of any use, according to Frampton.
- “Craig Owens also regards postmodernism as a crisis in Western representation, its authority and universal claims - a crisis announced by heretofore marginal or repressed discourses, feminism most significant among them. As a radical critique of the master narratives of modern man, feminism, Owens argues, is a political and an epistemological event - political in that it challenges the order of patriarchal society, epistemological in that it questions the structure of its representations.”
Hand-outs (during or after lecture): Margaret A. Rose, The Post-modern and the Post-industrial, pp.44-45 and Fred Ffeil extracts from‘Postmodernism as a “Structure of Feeling”’ in Grossberg and Nelson (1988)