Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images

POSTMODERNISM

Modernism and Postmodernism

● Both styles are FORMALIST: as much concerned with how a story is told, as the story itself. Both feature fragmentation, self-referentiality, irony, doubling and pastiche.

Modernism and Postmodernism

● Postmodernism has many different definitions, depending on which art is being discussed. Pomo is different in architecture, for instance, than it is in film.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism: unlike Modernism, Postmodernism starts from the assumption that grand utopias are impossible. It accepts that reality is fragmented and that personal identity is an unstable quantity transmitted by a variety of cultural factors. Postmodernism advocates an irreverent, playful treatment of one's own identity, and a liberal society.

http://www.ffotogallery.org/th-edu/glossary.htm

POSTMODERNISMSome features of postmodern styles:Nostalgia and retro styles, recycling earlier genres and styles in new contexts (film/TV genres, images, typography, colors, clothing and hair styles, advertising images) "...the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve... The information function of the media would thus be to help us to forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms of our historical amnesia" (Jameson). Culture on Fast Forward: Time and history replaced by speed, futureness, accelerated obsolescence.

TRADITIONAL POSTMODERN

ENCLOSED OPEN UNSELFREFERENTIAL SELFREFERENTIAL

UNSELFCONSCIOUS SELFCONSCIOUS

BELIEF IN VALUES (SINCERE)

DISBELIEF IN VALUES (IRONIC)

SINGLE NARRATIVE (“Single Coding”)

MULTIPLE NARRATIVES ("Double Coding")

(Pretends to be) OBJECTIVE SUBJECTIVE

POSTMODERN

NO REALITY, ONLY PERCEPTIONS, COPIES

(SIMULACRA)

NO SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

PAST AND PRESENT SAME

MASS-PRODUCED

INDIVIDUALISM (“These jeans are

you!”)

TRADITIONAL (REALIST)

REALITY

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

HISTORY

INDIVIDUALISM

Paris, Las Vegas

SIMULACRA[JEAN BEAUDRILLARD]

REALIST POSTMODERN

ACTUAL VIRTUAL

Distinction between “High Art” and “Low Art”

No distinction: all viewsequally valid (and invalid)

Celine Dion, Rolling Stones, etc.

David Bowie, rap, hip-hop, Madonna, Eminem

CBS News The Daily Show

King of the Hill The Simpsons, Family Guy

Drew Carey Show Drew Carey Show

Sound of Music Adaptation, American Beauty, Scream

TRADITIONALAt best: Meaningful, engrossing, moving

At worst: Deceptive, sentimental

POSTMODERNAt best: Playful, curious,

startling

At worst: Detached, nihilistic, sexist, despairing,

homophobic, racist

Double Coding: Film● Knight's Tale: Medieval setting, Queen's We Will Rock You song● Moulin Rouge: Victorian Paris setting, Smells Like Teen Spirit song● Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors: Playing with different possible scenarios● Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich: Reality is fragmented, memory unreliable, past and present indistinguishable,identity uncertain ● Shrek: Princess fights like martial-artist, cross-references to Disney

Double Coding

Madonna: Both Virgin and Not-Virgin

Britney: Both Innocent andNot That Innocent

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

Matt Groening, The Persistence of the Simpsons

Postmodernism

Andy Warhol, Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan), 1985 Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup, 1968

Postmodernism

Roy Lichtenstein, Untitled, 1968

Charles Ray, Untitled, 1991

Self-Referentiality

Lisa: “Don’t worry, Bart. It seems like every week something odd happens to the Simpsons. My advice is to ride it out, make the occasional smart-aleck quip, and by next week, we’ll be back to where we started from, ready for another wacky adventure.”

“Homer Loves Flanders,” The Simpsons

Self-Referentiality

Seinfeld: A sitcom in which nothing happens, about a man named Jerry Seinfeld, played by Jerry Seinfeld, who writes a sitcom in which nothing happens.

The Postmodern Hero

Postmodern heroes in realist narratives

Double-Coding (Doubling)

● Double-coding is the practice of creating a work of art that speaks to two different audiences in different ways.

● For example, Animaniacs, Shrek, Toy Story and the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons are double-coded - they have many references that a child won’t get but will amuse an adult.

Pastiche● Can mean either a (satirical)

imitation of another work, or a “hodge-podge” of different styles all thrown together in one work.

● Family Guy is often a pastiche of other TV, film and musical genres or specific work, to the extent that any given episode may have no other meaning.

Kitsch…theorists…have… linked kitsch

to totalitarianism. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), defined it as “the absolute denial of shit.” His argument was that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptable consensus; by contrast, “everything that infringes on kitsch,” including individualism, doubt, and irony, “must be banished for life” in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote, “Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”

(wikipedia.org)

Collectible Plates

“Collectible” Figurines

Kitsch

Margaret Keane, Wistful, 1978

Margaret Keane

Kitsch

KitschAnne Geddes (1956-)

Kitsch

LOL Cats

“Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland.... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer

real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.”

Jean Baudrillard-- Simulacra and Simulation p. 12-13

Epcot Center