postmodernism vs. "art"

[tlewis]

Walter Benjamin was concerned with (or, to get with the jargon)
, theorized the symptoms of mass participation in the shaping of
cultural modernism. Unlike Greenberg, however, Benjamin
articulated them to new aesthetic tendencies that--divorced
from the cult of individual genius, the canon, disciplinary
autonomy, aesthetic purity, and so on--nevertheless did not
reduce cultural production to the vulgar display of
monumental socialist realism, fascist agitprop, or kitsch
consumerism. While Greenberg eschewed the spectacle of
mass communication, Benjamin proposed a materialist
intervention into consumer culture by reversing art's
traditional social function, which "instead of being based
on ritual . . . begins to be based on another practice--
politics" (WMP, 224). Against fascism's "introduction of
aesthetics into political life" (241)--its auraticization of
politics, nationalism, and mass spectacle--he campaigned for
a counter-strategy of "politicizing art" as critique.
Revolutionary art must not only pursue progressive
tendencies in form and content, Benjamin insisted, but
should effect what Brecht theorized as a broader "functional
transformation" (Umfunktionierun) of the institutional
practices in the expanded social field.

Responding to the spectacle of postmodernism,
critical artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Hans
Haacke have adopted tactics of quotation, citation, and
appropriation that were pioneered some five decades earlier
in Benjamin's examination of international Dada and the
Russian futurists in such essays as "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Artist as
Producer." The challenge that Benjamin laid down was
for every author to become a producer, every artist a
theorist, in the general remapping of generic boundaries,
aesthetic traditions, and cultural conventions that the age
demanded. Not incidentally, in photography this political
requisite entailed a subversion of "the barrier between
writing and image. What we require of the photographer,"
Benjamin insisted, "is the ability to give his picture the
caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a
revolutionary useful value. In thus linking
photographic activity to language and signification,
Benjamin's critique of photographic mimesis looks forward to
Roland Barthes' postwar argument that "the conventions of
photography . . . are themselves replete with signs."

In the age of mass communication, as Barthes would go on to
argue in the 1960s, every pictorial form is always already a
linguistic text.