1980s Postmodern Art in the Fashion World
The visual arts and postmodernism
Peradventure the greatest, and certainly the loudest, event in American cultural life since World War II was what the critic Irving Sandler has called "The Triumph of American Painting"—the emergence of a new class of fine art that allowed American painting to boss the globe. This dominance lasted for at least twoscore years, from the nativity of the so-chosen New York schoolhouse, or Abstract Expressionism, around l945 until at least the mid-1980s, and it took in many dissimilar kinds of art and artists. In its commencement flowering, in the epic-scaled abstractions of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and the other members of the New York school, this new painting seemed abstract, rarefied, and constructed from a series of negations, from maxim "no!" to everything except the purest elements of painting. Abstract Expressionism seemed to stand at the farthest possible remove from the mutual life of American culture and particularly from the life of American popular civilization. Even this painting, still, later came nether a new and perhaps less-austere scrutiny; and the art historian Robert Rosenblum has persuasively argued that many of the elements of Abstruse Expressionism, for all their apparent hermetic distance from common feel, are inspired by the scale and light of the American landscape and American 19th-century mural painting—past elements that run deep and centrally in Americans' sense of themselves and their country.
Woman II, oil on canvass by Willem de Kooning, 1952; in the Museum of Modern Art, New York Urban center. 149.ix × 109.3 cm.
Fine Fine art Images/SuperStockIt is certainly true that the next generation of painters, who throughout the 1950s continued the unparalleled dominance of American influence in the visual arts, made their art aggressively and unmistakably of the dialogue between the studio and the street. Jasper Johns, for instance, took as his subject field the about common and fifty-fifty banal of American symbols—maps of the 48 continental states, the flag itself—and depicted the rapidly read and immediately identifiable common icons with a slow, meditative, painterly scrutiny. His contemporary and occasional partner Robert Rauschenberg took up the same dialogue in a different form; his art consisted of dreamlike collages of images silk-screened from the mass media, combined with personal artifacts and personal symbols, all brought together in a mélange of jokes and deliberately perverse associations. In a remarkably similar spirit, the eccentric surrealist Joseph Cornell made fiddling shoe-box-similar dioramas in which images taken from popular culture were made into a dreamlike linguistic communication of nostalgia and poetic reverie. Although Cornell, like William Blake, whom he in many ways resembled, worked largely in isolation, his sense of the poetry that lurks unseen in even the about cool everyday objects had a profound upshot on other artists.
Monogram, combine painting (mixed media) by Robert Rauschenberg, 1959; in Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm/Photograph: Statens KonstmuseerBy the early 1960s, with the explosion of the new fine art form called Pop art, the engagement of painting and drawing with popular civilisation seemed so explicit as to exist almost overwhelming and, at times, risked losing whatever sense of individual life and personal inflection at all—it risked becoming all street and no studio. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg took the styles and objects of popular culture—everything from comic books to lipstick tubes—and treated them with the absorption and grave seriousness previously reserved for religious icons. Only this art too had its secrets, too every bit its stiff private voices and visions. In his series of drawings called Proposals for Monumental Buildings, 1965–69, Oldenburg drew ordinary things—fire hydrants, ice-cream bars, bananas—as though they were as big as skyscrapers. His pictures combined a virtuoso'south souvenir for drawing with a vision, at once celebratory and satirical, of the P.T. Barnum spirit of American life. Warhol silk-screened images of popular picture stars and Campbell's soup cans; in replicating them, he suggested that their reiteration by mass production had emptied them of their humanity merely likewise given them a kind of hieratic immortality. Lichtenstein used the techniques of comic-book illustration to paraphrase some of the monuments of modern painting, making a coolly witty art in which Henri Matisse danced with Helm Marvel.
But these artists who self-consciously chose to brand their art out of pop materials and images were not the only ones who had something to say nigh the traffic between mass and elite culture. The and so-chosen Minimalists, who made abstract fine art out of simple and usually hard-edged geometric forms, from one point of view carried on the tradition of austere abstraction. Only it was also the Minimalists, as art historians have pointed out, who carried over the vocabulary of the new International Style of unornamented compages into the world of the fine arts; Minimalism imagined the dialogue betwixt street and studio in terms of hard edges and simple forms rather than in terms of imagery, merely it took function in the same dialogue. In some cases, the play betwixt loftier and low has been carried out as a dialogue betwixt Pop and Minimalist styles themselves. Frank Stella, idea by many to exist the preeminent American painter of the tardily 20th century, began as a Minimalist, making extremely simple paintings of black chevrons from which everything was banished except the barest minimum of painterly cues. Yet in his subsequent work he became well-nigh extravagantly "maximalist" and, as he began to make bas-reliefs, added to the stark elegance of his early paintings wild, Popular-art elements of outthrusting spirals and Twenty-four hour period-Glo colors—fifty-fifty sequins and glitter—that deliberately suggested the invigorating vulgarity of the Las Vegas Strip. Stella's flamboyant reliefs combine the spare elegance of abstraction with the greedy vitality of the American street.
In the 1980s and '90s, information technology was in the visual arts, even so, that the debates over postmodern marginality and the construction of a stock-still canon became, perhaps, most trigger-happy—however, oddly, were at the same fourth dimension least eloquent, or least fully realized in emotionally potent works of art. Pictures and objects do not "argue" particularly well, so the tone of much contemporary American fine art became debased, with the ambiguous languages of high abstraction and conceptual art put in the service of narrow ideological arguments. Information technology became a standard practise in American avant-garde fine art of the 1980s and '90s to experience an installation in which an inarguable social bulletin—for case, that there should be fewer homeless people in the streets—was encoded in a highly oblique, Surrealist fashion, with the duty of the viewer then reduced to decoding the manner back into the message. The long journeying of American fine art in the 20th century away from socially "responsible" art that lacked intense artistic originality seemed to have been curt-circuited, without necessarily producing much of a gain in clarity or accessibility.
No subject or idea has been as powerful, or as controversial, in American arts and messages at the terminate of the 20th century and into the new millennium every bit the idea of the "postmodern," and in no sphere has the argument been equally lively equally in that of the plastic arts. The idea of the postmodern has been powerful in the United states of america exactly because the idea of the modern was and so powerful; where Europe has struggled with the idea of modernity, in the United States it has been largely triumphant, thus leaving the question of "what comes next" all the more problematic. Since the 1960s, the ascendance of postmodern culture has been argued—now information technology is even sometimes said that a "post-postmodern" epoch has begun, but what exactly that means is remarkably vague.
In some media, what is meant by postmodern is articulate and easy enough to indicate to: it is the rejection of the utopian aspects of modernism, and particularly of the attempt to express that utopianism in ideal or absolute class—the kind experienced in Bauhaus compages or in Minimalist painting. Postmodernism is an attempt to dingy lines drawn falsely clear. In American architecture, for instance, the meaning of postmodern is reasonably plain. Commencement with the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Peter Eisenman, postmodern architects deliberately rejected the pure forms and "truth to materials" of the modernistic builder and put in their place irony, ornament, historical reference, and deliberate paradox. Some American postmodern architecture has been ornamental and cheerfully cosmetic, every bit in the later work of Philip Johnson and the mid-1980s work of Michael Graves. Some has been demanding and deliberately challenging even to conventional ideas of spatial lucidity, as in Eisenman'south Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Merely one tin can see the difference just by looking.
In painting and sculpture, on the other manus, it is often harder to know where exactly to draw the line—and why the line is fatigued. In the paintings of the American artist David Salle or the photographs of Cindy Sherman, for instance, one sees plain postmodern elements of pastiche, borrowed imagery, and deliberately "impure" collage. But all of these devices are besides components of modernism and part of the heritage of Surrealism, though the formal devices of a Rauschenberg or Johns were used in a different emotional fundamental. The true common element among the postmodern perhaps lies in a annotation of extreme pessimism and melancholy well-nigh the possibility of escaping from borrowed imagery into "authentic" experience. It is this emotional tone that gives postmodernism its peculiar register and, one might near say, its authenticity.
In literature, the postmodern is, once again, hard to separate from the modernistic, since many of its keynotes—for example, a love of complicated artifice and obviously literary devices, forth with the mixing of realistic and frankly fantastic or magical devices—are at to the lowest degree every bit old equally James Joyce's founding modernist fictions. But certainly the expansion of possible sources, the liberation from the narrowly white male view of the world, and a broadening of testimony given and testimony taken are part of what postmodern literature has in mutual with other kinds of postmodern civilization. It has been part of the postmodern transformation in American fiction too to place authors previously marginalized every bit genre writers at the centre of attention. The African American offense author Chester Himes, for example, has been given serious critical attending, while the strange visionary science-fiction writer Philip Yard. Dick was ushered, in 2007, from his long exile in paperback into the Library of America.
What is at pale in the debates over mod and postmodern is finally the American idea of the private. Where modernism in the United states of america placed its emphasis on the autonomous private, the heroic artist, postmodernism places its accent on the "de-centred" subject area, the creative person every bit a prisoner, rueful or miserable, of civilisation. Fine art is seen as a social outcome rather than as communication between persons. If in modernism an individual artist fabricated something that in plow created a community of observers, in the postmodern epoch the contrary is truthful: the social circumstance, the chain of connections that brand seeming opposites unite, fundamental off the artist and make him what he is. In the work of the creative person Jeff Koons, for instance—who makes nothing but has things, from kitsch figurines to giant puppies composed of flowers, made for him—this postmodern rejection of the handmade or authentic is given a weirdly comic tone, at one time eccentric and humorous. It is the impurities of civilisation, rather than the purity of the artist'south vision, that haunts gimmicky fine art.
Nonetheless, if the push and accuse that had been then unlooked-for in American fine art since the 1940s seemed diminished, the turn of the 21st century was a rich time for second and even third acts. Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Murray, and Chuck Close were all American artists who continued to produce arresting, original piece of work—almost often balanced on that fine knife edge between the blankly literal and the disturbingly metaphoric—without worrying overmuch about theoretical fashions or fashionable theory.
As recently as the 1980s, most surveys of American culture might non accept thought photography of much importance. But at the turn of the century, photography began to lay a new claim to attention as a serious art class. For the bulk of the first role of the 20th century, the most remarkable American photographers had, on the whole, tried to make photography into a "fine fine art" by divorcing information technology from its ubiquitous presence as a recorder of moments and by splicing it onto older, painterly traditions. A clutch of gifted photographers, yet, have, since the end of Globe War II, been able to transcend the distinction between media image and aesthetic object—between fine art and photojournalism—to make from a single, pregnant moment a consummate and enduring image. Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and Robert Frank (the latter, similar so many artists of the postwar menses, an emigrant), for example, rather than trying to make of photography something equally calculated and considered equally the traditional fine arts, institute in the instantaneous vision of the camera something at once personal and permanent. Frank's volume The Americans (l956), the record of a tour of the United States that combined the sense of accident of a family slide prove with a sense of the ominous worthy of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, was the masterpiece of this vision; and no work of the postwar era was more than influential in all fields of visual expression. Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and, above all, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who together dominated both way and portrait photography for almost half a century and straddled the lines between museum and magazine, high portraiture and low commercials, all came to seem, in their oscillations betwixt glamour and gloom, exemplary of the predicaments facing the American artist.
Adam GopnikThe theatre
Maybe more than whatsoever other fine art form, the American theatre suffered from the invention of the new technologies of mass reproduction. Where painting and writing could choose their distance from (or intimacy with) the new mass culture, many of the historic period-old materials of the theatre had by the 1980s been subsumed by movies and television. What the theatre could do that could not exist done elsewhere was not always clear. Every bit a consequence, the Broadway theatre—which in the 1920s had withal seemed a vital area of American culture and, in the high menstruation of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, a place of cultural renaissance—had by the end of the 1980s become very nearly defunct. A brief and largely false jump had taken place in the menstruation only after World War II. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, in particular, both wrote movingly and even courageously about the lives of the "left-out" Americans, enervating attention for the outcasts of a relentlessly commercial society. Viewing them from the 21st century, however, both seem more than traditional and less profoundly innovative than their contemporaries in the other arts, more profoundly tied to the conventions of European naturalist theatre and less inclined or able to renew and rejuvenate the language of their form.
Likewise much influenced by European models, though in his example by the absurdist theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, was Edward Albee, the nigh prominent American playwright of the 1960s. As Broadway'south dominance of the American stage waned in the 1970s, regional theatre took on new importance, and cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Louisville, Kentucky, provided significant proving grounds for a new generation of playwrights. On those smaller but even so potent stages, theatre continues to speak powerfully. An African American renaissance in the theatre has taken place, with its almost notable figure being August Wilson, whose 1985 play Fences won the Pulitzer Prize. And, for the renewal and preservation of the American language, there is all the same nothing to equal the phase: David Mamet, in his plays, amongst them Glengarry, Glen Ross (1983) and Speed the Plow (1987), both caught and created an American vernacular—verbose, repetitive, obscene, and eloquent—that combined the local colour of Damon Runyon and the bleak truthfulness of Harold Pinter. The one completely original American contribution to the stage, the musical theatre, blossomed in the 1940s and '50s in the works of Frank Loesser (especially Guys and Dolls, which the critic Kenneth Tynan regarded as 1 of the greatest of American plays) but became heavy-handed and at the offset of the 21st century existed largely equally a revival art and in the brave "holdout" work of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods). As the new century progressed, nonetheless, innovation once more found its way to Broadway with productions such as Steve Sater and Duncan Sheik'south Jump Enkindling, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman's Wicked, Jeff Whitty, Jeff Marx, and Robert Lopez's Avenue Q, Lopez, Matt Stone, and Trey Parker's The Book of Mormon, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton.
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