Definitions
CL Hamshaw
"formalist") def of pomo and the beyond modernism conceptualization of
pomo.
"The postmodern avant-garde has asserted its opposition to the dominant
brand of modernism--and its continued ascendancy in the art world at
large--by attempting to strip the idea of "modernism" itself of the
consistency, univocality, and autonomy (in short, the consolation) of a
period "style." It has done this both by "re-inventing," as it were, a
neglected modernist heritage, and, more important, by offering an art of
its own founded upon contingency, multiplicity, and polyvocality.
Performance, which was (and remains) styleless, diverse, and
conspicuously unprogrammatic, has consistently proved one of the most
readily available means for realizing this strategy of opposition. but
its very diversity has led to an even greater confusion. It has
generally been assumed that the stylistic "pluralism" of performance,
and by extension the "pluralism" of all art since about 1970, is
synonymous with postmodernism itself, that "pluralism" is the sine qua
non of the postmodern condition. That is, formalist criticism has been
quick to recognize, more or less correctly, that the contingency,
multiplicity, and polyvocality of postmodern art constitutes a style in
its own right and has proceeded to designate this style as,
interchangeabley, "pluralist" and "postmodern." The profusion of
individual discourses within this postmodern "condition"--in painting
alone we have had minimalism, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, neo-geo,
graffiti, abstract illusionism, photorealism, "bad" painting, pattern
and decoration, and so on--has remained, nevertheless, eminently
amenable to a formalist approach, since no matter how pluralistic the
scene as a whole has become, individual works have remained by and large
stylistically coherent, formally integrated, and wholly autonomous. From
this point of view, pluralism (and by extension postmodernism) has
become confused with a kind of Me-Generation, do-your-own-thing,
I'm-OK-you're-OK aesthetics, and the only grounds upon which one could
make judgments of artistic value were, in fact, formalist ones--if the
work held together, possessed its own intrinsic unity, then it had to be
more or less all right. In his preface to an anthology of essays that
was among the first to take on the question of postmodern art's
oppositional status, The Anti-Aesthetic, published in 1983, Hal Foster
warns against precisely such a conflation of "pluralism" and
"postmodernism." For Foster, "pluralism" is a "quixotic notion that all
positions in culture and politics are now open and equal. This
apocalyptic belief that anything goes, that the 'end of ideology' is
here, is simply the inverse of the fatalistic belief that nothing works,
that we live under a 'total system' without hope of redress." Even when
individual works have mixed different styles within a single
work--thereby intentionally dismissing, in an overtly antiformalist
gesture, the idea of formal coherence, for example--they still indulge
in an easygoing eclecticism. Jean-Francois Lyotard, the author of The
Postmodern Condition, has complained about the "postmodern" tendency to
mix various styles in the same work in the name of an avant-garde
"pluralism"--a complaint he aims directly at so-called postmodernism in
architecture. He writes: "Mixing neo- or hyper-realistic motifs with
lyrically abstract or conceptual ones on a single surface is saying that
everything is equal because everything is easy to consume...[Such]
eclecticism panders to the habits of magazine readers, to the needs of
consumers of standard industrial imagery, to the sensibility of the
supermarket shopper." This is a brand of postmodernism, he says, which
it is the responsibility of artists to question and avoid.
At the outset, then, I want to insist on one basic separation of terms:
pluralism and postmodernism are not, despite popular usage, synonymous.
"Pluralism" is the critical crutch of an outmoded and inadequate
formalist aesthetics. In the following pages I have consistently tried
to indicate how a formalist-pluralist methodology is stymied before the
kinds of postmodern work I am interested in. I have, in addition,
avoided using the word "pluralism" in this book, and I have instead
employed the concept of "undecidability"--borrowed (loosely) from the
work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida--to describe the condition of
contingency, multiplicity, and polyvocality which dominates the
postmodern scene. If pluralism can be defined as the many possible, but
more or less equal, "solutions" which arise in answer to a particular
aesthetic situation, undecidability is the condition of conflict and
contradiction which presents no possible "solution" or resolution.
Furthermore, because postmodern avant-garde art self-consciously denies
its own intrinsic unity and autonomy, most of the works of art I discuss
in these pages--performance and performance-related art--cut across the
traditional boundaries between media. The medium of avant-garde art is
itself "undecidable," almost by definition interdisciplinary. Roland
Barthes pointed out this state of affairs in the early seventies in an
essay on Masson's "semiograms"--that is, his ideographic paintings.
According to Barthes, Masson's semiograms offer up "a theory of the text
which twenty years ago did not exist and which today constitutes the
distinctive sign of the avant-garde." They are "proof that it is the
*circulation* of [between] the 'arts' (or elsewhere: of the sciences)
which produces movement: 'painting' here opens the way to 'literature,'
for it seems to have postulated a new object ahead of itself, the Text,
which decisively invalidates the separation of the 'arts.'" "
from _The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970_ by
Henry M. Sayre. U of Chicago Press, 1989. xi-xiii.
--
Carol L. Hamshaw
Administrator
Edgewise ElectroLit Centre
www.edgewisecafe.org