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MoveMeENTS IN MODERN ART

1G RESOURTES
CENTRE
Havering College
of Further and Higher Education
 MOVEMENTS IN Mopern Art

POSTMODERNISM
ELEANOR HEARTNEY

LEARNING RESOURCES
CENTRE
" Havering College
: of Further and Higher Education

oa TATE PUBLISHING
Cover:
Gilbert and George,
DEATH 1984 (detail
of fig.46)

Frontispiece:
Sarah Charlesworth
Figures 1983
(detail of fig.41)

ISBN 1 85437 305 6

A catalogue record
for this book is
available from the
British Library

Published by order
of Tate Trustees
by Tate Gallery
Publishing Ltd
Millbank, London
SWIP 4RG

©Tate 2001 All

rights reserved.
Eleanor Heartney
has asserted her
moral right to be
identified as the
author of this work

Cover designed by
Slatter-Anderson,
London.
Book designed by
Isambard Thomas

Printed in Hong
Kong by South Sea
International Press
Ltd

Measurements
are given in
centimetres,
height before width,
followed by inches
in brackets
 INTRODUCTION

I
NEO-EXPRESSIONISM 13

De

THE ANTI-AESTHETES 2if,

3
Commooity Critics At

4
Contents POSTMODERN FEMINISM 51

5
POSTMODERN MULTICULTURALISM 65

6
CONCLUSION ai

Bibliography 78

Index 19

Credits 80
INTRODUCTION
Like the concept of a God who is everywhere and nowhere, ‘postmodernism’ ts
remarkably impervious to definition. A term thrown about to describe
phenomena as diverse as the Star Wars films, the practice of digital sampling in
rock music, television-driven political campaigns and the fashion designs of
Jean Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake, postmodernism seems to permeate
contemporary life. And yet, there are few outside the confines of academic
departments devoted to Cultural Studies who could confidently say exactly
what they think it 1s.
Part of the difficulty stems from the name. ‘Postmodernism’, as the term
suggests, is unthinkable without modernism. It may be construed as a reaction
against the ideals of modernism, as a return to the state that preceded
modernism, or even as a continuation and completion of various neglected
strains within modernism. But whether the relationship ts defined as parasitic,
cannibalistic, symbiotic or revolutionary, one thing is clear: you cannot have
postmodernism without modernism. Postmodernism is modernism’s unruly
child. And since the definition of modernism itself remains in dispute, it
should come as no surprise that even postmodernism’s most ardent advocates
seem unable to come to any consensus about what, exactly, tt ts.
The severity of postmodernism’s identity crisis can be glimpsed in some of
the terms used to describe it. Characterised variously as ‘an incredulity toward
metanatrratives’, ‘a crisis of cultural authority’ and ‘the shift from production to
reproduction’, and tossed into conversation in the company of words like
‘decentred’, ‘simulation’, ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘anti-aesthetic’, postmodernism
seems to exist tenuously, Asta thing that can only be defined as the negation of
something else. To a student of the subject, postmodernism may feel very much
like Narcissus’ reflection in the water, which disintegrates the moment one
reaches out to grasp tt.
This, as it turns out, is a very postmodern way to be.
It may be easier to come at the problem by looking more closely at some
situations that might be termed ‘postmodern’. Take, for instance, the exclusion
of the press corps from actual scenes of carnage during the 1991 Gulf War. We
were shown instead the footage recorded by the air forces themselves on their
targeting equipment. This resulted in a war that played out on the television
screen like a video game of surgical strikes on abstract, two-dimensional targets.
In a more bucolic mode, one might point to the founding of a planned
community called Celebration outside Orlando, Florida. Touted as an
alternative to the crime-ridden cities and suburbs of the United States,
Celebration is the creation and bailiwick of the Disney Corporation. Drawing
on the mythology of small-town America that underlies Disney's own films and
theme parks, Celebration offers a return to a kinder, gentler era — an era that
only ever existed on celluloid.
And third, one of the most popular tourist attractions 1n France ts the
Lascaux caves, which contain spectacular paintings of hunting scenes from the
Palaeolithic era. The fact that the caves themselves have been closed to public
view since 1963, and that what is available for view are re-creations of the caves
and their paintings in a nearby quarry has done nothing to dim their appeal to
the thousands of yearly visitors.
What makes these situations postmodern? Each is characterised by it
removal from a reality whose absence is not even felt. Thus, each supports
the postmodern tenet that our understanding of the world is based, first
and foremost, on mediated images. Each affirms the notion that we live
within the sway of a mythology conjured for us by the mass media, movies,
advertisements.
With the ‘real’ world upon which such representations once rested yanked
from under us, we find ourselves tumbling down the postmodern rabbit hole.
In this strange new world, artworks are reborn as texts, history is exposed as
myth, the author dies, reality 1s repudiated as an outmoded convention,
language rules and ideology masquerades as truth.
How did we get into this predicament? And what does it all mean?
From a philosophical point of view, postmodernism ts associated with the
dethroning of Enlightenment ideas of progress, the independent subject, truth
and the external world. The dismal outcome of the utopian ideals that opened
the twentieth century have played a big role in undermining such beliefs. So
have developments in various scientific fields.
For instance, Einstein's theory of relativity forever exploded the old
Newtonian idea of a stable frame of reference, suggesting instead that time and
space exist as a continuum and can only be experienced relative to each other.
Further undercutting Newtonian certitude, Quantum Mechanics introduced
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which demonstrates that at the atomic
level the act of observation alters the object observed. Translated into layman's
terms, such ideas have infiltrated the culture at large and contributed to a sense
of reality’s inherent instability. Though they undermined our perceptions of
everyday reality, such ideas were still compatible with modernism because they
promised to produce facts that everyone could accept as true. But by mid
century, even that principle came under fire.
The scientific ideas that probably had the most impact on postmodern
theory was the thesis advanced by Thomas Kuhn to explain the evolution of
scientific thought. In his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962), Kuhn rejected the conventional idea that science progresses in a rational
way, with each new discovery building on and expanding the ideas that
preceded it. Instead, he proposed the history of science as a series of ruptures,
or ‘paradigms’, as he called them, which swept away the assumptions of the
previous regimes. [he illusion of continuity 1s created by the apparent
recurrence of terms or concepts that are revealed on closer examination to have
very different and often incompatible meanings from paradigm to paradigm.
Paradigms determine what ts thinkable, what constitutes a valid scientific
question, what one means by a fact. Thus for instance, the Newtonian idea of
gravity as action at a distance was unthinkable in an Aristotelian world where
scientific laws were based on movements of matter. Once gr ravity 1s understood
purely in an instrumental mode, as a reliable mathematica | formula, the old
questions become simply irrelevant.
Kuhn's thesis remains controversial in the scientific world, where his critics
point to the remarkable breakthroughs in all fields of scientific knowledge as
refutation of his notion that progress occurs only within paradigms and not
between them. But practitioners of disciplines outside science have been much
taken with his ideas, and they are frequently invoked by proponents of
postmodern theory. For them, the notion of the paradigm neatly encapsulates
the idea that truth and knowledge are relative, and depend upon the larger
system of assumptions and relations from which they emerge.
 This is quite compatible with the linguistic theories of structuralism and
poststructuralism, which also began to seep into the larger culture during the
1960s and 1970s. As laid out in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General
Linguistics, originally published in 1916, structuralism conceives of language as a
complex system composed of relationships between signs — those elements we
ordinarily call words. A sign is itself a relationship between a signifier — the
sound or script that makes up a word, and a signified — the meaning of that
word.
Construing a sign in this way makes it possible to see the arbitrary nature of
language. Notice that no mention has been made in this system of the ‘referent’
or the ‘real’, that is, the actual thing in the world, as opposed to the concept and
the look or sound of the word. Thus, structuralism questions the
commonplace idea that language has a natural connection to things ‘out there’.
Instead, meaning in language is an internal matter, coming from the interplay
between signifiers and signifieds.
A classic illustration of this involves three image and word pairings. The
word ‘tree’ and a picture of the tree might seem to have some natural and
constant relationship to each other. But a picture of a door, paired first with the
1
word ‘ladies’ and then with the word ‘gentlemen’ makes it clear that the
Mark Tansey connection between the signified and its signifier is totally dependent ona
A Short History of whole system of cultural understandings, social relationships, and
Modernist Painting
philosophical definitions of gender.
1982
Oil on canvas
Poststructuralism takes Saussure’s ideas further, in effect altogether
Three panels, each eliminating the real world, which exists as a shadowy presence 1n structuralism
147.3 x 121.9
proper. Now the signified drops out and the meaning of the signifier 1s simply
(58 x 48)
Courtesy of Curt a matter of its relationship to other signifiers. In poststructuralism, we do not
Marcus Gallery, create language from our concrete experience of the world. Rather, it creates us,
New York
in the sense that a complex structure of codes, symbols and conventions
precedes us and essentially determines what it 1s possible for us to do and even
to think.
Things are further complicated by the fact that meaning exists only in the
relationship between signifiers. Thus, it can never be precisely pinned down, as
it could when a signifier was tied toa signified. Instead, in poststructuralism,
meaning 1s constantly being deferred. Something will always escape any effort
to make a clear and definitive statement. As a result, language is haunted by
what is not, or cannot be, said.
Into the interstices of poststructural language comes deconstruction, a very
important concept for postmodernism. Deconstruction, as developed in the
writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a way of teasing out the
fissures that have opened up within meaning. By reading between the lines,
deconstruction reveals that the apparent meaning of the text often masks its
opposite. In this, Derrida takes a cue from Freud's notion of repression, in
which experiences, memories or feelings are pushed back into the subconscious
where they wreak havoc until brought back to the surface.
Deconstruction exposes that which has been suppressed in the name of
coherence. It demonstrates that any assertion of truth and any appeal to nature
or first principles is a sham. Rather (in a manner reminiscent of the workings
 of Kuhn’s paradigm), these are revealed to be the products of a particular
system of meaning. In a terminology that will become familiar to readers of
this book, they are ideological constructs that attempt to make that which ts a
product of a particular culture or thought system seem natural and inevitable.
An example may be helpful. Mark Tansey’s A Short History of Modernist Painting
(fig.1) playfully deconstructs the interpretation of modernism that held sway
for several decades in the art world at mid-century. As formulated by critic
Clement Greenberg (more of whom later), the history of modern art has been
a march toward purity in which each discipline — painting, sculpture, muSsIC,
architecture — slowly shrugs off such extraneous elements as representation,
narrative and outside reference so as to be true to its own medium. Tansy has
taken the hallowed principles of modernist painting and reduced them to
absurdity. The progression from the notion of the painting as a window on the
world, to a conception of it as a flat, self-contained surface and, finally, its
status as a mirror of the self, are presented as a set of literal anecdotes. No
longer necessary and inexorable, they appear here as an arbitrary set of
conventions. Tansey adds insult to injury by adopting a dry illustrative
technique, which Greenberg believed was long ago superseded by modernist
abstraction.
The application of poststructuralist thought to art has some surprising
consequences. Most famously it mandates what French theorist Roland Barthes
calls “The Death of the Author’ (or, for our purposes, the artist). Barthes’ idea
can best be understood by recourse to his distinction between the Work and the
Text. The Work takes us back to the prestructural realm, where there is a stable
external world from which an artwork or piece of writing issues.
Ihe reader's
job is simply to interpret, or in Barthes’ term, ‘consume’ it, in accordance with
the creator’s intentions.
[he Text, by contrast, 1s composed of that web of
interwoven signifiers and deferred meanings that is poststructuralism. Or as
Barthes describes it, the Text 1s ‘a mult: dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.
The Text has no author, or at least, no privileged figure who can be lifted
above any of the raw materials out of which it is composed. In the end, the Text
is created, not by the author, but by the reader who engages with it and puts it
to work. Barthes uses the metaphor of music to make his point, likening the
Text to a score, which the performer brings to life.
From the conventional viewpoint of art, the death of the author/artist iS AN
grievous blow, because it undermines the whole apparatus of art history, based
as it is on notions of signature style and individual genius. It also undercuts the
basis of the art market. From a commercial perspective, a work ‘in the school of
Rembrandt’ can never attain the stratospheric prices of an authenticated work
by the master himself, no matter how artistically satisfying It might be on all
other levels. What is art without an artist? Can the art system continue to
function in his or her absence?
Equally strange is the notion of artwork as text. Poststructuralism was
initially a theory of literature, so the transition from work to text still kepta
book or essay in its original realm of language. But artworks are objects in the

10
 world. They are created from tangible materials and appeal as much to the
physical senses of sight and touch as to the mind. How can paintings and
sculptures be thought of as ‘multidimensional spaces’ in Barthes’ sense? Must
we dispense with the art object altogether and replace it with something more

compatible with the requirements of the text? As we shall see, this ts the route
chosen by certain proponents of postmodernism.
To explain how art could have strayed so far from commonplace ideas about
aesthetics and creativity, a brief history of the term ‘postmodernism’ is now 1n
order. Like the French Revolution, which had multiple starting points, each
leading to a more extreme denouement, a variety of starting points have been
proposed for postmodernism. The word was used as far back as 1938 by Arnold
Toynbee for a new historical cycle that started in 1875 and signalled the end of
Western dominance and the decline of individualism, capitalism and
Christianity. Interestingly, though he
was writing before the period
generally thought of as high
modernism, Toynbee had already
conceptualised many of the
characteristics of postmodernism as
we think of it today.
2 ‘Postmodernism’ as a term first
Philip Johnson
entered popular consciousness
AT&T Building, New
through architecture in 1979
York completed 1979
Photograph by Joe
when Philip Johnson, one of the
Kerr/ Architectural founders of the austere form of
Association
modern architecture known as
the International Style, put a
Chippendale top on a skyscraper he
MM i it oem
1 ep donee cel created for AT&T (fig.2). In this, he
bie TH) gg ULE
was offering a highly visible example
of the thesis set out seven years
earlier by Robert Venturi in his
aptly named Learning from Las Vegas.
Venturi called for a return to the
vernacular forms, historical references and pop imagery that modernist
architecture had banished from buildings. Johnson's Chippendale top was
ironic and self deflating, putting a cosy domestic gloss ona form of
architecture that had grown remote and authoritarian.
In the art world, the idea of postmodernism first began to surface in the
1960s, with the emergence of trends like Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptualism
and performance. (In retrospect, nascent examples of postmodernism could be
detected much earlier in works by such artists as Duchamp, whose readymades
spoofed the preciousness of the art object, late De Chirico, who laid waste to
the idea of the uniqueness of the artwork by cannibalising his own work, and
even Picasso, whose abrupt stylistic changes madea mockery of the notion of
signature style).
Once open for discussion, postmodernism quickly evolved into an assault

11
 on the Greenbergian dogma and its insistence that modernist art constituted an
autonomous, self-referential field of human activity. The attacks came froma
number of different directions. Pop art revelled in commercial kitsch, wilfully
reopening the floodgates to the mass culture and mass taste from which
Greenberg thought he had saved high art. Minimalism reintroduced the
dreaded ‘theatricality’, making the viewer a part of the work by requiring him
or her to ‘activate’ the sculpture by moving around it. Conceptual art all but
obliterated the optical aspect of the art work so prized by Greenberg while
infecting it with the alien element of text. As he watched his fortress besieged
on all sides, the high priest of modernism decried the lowering of standards
and laid the blame on what he ominously referred to as ‘philistine taste’,
‘middlebrow demands’ and ‘the democratisation of culture under
industrialism’.
There was worse to come: Postminimalism, Body art, Land art,
performance, Neo-expressionism, feminism and multiculturalism, to name just
a few of the impending horrors. By the 1980s, postmodernism had effected a
marriage with poststructuralism, creating for the first time a style that began to
characterise itself as postmodern.
During the heyday of postmodernism, artists happily attached their names
to the work of other artists and renamed what would once have been termed
plagiarism as ‘appropriation’. Stuffed bears, plastic bunnies, lava lamps and
toilet-bowl cleaners invaded the museum, to be displayed with all the protective
security once awarded the Mona Lisa. Hoary forms of academic painting that
had been relegated to the dustbin of art history were suddenly a la mode. New
rules governed the artistic enterprise. The revolution against the modernist
faith in universality, artistic progress, shared meaning and quality was complete.

12
NEO-EXPRESSIONISM
Around 1980, the American art press, which had been prone to dour
ruminations on the death of painting, was suddenly galvanised by the
emergence of a group of brash young male painters. The newcomers
unapologetically disinterred a host of elements that critics of both the pro-
and anti-Greenbergian persuasion believed had been buried forever. These
included flamboyant brushwork, mythological subjects, nationalistic posturing
and premodern stylistic devices.
The ‘Neo-expressionists’ were an international
group, hailing from such countries as Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the
United States.
The art market had been languishing in the doldrums following redoubled
attacks on the art object by those of Conceptual, Postminimal and anti-
aesthetic persuasion. With the advent of Neo-expressionism, it perked up,
pleased once again that there was something tangible to sell. Younger critics and
curators, looking with longing back to the Abstract Expressionist heyday, had
despaired of ever having the opportunity to introduce a ‘great’ art movement or
artist to the world. Now they were filled with hope. There was a palpable sense
of relief in all quarters. It appeared that the endgame proferred by increasingly
radical attacks on the idea of art had been averted. Art history was back on
track.
And yet, as critic Arthur Danto pointed out, something seemed awry. Art
history, as a narrative of one thing after another, was indeed continuing. But art
history as a philosophical enterprise that evolved in accordance with larger
historical and cultural forces (and Danto as a practising philosopher was most

13
 interested in such forces) seemed irreconcilable with this new development. He
concluded, “This was not supposed to happen next’. Dantos discomfort
stemmed from his sense that art history had changed engines. No longer driven
by the profound philosophical questions that he believed underlay the
modernist enterprise, art was now fuelled by the far more banal needs of the
institutions that had arisen to nurture it. The market needed something to sell.
Critics and curators needed something on which to make a reputation. Artists
needed something to distinguish themselves from all the others.
Danto’s observation led him to formulate a much-discussed idea, namely,
that we have reached the end of art. By this, he was referring to art as a

ftx
Ssyy

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g

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ae

philosophical investigation ( his candidate for the end of ‘real’ art is Andy
Warhol's Brillo Box of 1964, discussed further in chapter 3). But, unlike others
who also sounded a death knell, Danto was upbeat. Art-making continues, he
maintained, and in fact, freed from the necessity of philosophical inquiry, has
entered into a new realm of pluralism. In the new era, he noted, paraphrasing
Dostoyevsky, ‘History ts dead and everything 1s permitted’,
Diagnosing the same phenomenon, Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson came
up with a bleaker prognosis, outlined in his essay ‘Postmodernism and
Consumer Society’ (1984). For him, the sudden eruption of a new style of
painting that borrowed promiscuously from history and mythology was yet

14
 another symptom of a malaise rooted in the emergence of consumer
capitalism. This latter is an economic system that obliterates national and
psychological borders, undermines social bonds, and fragments the individual
psyche, all in the name of turning active citizens into passive consumers. In the
cultural sphere, according to Jameson, it has produced a world dominated by
the twin conditions of pastiche and schizophrenia.
Jameson's description of pastiche draws on Barthes’ notion of the death of
the author, and suggests that the ease with which contemporary artists and
writers graze over the whole history of Western cultural expression is evidence
of their disconnection from any sense of unique selfhood. He gloomily
concludes that ‘in a world in which stylistic innovation Is no longer possible, all
that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the
voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’.
Postmodernism’s schizophrenia has a similar source. Jameson ts quick
to point out that he ts not referring to clinical pathology. Rather, taking A
cue from the poststructural psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, he describes
schizophrenia as a condition in which ‘tsolated, disconnected, discontinuous
material signifiers ... fail to link up into any coherent sequence’.The result ts
an experience of the world that occurs solely in the present tense — analogous
to the act of repeating the same word over and over until it becomes strange
3
and abstract. The cultural equivalent, Jameson suggested, was the wresting of
Jorg Immendorff
historical motifs from their original contexts in order to let them float freely
We're Coming from
Café Deutschland 1983 through contemporary paintings. Thus, Jameson suggested, Neo-expressionism
Linocut on paper only appears to bea re-engagement with history and a celebration of individual
180.3 x 229.4
creativity. In fact, it is rife with pastiche and schizophrenia and capable only of
(71 x 90%)
Tate arbitrary ahistoricism and an illusory individualism. Reservations expressed by
commentators like Danto and Jameson did little to temper the enthusiasm of
the larger art world for Neo-expressionism, though it did kick off widespread
debates over the authenticity, originality and sincerity of the artists who fell
beneath its rubric. It also inspired a rather nasty contretemps over the question
of Neo-expressionism’s latent politics.
It did not escape notice that two of the countries in which Neo-
expressionism had taken strongest hold were Germany and Italy, leaders of the
Axis during the Second World War. In the decades immediately following the
war, artists in both countries had resolutely rejected anything that smacked of
nationalism, nostalgia, or the insipid academicism that was associated with
German and Italian Fascism. By the 1970s, however, a new generation had
arrived on the scene. It had no personal involvement in the horrors of the war
and felt constricted by the unstated ban on certain kinds of debate.
Arguing that the pursuit of national identity is not the same thing as
nationalism, artists began to explore what had been forbidden fruit. Jorg
Immendorff was a student of Joseph Beuys, the most influential artist of
Germany's post-war era. Seeking a way out of the contradictions of German
history and identity, Beuys had turned to performance and installation in an
effort to heal the rift between politics and spirituality in the modern psyche.
Immendorff shared Beuys’ sense of mission, but determined to pursue it
through the discredited medium of painting.
 Immendorffs best-known works are a series of paintings under the title Café
Deutschland, created during the late 1970s and early 1980s (fig.3). They are set ina
cavernous, dimly lit café crammed with figures and symbols from Germany's
present and recent past. The artist often appears, passed out on a table,
drinking with friends, or otherwise participating in the festivities. Around him
swirl the café’s other denizens — one may find figures like Erik Honnecker —
President of what was then East Germany, fellow artist A.R. Penck and Karl
Marx. Ice swastikas attest to a frozen history, a screaming German eagle with

knife-like talons swoops down aggressively, nude couples dance with decadent
abandon. The café, whose careening interior suggests a nightmarish cartoon,
provides a metaphor for the artist’s psyche, rent by an unspeakable history anda
brutally divided country.
A similar sense of imbalance dominates the work of Georg Baselitz. A
refugee from East Germany in the 1970s, Baselitz remembers watching the
firebombing of Dresden as a child. Like Immendorff, he also defied the
interdiction against painting, and in the mid-1960s began creating broadly
brushed expressionist representations of loutish peasant figures astride ruined

16
 landscapes. Gradually, these figures began to fragment, seeming literally to tear
themselves apart on the canvas. Then, in 1969, they flipped upside down, where
they have remained ever since.
Baselitz maintains that the inversion of his figures prevents a literal
interpretation of the image. Yet, as in Adieu (fig.4), it is impossible not to read
into the hanging figures the sense of a world that can never be set right. Here,
two figures composed of furious slashing brushstrokes seem to be heaving out
of the canvas, oblivious to each other’s presence. The sense of disconnection ts
only enhanced by the implacable yellow and white grid that serves as backdrop,
untouched by their agitation.
The German Neo-expressionist who has stirred the strongest acclaim and
censure 1s Anselm Kiefer. His ambitious works draw on deep recesses of
German romanticism, which had retreated underground in the immediate post-

4
Georg Baselitz
Adieu 1982
Oil on canvas
250 x 300.5
(98% x 118)
Tate

5
Anselm Kiefer
Parsifal Il] 1973
Oil and blood on paper
on canvas
300.7 x 434.5
(118% x 171)
Tate

war era. Borrowing from Nordic, Greek, Egyptian, early Christian and Jewish
mythology, as well as Teutonic mysticism, he creates works that ambiguously
mingle references to German guilt and German idealism. What ts Kiefer’s
stance on Germany’s chilling history? Does he hope to rekindle a sense of
German identity by vaulting back past the twentieth century to a supposedly
purer time?
Kiefer's paintings leave these questions open. The Parsifal cycle (1973), for
instance, draws on the legend celebrated in one of Wagner's key operas.
(Wagner's ties to the Third Reich already make this reference problematic for
many commentators. )Parsifal is a reworking of the legend of the Holy Grail.
Wagner transforms it into an allegory of the artist / warrior. Emerging in
innocence into the world, brought up in ignorance of the chivalric traditions of
hunting and war, Parsifal is ordered to recover the spear that will restore peace

ef
 to earth. Kiefer’s paintings make oblique references to the tale, employing as a
setting a wooden attic that doubles as a symbol of the artist’s studio and hence
his inner world. In Parsifal ILI (fg.5), the sword appears thrust into the floor and
the names of the opera's characters, as well as an unsettling reference to the
terrorist Baader Meinhof group, can be deciphered within the wood grain.
Kiefer’s Parsifal paintings ask: is the world to be saved by violence or art? Are
ignorance and innocence a sufhicient bulwark against the evils of the world?
The debate over the new German painting revolves around its political
implications. Seeing a dangerous nationalism at work, the German-born
Marxist critic Benjamin Buchloh cites parallels between this new work and the
reactionary turn of avant-gardist
artists of the 1920s and 1930s as they
embraced authoritarian regimes in
Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and
6
Spain. Buchloh suggests that the Giorgio de Chirico
quest for national identity in the The Painter's Family
work of German and Italian Neo- 1926
expressionists is in fact an unhealthy Oil on canvas
146.4 x 114.9
flirtation with the Fascist elements of (57% x 45%)
their countries’ recent pasts. Tate

American critic Donald Kuspit

7
disputes these arguments, Carlo Maria Mariani
maintaining instead that artists like Offspring of Helios
1982
Kiefer and Immendorftt dredge up
Lithograph on paper
these nightmares in order to purge 62.2 x 87 (24% x 344)
them. The German painters, he Tate
argues, perform an extraordinary
8
service for the German people. They Sandro Chia
lay to rest the ghosts — profound as Water Bearer 1981
only the monstrous can be — of Oil and pastel on
German style, culture and history, so canvas
206.5 x 170
that the people can be authentically (79 x 98%)
new’. Tate

In the Italian version of Neo-

expressionism, similar dynamics are
at work. Here, the artists are looking
back to Italian painting of the 1920s
and 1930s, a period derided by high modernists as decadent and aesthetically
inferior. Of particular interest to them is Giorgio de Chirico, whose
metaphysical painting, filled with mannequins, classical motifs, and a dream-
like remove from the realities of political life, stood in such sharp contrast to
the forward thrust of official modernism (fig.6). To make matters more
delicious, De Chirico’s late work turned cannibalistic, as he endlessly recopied
his own earlier productions. It was a strategy that the later generation would
hail as an anticipation of their own questions about originality and
authorship.
The most archly historicist of the Italian Neo-expressionists is Carlo Marta

18
19
 Mariani. He explains his attraction to the past as a revulsion against a
contemporary world in which we ‘seem to have lost our sense of values’. His
work ts a remarkably convincing recreation of the neoclassical style, which
reigned in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century. Often there are
contemporary references — portraits of artist friends and associates, but they
are reimagined as classical heroes or gods. Mariani’s ongoing theme seems to be
the retreat through art to a timeless realm of beauty and perfection, suggested
in Offspring of Helias (fig.7), for example, as a reworking of myth of the sisters of
Phaethon in which a pair of beautiful nymphs are transformed into trees.
There is an irony, perhaps intended, perhaps not, in Martant’s choice of
style. The neoclassical period was itself an emulation of the imagined ideals of

9
Francesco Clemente
Midnight Sun II 1982
Oil on canvas
201 x 250.7
(79 x 98 %)
Tate

10
Julian Schnabel
Humanity Asleep 1982
Mixed media on
wooden support
274.3 x 365.6 x 28
(108 x 144 x 11)
Tate

ancient Greece and Rome, and as such, was a favourite reference for the
imperial ambitions of the Italian Fascist and Nazi regimes,
De Chirico ts an especially important influence on Sandro Chia, whose work
transforms images drawn from sources such as classical sculpture and Italian
Futurism into tableaux edged with absurdity. Chia’s work has been described as
an anti-classical classicism, in that it seems to spoof the classical prototypes
that Mariani takes more seriously, Chia’s protagonists are muscular young men
in the mode of the neoclassical hero, but when they are clothed, they are in
peasant garb and they convey a sense of vacuous naiveté that is not in keeping
with the heroic ideal. Often, they are in transit, though the purpose of the
journeys are unclear. In his Water Bearer (fig.8 ) the title suggests a mission, yet
the young man struggles not with a water-filled vessel but with a giant fish.

20
Chia suggests an interpretation when he remarks: “The fish is a symbol of death
... It is the biggest thing we carry around with us.
The flight from the modern world takes a different form in the work of
Francesco Clemente. Rather than escaping into an idealised past (made simpler
for the Italian Neo-expressionists by the existence of an almost overwhelming
artistic heritage),Clemente has turned inward. He mixes Western traditions
with Eastern ones — especially from Hindu art and philosophy — to create
works that suggest the experience of the world as an extension of the self.
Whilst Clemente employs motifs from sources as diverse as Christianity, tarot,
alchemy and astrology, his recurring theme is his own signature face and body,

androgynous, auto-erotic and polymorphous sexuality, which draws on his

interest in Tantric yoga.
Midnight Sun II (fig.),for instance, 1s filled with multilayered symbols that
speak of a kind of spiritual transcendence through sex. Three entwined figures,
one of them blindfolded, are surrounded by a sea of eyes that also have vaginal
overtones. [hese may make reference to a Hindu legend of the God Indra, who
was punished for a sexual indiscretion by having his body covered with marks
of the yont, or vagina, which were later transformed into eyes. But here they are
each topped with a small sail. As the small vessels set off for parts unknown,

21
 they seem to partake of a form of a sexually inspired knowledge emanating
from the central figures.
American art historian Irving Sandler has chronicled how Neo-
expressionism was initially presented by its advocates in Europe as a counter to
American hegemony in international culture and economics. Italian and
German Neo-expressionism, In particular, were posited as areturn to
humanism and the venerable artistic traditions that the Americans had all
but obliterated with their McDonaldisation of commerce, culture and media.
But by the time the German and Italian Neo-expressionists burst onto the
American scene, they found they had to contend with a home-grown
variation.
In the United States, the emergence of Neo-expressionism coincided with
the onset of the Reagan era, and the two phenomena were often linked in
critical discourse. For its supporters,
the new movement spoke to a
hunger for feeling after twenty" 11
years of carefully cultivated irony Jean-Michel Basquiat

and aesthetic distance. But Horn Players 1983

d etractors sug© gested that the Neo- Acrylic and mixed

co)
media on canvas
expressionists S were bourgeois rebels, 243.8 x 190.5
cultivating an aura of raw feeling and (96 x 75)
The Broad Art
unbridled expression while looking Foundation
over their shoulders at the newly
invigorated art market, which was
12
eager to snap up their works. Eric Fischl
The artist who received the Bad Boy 1981
largest brunt of such attacks was Oil on canvas
167.6 x 243.8
Julian Schnabel, a native Texan whose
(66 x 96)
|ORNIIHOLOGS | outsize personality and penchant Daros Collection,
sees
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self my wale
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AL CHE MY,
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} for Neo- New York
expressionism, Styling himself asa
man of enormous appetites, he once
posed as Tennessee Williams’ ultra
macho Stanley Kowolski in a photo spread for Vanity Fair magazine.
Schnabel took on weighty themes in his work, among them life and death,
earthly suffering and spiritual transcendence. He went so far as to title one
painting Portrait of God (1981). In another, a self-portrait entitled Saint Sebastian —
Born in 1951 (1979), he hinted that he was a martyr for art. His materials were
unorthodox too: he scrawled text and loose imagery over black velvet, pony
hide, raw tarpaulin and Kabuki theatre backdrops.
But Schnabel remains best known for paintings on fields of broken crockery.
Drawing the brush over these pseudo-archeological surfaces, he was able to pit
image and material against each other in an equal competition. The crockery
served a dual purpose. On one hand it made art-historical references to
Antonio Gaudi’s expressionist architecture and to Byzantine mosaics. But also,
thanks to the banality of the mass-market plates and teapots that served as raw

22
material, it introduced a satisfyingly postmodern element of kitsch. In
Humanity Asleep (fig.10),Schnabel uses broken plates as the ground for a
typically grandiose theme: the artist's fight for understanding in an uncaring
world. Hard to make out over the shards are images of a pair of heads, one a
self portrait, the other belonging to the artist's friend Francesco Clemente,
clinging to a raft. Rising protectively above them ts an angel with a sword
encircled by a halo/mirror, suggesting that the artist's best tool is his own
self-reflection.
Neo-expressionist mythmaking also extended to the career of Jean-Michel
Basquiat, a young man of mixed black and hispanic heritage. Basquiat first
appeared on the scene in the guise of SAMO, a streetwise grafhiti artist whose

tags betrayed an astute understanding of politics and the art world. Absorbed
into the art world and using his own name, he became celebrated as an
authentic voice of the street. His paintings blended artfully scrawled texts and
cartoonish imagery, which made reference to Jazz, sports, Harlem renaissance
literature, racism and other elements of the black experience in America. Horn
Players (fig.11), which pays tribute to the jazz musicians Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie, IS a JaZZy MIX of grafhti-like imagery and texts that reference
these masters’ music, their places in history and the effect of jazz on the human
body.
Contrary to his public image, however, Basquiat was the product of a
solid middle-class upbringing. This set him apart from the other, less
sophisticated grafhtt artists who were also briefly taken up by collectors and art

23
 cognoscenti as the Reagan era's version of ‘radical chic’. Nevertheless, Basquiat
cultivated his ‘wild child’ persona, and when he died of a drug overdose in 1988
aged twenty-seven, he was quickly proclaimed a martyr to art and a victim of
the overheated hype machine of the 1980s art world in America.
Not all the American Neo-expressionists were so overt in their embrace of
the 1980s cult of personality. Eric Fischl took a more circumspect attitude
towards the Reagan era's strange combination of free-market economics and
social conservatism, although in the height of the market frenzy over Neo-
expressionism, any critical overtones in his work did not prevent them from
selling extremely readily. Fischl’s chosen subject during this period was the
undertone of corruption and decadence in the upper-middle-class suburban
lifestyle that exemplified the American Dream. Lifting the curtain, he
relayed hints of incest, paedophilia, rape and other sexual perversities taking
place in suburban living rooms, bedrooms and even outside beside the
Olympic-size pool. Bad Boy (fig.12) is particularly pointed in its demolition
of the Reagan-era devotion to family values. An adolescent boy sits ina —
suburban bedroom watching a naked woman — presumably his mother —
writhe in post-coital satisfaction as the afternoon light breaks through the slats
in the Venetian blind. Fischl suggests a double transgression. One involves
sexual voyeurism with overtones of incest. The other is a theft scenario as the
boy’s hands dip into the woman's handbag behind his back. (The analogy
13
between the woman's vagina and purse have been duly noted by critics of a Christopher Le Brun
psychoanalytic bent.) Dream, Think, Speak
1981
Meanwhile, Neo-expressionism also flowered in Great Britain. Figurative
Oil on canvas
art had never really disappeared there, as it had in the United States and the rest
244 x 228.5 (96 x 90)
of Europe. In fact, figurative artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Tate

R.B. Kitay remained among the most celebrated in England at a time when
painting was being daily decreed dead in other art circles.
As a result, British Neo-expressionism could be seen as part of a continuing
tradition rather than a reactionary return, Christopher Le Brun’s dreamlike
images emerge out of a welter of Abstract Expressionist-type brushstrokes.
The white horse ts a recurring image, replete with associations from legend and
folk tales of purity and truth. In Dream, Think, Speak (fig.13), we are presented
with a pair of horses, one full-bodied and emerging from what might be a
dark lake flanked by shadowy tree forms. The other is partial, a severed ghost-
like head appears off to the side. Le Brun feels a kinship with visionary
British painters like Turner and William Blake, but is equally connected to the
modernist tradition. He sees no contradiction between abstraction and
figuration, noting that his images evolve during the painting process like half-
forgotten memories tossed up by the subconscious. The title of the work
comes from the journal of Delacroix and suggests the way in which painting
itself matertalises.
Scottish artist Steven Campbell takes a much more self-conscious approach.
He cobbles his paintings together from the materials at hand, scattering them
with literary and historical references that serve as clues for the viewer to
decipher. The Dangerous Early and Late Life of Lytton Strachey (fig.14), is crammed
with symbols and images relating to the hypocrisies of the Victorian era.

24
 Campbell's eponymous hero, the biographer and chronicler of late Victorian
mores, is depicted at three stages of life — as a baby in a cabbage, as a young boy
and as a mature adult. The latter two are attached to targets (located on the boy's
cap and in the man’s arms), suggesting that, in exposing the sexual and political
peccadillos of others, Strachey makes himself vulnerable to similar attack. The
wallpaper pattern of pansies with human faces make humorous reference to
Strachey’s own sexual orientation, while other images refer to various subjects
of his biographies.
Campbell has a fondness for the art of British illustration, and for English
humorists such as Edward Lear and P.G. Wodehouse. His work reflects a

14
Steven Campbell
The Dangerous Early
and Late Life of Lytton
Strachey 1985
Oil on canvas
261.8 x 274.5
(103 x 108)
Tate

playful sensibility that is light years away from the weighty symbolism of
German versions of Neo-expressionism.,
As we have seen, Neo-expressionism unfolded differently in different native
grounds, suggesting that the notion of national culture might still have some
validity. [he more radical postmodern position, which we will investigate next,
derides any such notion as hopelessly nostalgic.
c

26
THE ANTI-AESTHETES
Neo-expressionism was seen as frivolously collaborationist by the austere
group of postmodernists who rallied around the banner of the ‘anti-aesthetic’.
With a few notable exceptions, they rejected painting as hopelessly corrupted
by its historic dependence on the art market and the mythology of heroic
individualism. Moving instead, as the critic Hal Foster put it, ‘from production
to reproduction’, they embraced text, photography and film as the proper tools
for a late twentieth-century art. Through these they could explore the one
legitimate subject left for art in the wake of the death of modernism. This was
representation — a postmodern buzzword that referred to the influx of media
and marketing messages out of which, these self-styled Jeremiahs proclaimed,
our illusory senses of self and reality are composed.
Scornfully deriding pluralist definitions of postmodernism implicit in the
analysis of writers like Danto and Jameson, they issued a call for‘a
postmodernism of resistance’. [heir mandate was to deconstruct the insidious
representations that have depoliticised the citizenry by making oppressive
ideological positions seem natural and hence incontestable. In this, they
adopted the critique of Roland Barthes, who gave the name ‘myth’ to this
fallacy, describing it thus: ‘|Myth] ... organises a world which is without
contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in
the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by
themselves.
Clarity being the enemy of postmodern resistance, the anti-aesthetes
married poststructuralism to postmodernism in order to unearth the

27
 contradictions hidden in ideological constructs. The first order of the day
was to convert the art object into text, in order to make it amenable to
deconstruction. This had already been partly accomplished by the Conceptual
art movement, which, by the late 1960s, had begun to move from the realm of
objects to the realm of ideas. Joseph Kosuth, one of the leaders of that
movement, insisted that artworks were actually analytical propositions. In Clock
(fig.15), he demonstrates how this works. Clock consists of three elements: a real
clock, a photo of the same clock printed actual size, and three blown-up entries
from an English—Latin dictionary for the words ‘time’, ‘machination’ and
‘object’. Which, Kosuth asks, is the real essence of the clock — the mechanical
object, its visual representation, or the web of ideas that give it meaning? Thus
the artwork itself poses a philosophical question about the meaning of
meaning.
In some hands, Conceptual art dropped the object altogether. Lawrence
Weiner presented ‘artworks’ that were simply strings of text to be painted on
the wall. These typically described tn words the kind of things and .

relationships conventionally found tn art galleries. In a work like MANY

COLORED OBJECTS PLACED SIDE BY SIDE TO FORM A ROW OF MANY
GCOLOKED OBJECTS (fig.16), he suggests that a linguistic description is
equivalent to a material object.
The critical postmodernists found such precedents useful, but felt that
Conceptualism was too narrowly focused on art. They wished to expand
linguistic analysis to the world at large. Thus, when a younger artist like Jenny
Holzer adopted a purely textual approach to art, she cast a much wider net. She
directed her attention to the contradictory messages conveyed to the general
public from the worlds of politics, advertising and popular culture and she
made her field of play the city street rather than the art gallery.
From the mid-1970s, Holzer began turning out series of propositions
printed on coloured grounds to be fly-posted on urban walls. The statements
had the authoritative tone of public-service announcements, but they offered
provocatively ambiguous and contradictory sentiments. Her Truisms were
statements like ABUSE OF POWER SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE’,
which often had the ring of truth until one examined them more closely.

28
 Holzer followed these with the Inflammatory Essays (fig.17), whose statements
seem to be culled from both the far right and far left of the political spectrum.
They exhort readers with such overheated rhetoric as: ‘REJOICE! OUR
TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE’, and “THE APOCALYPSE WILL
BLOSSOM’. Again they were fly-posted on walls and buildings throughout
downtown Manhattan.
True to Barthes’ injunction against authorship, such works refused to
relay the artist's real beliefs. Instead, the Truisms and the Inflammatory
Essays seemed to offer a literal demonstration of Barthes’ notion of the
artwork/text as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of
culture’. In the process, they suggest the emptiness at the core of most
political rhetoric.
While many of the most strident anti-aesthetes unequivocally rejected
painting as a medium for critical discourse, a small faction suggested that its
15
Joseph Kosuth
ties to discredited notions of authenticity and originality made it the perfect
Clock (One and Five)
vehicle for the final interment of modernism. In a much-discussed essay
English/Latin Version entitled ‘Last Exit: Painting’ (1981), critic and painter Thomas Lawson argued
1965
that “The appropriation of painting as a subversive method allows one to place
Clock, photograph and
printed texts
critical aesthetic activity at the
61 x 290.2 centre of the marketplace, where it
(24 x 114%)
can cause the most trouble’,
Tate
Some of the most effective of
16 these ‘subversive’ attacks came from
Lawrence Weiner
Germany, where the heroic
MANY COLORED
OBJECTS PLACED SIDE romanticism of Neo-expressionism
BY SIDE TO FORM A was particularly fevered. Gerhard
ROW OF MANY
COLORED OBJECTS Richter and Sigmar Polke, both
1979 students of Beuys and both born in
Anton and Annick
Herbert, Belgium
East Germany (a biographical fact
that gave them a certain outsider status in the still divided Germany), lay siege
to the idea of individual style and personal expression.
Polke’s work undermines the idea of artistic coherence. He mixes multiple
styles and modes of representation within each work to create a kind of visual
static in which potential meanings cancel each other out. He began employing
ben-day dots — the pattern of dots used in commercial four-colour printing —
only a few months after they were adopted by Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, for
whom they quickly became a signature style. In Polke’s hands, however, the
effect was quite different.
The dots formed screens that, when printed slightly
off-register, served to obscure and partially obliterate the images they were
supposed to convey. Later, Polke began to use other mechanical devices to
camouflage his images — painting them over preprinted fabric, overlaying thin
wire meshes, coating them with splashes of translucent resin, or as in Figure with
Hand (fig.18), laying them over a grid of nonsense letters and covering the whole
with a snakeskin dot pattern.
The conceptual connections between the partially visible images in Polke’s
work are also obscure. Drawn from mass-produced sources like advertisements,
news photos, children’s book illustrations and nineteenth-century engravings,

29
 they jostle together in a way that simultaneously encourages and undermines
the viewer's efforts to create meaningful associations.
Gerhard Richter denies coherence in another way. Internally, each work
manifests a single approach, but from one work to another, Richter displays
radically different styles. Taken as a whole, his oeuvre throws the whole
question of artistic expression into disarray. For instance, he creates abstract
paintings that make a cliché of their
expressiveness. An apparently spontaneous
DON'T TALK DOWN TO MeDONT gestural work like Abstract Painting No.439
(fig.19) isi in fact an enlargement of a small 17
N RELAX, ?'LL- é
SMILE OFF YOUR FACE. YO! sketch that has been projected on the canvas. Jenny Holzer
THIN. DON'T KNOW WHAT
But while the sketch (fig.20) has the raw from Inflammatory
Essays 1979-82
edges of an unrehearsed brushstroke, in the
Lithograph on paper
painting, Richter has tipped his hand by 43.1 « 43.1
carefully softening and blurring the (17 2a)
Tate
‘expressive’ marks.
If Richter’s abstract paintings have a 18
Sigmar Polke
mechanical quality, his photobased works are
Figure with Hand (1 Am
deliberately ‘painterly’ and abstract. Elizabeth I Made Dizzy by a Carpet
(fig.21) is based on a news photograph of of Rose Petals ...)
1973
Queen Elizabeth, but it has been painted as a
Offset lithograph on
soft blur, so that the tmage almost disappears paper 62.6 x 45.3
on close vie wing . Richter notes that he likes (24% x 17%)
Tate
to use images fon the mass media because
they liberate htm from personal experience. 19
However, he turns the tables on conventional Gerhard Richter

expectations. Richter’s media-based works, Abstract Painting

No.439 1978
rather than his expressionist abstractions,
Oil on canvas
have a gently romantic, hand-crafted look. 200 x 300
Not surprisingly, the American version (78% x 118)
Tate
of anti-painting painting took a different
turn. It took its cue on one hand from the 20
Gerhard Richter
slickness of American advertising, and on
Oil Sketch No.432/11
the other from an icy irony that ts the flip 1977
side of American sentimentality, Vhese Oil on canvas
qualities were particularly striking in the 52.4 x 78.4
(20% x 31)
work of Robert Longo, which presented Tate
images of masculinity and authority in forms
that evoked the monolithic power of corporate America. Echoing Lawson, he
noted that the disrepute of traditional art media made it seem ‘really radical to
draw, to paint’. He first gained attention with a series of huge, photographically
precise black and white drawings of corporate-type men and women. They
twist in contorted poses that suggest both recoil from a bullet and the steps of
an anguished dance (fig.22). In their expensive suits, the frozen figures speak of
the corporate wars that redirect instinctive survival drives toward the brutal
competition of the marketplace.
Later, Longo
é began
g to produce multipart artworks that mixed paintingg and

30
 drawing with aluminium and fibreglass constructions. They take the idea of
urban dehumanisation even further, graphically squeezing the human body
beneath or between emblems of corporate or military might. Sword of the Pig
(fig.23) is a coldly impersonal meditation on masculinity. Sword-like in overall
shape, each of its individual elements makes reference to stereotypes of
machismo. The sword hilt ts an
abstracted church tower, turned on
its side but flagrantly phallic
nevertheless. [he centre section 1s a
painting of the wildly muscular
torso of a body builder, which ts
attached to the final section, the
scabbard of the sword. This latter is
a reworking of a news photograph ai!
- a uo : : Gerhard Richter
of abandoned missile silos in the
: , : : Elizabeth | 1966
American Midwest, their upright
~ ; Step Offset lithograph on
forms completing the transcription Sy
of the male body into military 70 x 59.5 (274 x 23%)
‘ Hier seone [ate
weaponry. Longo notes that the ‘pig
of the title is derived from the WD.
Robert Longo
popular epithet for the overly macho
ao Sc Jules, Gretchen, Mark,
man. Pig 1S also a derogatory term
State |] 1982-3
for the police and in fact the upper Lithograph and
torso of the figure is based ona embossing on paper
S r +: 76.2 x 134
photogray
shotographh ofof a NewNew Yor York City) eee: ;
policeman. Tate
A different order of coldness
; 5 : me 23
permeates David Salle’s paintings. Robert Longo
Often grouped with the American Sword of
the Pig 1983
Neo-expressionists because of his Mixed media on wood
predilection for painting, Salle is relief, paper
and
ees ; oA: : aluminium
in fact their polar opposite. His 948 x 58851
paintings deliberately suppress any (97% x 231% 20)
53 z J Tate
hint of self expression, going so
far as to suggest that different sections, composed in different styles, come
from different hands. (And in fact Salle hires assistants to paint some sections
of his paintings.)
The imagery is equally cool, drawn from popular media,
soft-core pornography, modern-style home interiors, art history and kitsch.
Images are juxtaposed and overlaid tn ways that hint at associative meaning
without ever delivering it. Commentators have linked Salle'’s approach with that
of Pop artist James Rosenquist, who also assembles fragmentary compositions
from slightly out-of-date commercial and media tmagery (fig.24). But while
Rosenquist employs the hot seductive colours of advertising billboards to
evoke the mass media's manipulation of desire, Salle deliberately flattens his
palette. Much of the canvas ts painted in black and white, and the occasional
flashes of brilliant colour are neutralised by sickly shades of yellow and green
and greyed-out blue.

32
 In Satori Three Inches within Your Heart (fig.25), for example, a flat monochrome
rendering nullifies the erotic potential of the central nude, while the yellow
overlay distances us from any emotional impact that the social realist tableau at
the top might have possessed in its original form. Only the cut melon has any
real resonance, suggesting a displaced sexuality that can only be experienced
through eroticised objects. Lawson, pointing to Salle as exhibit A in his quest
to subvert painting from within, approvingly describes his works thus: “They
are dead, inert representations of the impossibility of passion in a culture that
has institutionalised self expression.
Though Salle and Longo continue to employ the discredited medium
of paint, photographic reproductions are central to their work. Critical
postmodernists take the mediation of reality as the central fact of contemporary
life and they take photography as the central exemplar of mediation.
Photography is quintessentially postmodern for a number of reasons. Because

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any number of equally distinct prints can be made from a single photographic
negative, there is no ‘original’, a condition that meshes perfectly with the
postmodern negation of uniqueness and originality. Because photography,
however manipulated, lies at the heart of most advertising and mass media, it
provides the most pervasive conduit for ideology, making it ripe for
deconstruction. And because photography is based on visual illusion — even the
most abstract photograph ts still a photograph of something — it wreaks havoc
with Greenberg's efforts to remove all external reference from art. As a result,
photography provides postmodernists both with the perfect tool and
the perfect target. As Thomas Lawson maintains, “The camera, in all its
manifestations, 1s our god, dispensing what we mistakenly take to be truth. The
Photograph is the modern world’.
Andy Warhol was arguably the first fully to recognise this fact, and his
photobased works enshrine a version of reality that is composed entirely of

33
34
 readymade images originally produced for the purposes of tabloid journalism,
advertisement, promotion and entertainment (fig.26).
However, Warhol still renders his images in paint, letting the transition
from photograph to silkscreened painting artfully confuse the distinction
between mechanical reproduction and hand craftsmanship. In the terminology
of Walter Benjamin's essay of 1936, lhe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ (a work that serves as holy writ for many of the anti-aesthetes),
his paintings still have ‘aura’, that ambiance of uniqueness that the multiply
reproducible photograph can never achieve.
Subsequent artists working with photography went further, eliminating
both the last vestiges of human touch and any reference to the original context
from which the image has been torn. In the 1970s, John Baldessari turned from

24
James Rosenquist
Marilyn 19 74
Lithograph on paper
90.5 x 69.5
(35% x 274)
Tate

25
David Salle
Satori Three Inches
within Your Heart
1988
Acrylic and oil on
canvas
214.2 x 291
(84% x 114%)
Tate

painting to the creation of photomontages based on B-movie stills. He notes

that he is not interested in the long-forgotten films from which they came, or
even in any cultural messages they might convey. Instead, they operate as open-
ended signifiers that can be shuffled in arbitrary ways to create new and
unintended narratives. For instance, Heel (fig.27) is an assembly of various
images that relate in one way or another to the word ‘heel’. While some are
literal representations of the bottom of feet, others take on more metaphoric
associations — as the command for a dog to stop, for instance, or as unflattering
slang for aman. Together, they invite the viewer to recompose them into any
order that makes sense.
By contrast, Victor Burgin ts interested in the social messages embedded in
photographic images culled from Hollywood film or advertising. After
isolating them from their sources, he provides new contexts that highlight the

35
unspoken assumptions they embody, Lei-Feng (fig.28) is composed of nine
panels, each containing the same photographic image of a prosperous family
celebrating a beautiful daughter's appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine.
The original caption for this photograph, which was an advertisement for
Bristol Cream sherry, read: ‘Every bread winner deserves to be toasted. Hence it
associated its product with beauty, economic success and family harmony.
Burgin has replaced this caption with a running narrative taken from a Maoist
parable about a young soldier who learns that it is more important to perform
the mundane tasks required by the community than to seek personal glory. In
other words, its message, which stresses the sublimation of self for the sake of
the collective, runs exactly counter to the celebration of individualism in the
photo above. A third element 1s an academic commentary on the semiotic

26
Andy Warhol
Marilyn Diptych 1962
Acrylic on canvas
2 panels, each
205.4 x 144.8
(81 x 57)
Tate

27
John Baldessari
Heel 1986
Black and white
photographs with oil
tint, oil stick, and
acrylic
270.5 x 220.9
(106% x 87)
Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Modern
and Contemporary Art
Council. Gift of the
artist

relationship of text and image and the arbitrary nature of the link between
signifier and sign. Taken together, the three apparently unrelated elements serve
as a caution against uncritical consumption of any mass-culture representation,
Baldessari and Burgin purloin already existing images and recontextualise
them in ways that leave plenty of room for viewer interpretation, But the more
extreme formulations of postmodern theory would do away with the artist
altogether and leave the task of constructing the meaning of a photographic
image solely with the viewer.
The ultimate example of this is the work of Sherrie Levine. Levine ignited a
minor controversy in the early 1980s with a series of photographs that were
simply unretouched photographs of works by illustrious art photographers like
Edward Weston and Walker Evans. From an old-fashioned perspective, these
works were simply plagiarism. But in postmodernist terms they were the purest
Si
 examples of appropriation, which was shorthand for the widespread practice
of plundering art-historical and mass-media images for use in contemporary
artworks.
Levine carefully included the name of the original photographer in each
work, titling them After Walker Evans or After Edward Weston (fig.29).She insisted
these became new works through her act of claiming them. In this, she was
echoing the assertions of the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘Pierre
Menard, Author of Don Quixote’ (1939), a droll conceit that briefly became
required reading in art schools thanks to Levine’s use of it to justify her attack
on authorship. In Borges’ story, a twentieth-century pedant named Pierre
Menard struggles to recreate several chapters of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not by
simply reading and transcribing them, or even by assuming, to the degree
possible at a remove of four centuries, the identity of Cervantes. Rather,
Menard resolved ‘to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through
the experiences of Pierre Menard’. This is followed by a comical passage in
which the reader is invited to read two identical passages from Cervantes’ and
Menard’s Quixote. The narrator marvels at the greater subtlety of Menard’s 28
Victor Burgin
‘version, coming as it does from a twentieth-century writer who has had to
Lei-Feng 1973-4
arrive at an archaic style and mental state despite his knowledge of the
Print on paper
intervening centuries. The point here is, of course, that the meaning of the 40.6 x 50.8
book changes when the reader imagines a different author. Thus tt presents a (16 x 20)
Tate
tongue-in-cheek illustration of Barthes notion that ‘the birth of the reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. 29
Sherrie Levine
Interestingly, Levine's jeremiad against originality was itself not original.
After Walker Evans #13
After her radical gesture became cocktail-party chatter, commentators began
1981
circulating an essay originally published under the name Cheryl Bernstein in an Black and white
anthology of Conceptual art entitled Idea Art in 1973. It purported to be a photograph
20.3 x 25.4
review of the one and only show of an artist named Hank Herron, who created
(8 x 10)
exact Copies of paintings by Frank Stella. In an analysis that struck a chord with Courtesy of Paula
the later generation, Bernstein averred, ‘Mr Herron’s work, by reproducing the Cooper Gallery, New
York
exact appearance of Frank Stella's entire oeuvre, nevertheless introduces a new
content and a new context ... that ts precluded in the work of Mr. Stella, te.
the denial of originality’. However, both Hank Herron and Cheryl Bernstein
were the invention of a pseudonymous art historian and the essay itself was
written as a parody of the logical consequences of Conceptualism. Ten years
later, Conceptualist satire had become postmodern reality, and few who eagerly
brandished the essay as support for the postmodern position realised that it
was written as a joke.
Though Levine took postmodernism's most radical position on authorship,
she was by no means alone. Richard Prince staked out a similar artistic territory
by rephotographing images from magazines and advertisements. Echoing
Barthes again, he remarked, ‘I think the audience has always been the author of
an artist’s work. What's different now is that the artist can become the author
of someone else's work’. (A few years later, the artist Jeff Koons would run into
legal trouble with just such an attitude.)
Prince became particularly associated with fragmentary representations of
images of the Marlboro Man of Marlboro cigarettes fame (fig.30). Removed

38
 The semiotics of iconic signs confronts two basic questions which are so
closely related as to be frequently confused. The one concerns the
mechanics of denotation by which an iconic sign simultaneously presents
and mediates its object. The other concerns the process in which the
object is itself culturally constituted as a sign. The former is fundamentally
a technical question which may be resolved in the areas where semiotics
overlap such disciplines as psychology and mathematics. The latter is a
social, ultimately ideological, question the answer to which seeks to give
account of the articulations through which a culture presents reality.

The posing of the former, above, has ideological implications in common

with the latter in that it emphasises that photography is a process of
production. Such a process, through the technical manipulation of ma-
terials, mediates reality and constitutes an ideological intervention in the
world. This awareness corrects the ingenuous acceptance of the camera
as an incorruptible instrument of truth. We are thus returned to the
question of the motivation of iconic signs. It is not arbitrary that a particular
photographic image should have as its referent, say, ‘woman wearing
twin-set with silk scarf’. It és arbitrary however that this particular referent
should have such an interpretant as ‘bourgeoise’.

Iconic signs directly denote only objects in the physical world. It is only
through these objects that images signify such abstract entities as values.
Any study of the meanings of an iconic sign must therefore include con-
sideration of the meanings of its object-as-sign. In fact, as Metz has
observed, all systems of signification must converge on the same sphere.
“All systems of signification, whatever they may be, have the function
of transmitting sense. They may borrow their signifiers from very diverse
spheres (visual, auditory, etc.) but their signifieds belong always to the
semantic sphere and to it alone: to this ideal ‘purport’ - immaterial
purport, if one can call it that - to this psycho-sociological purport which
is “‘sense’’. Z

“Did Zhang Si-de fall gloriously in front-line action?”

asks the instructor. Lei-Feng replies that Zhang
Si-de died in a coal-mining accident.
 from his advertising context, the sturdy cowboy became a free-floating signifier
of the mythology of American masculinity, with its emphasis on self-
sufficiency and freedom from social constraints. Prince eliminated captions and
presented only portions of the original images, often blown up so large that the
ben-day dot pattern was visible. Thus the images became oddly oblique and
dispassionate, revealing (or so commentators argued) the emptiness of the
ethos of rugged individualism.
Prince's choice of the Marlboro Man resonated with the larger mythology of
the Reagan era. These were the years, after all, in which the President of the
United States was a former actor who frequently confused the heroic roles he
had played in westerns and war movies with his own rather tame experiences
during the Second World War.

30
Richard Prince

Untitled (cowboy)
1989
Ektacolor print
185.4 x 275
(73 x 108% )
Courtesy of Barbara
Gladstone Gallery,
New York

ee

The attacks by critical postmodernists on authorship and originality did

nothing to cool the raging art market of the 1980s. Even if they had originally
been designed to resist commodification, works by artists like Salle, Longo,
Levine and Prince became hot commodities and sold just as well as the
paintings of the unresistant Neo-expressionists. (The anti-aesthetes,
incidentally, seemed disinclined to go all the way when it came to obliterating
the myth of originality, and were frequently found on the pages of art
magazines explicating the nuances of their particular brand of anti-
authorship.)
The contradictions inherent in critical postmodernism became glaringly
obvious as the decade wore on. As a result, they inspired a new group of artists
to take the critical artists’ simultaneous position of subversion and complicity
as the subject of their work.

40
31
Andy Warhol
Brillo Box 1964
Synthetic polymer and
silkscreen on wood
Commoopity Critics
43.2 x 43.2 x 35.6
(17 x 17 x 14) Much to the dismay of the purveyors of anti-aestheticism, towards the end
Private Collection of the 1980s their intricate arguments against authenticity, originality and
authorship were retooled to justify the return of the object. This was not,
however, the aestheticised art object valorised in modernist discourse. The
postmodern art object was decked out with a gleaming new theoretical raiment
and sparkled with impressively obscure terms like ‘simulacrum’, ‘hyperreality’,
‘critical complicity’ and ‘commodity critique’.
Again, precedents were sought in art history, and again,
Duchamp and Warhol were dusted off as
spiritual ancestors. However, the
interpretations of these artists were subtly
different this time around. The anti-
aesthetes had been interested in the
negation of aesthetics implied by
Duchamp’s famous presentation of an
ordinary urinal as a work of art. The
commodity critics believed that Duchamp’s
gesture, rather than deflating high art, had
conferred Walter Benjamin's famous aura
upon a lowly implement of plumbing.
Similarly, the Warhol who interested this
new group was not the Warhol of appropriated
mass-culture images, but Warhol the creator of Brillo Box

41
 (fig.31), a carefully painted replica of the packing box for a ubiquitous cleaning
product.
Interestingly, this 1s the same work that inspired Arthur Danto’s epiphany
about the end of art. For Danto, Warhol's Brillo Box was the end of the
modernist line — art became self-conscious in a Hegelian way by raising the
paramount question about its ontological status — why ts this art and not
simply a Brillo box? With Brillo Box, Danto believed, ‘Art had raised, from
within and in its definitive form, the question of the philosophical nature of
art’. In other words, art had completed the line of questioning that had begun
when photography stole its earlier justification as an imitation of reality. Now
that the ultimate question had been asked, there was nothing more for art to do
but splinter into different varieties of art-making — the pluralistic creation of
hand-crafted objects that no longer asked philosophical questions.
If Brillo Box represented the end of modernism in Danto’s schema, for
the commodity critics it marked the beginning of postmodernism. For
them, its key element was the recognition of the identity of artworks and 30
consumer products. From this it was a short leap, via a particularly defeatist Louise Lawler
interpretation of poststructuralism, Pollock and Tureen
fa ees h t li a6 Arranged by Mr and Mrs
to the conclusion t a we ive ina ion ine
soulless, empty society in which Connecticut 1984
the selection of running shoes or Cibachrome
40.6 x 50.8 (16 x 20)
table lamps has become the most caenoiens
complex form of self expression. Pictures, New York
The new work elevated gleaming oe
vacuum cleaners, lava lamps and Allan McCollum
‘surrogate paintings’ to gallery Plaster Surrogates
status. In this, 1t bore some 1983
resemblance to Pop art. However, rane Ch sovectaes
> ydrostone
Pop art had proffered a buoyant incialanon at
vision of consumer culture as a garden of earthly delights. The commodity Marian Goodman
xe : ; ; Bog 2 Gallery, New York 1983
critics, by contrast, were mired in a technological dystopia in which people only
sustain the illusion of individuality and choice by cultivating their relationship
to mass-produced objects.
This work was, in part, a response to what the artists saw as the takeover
of individual consciousness by mass media and advertising. They argued
that late capitalism has created a ‘spectacular’ society in which the false
excitement engendered by the consumption of mass-produced objects and
images masks what they regarded as an all-powerful, amoral and inescapable
economic system. Citizens had become consumers who elected politicians on
the basis of media presence, and purchased products because they appealed
to a media-constructed self-image.
Explanations of the art of commodity critique were infused with traces of
Marxist rhetoric — especially references to Marx’s notion of commodity
fetishism, whereby objects divorced from the labour that created them
become independent beings endowed with life. Mixed with poststructuralist
ideas about the illusory nature of the self, free will and reality, this created a
distorted, looking-glass Marxism. Bereft of a concept of the ‘real’, Marx’s

42
economic base and dependent superstructure simply collapsed into each
other. All that remained were empty signifiers of value and meaning which no
longer belonged to any larger social or economic system. This created, in a
terminology that became extremely fashionable during this period, the reign of
the ‘simulacra’. As a result, the literature about this new work ts rife with
statements that would be anathema to any orthodox Marxist. For instance,
artist and writer Peter Halley’s comment: ‘Along with reality, politics 1s sort of
an outdated notion’, or the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s statement ‘Power
is no longer present exceptto conceal that there is none’.
The all-encompassing nature of the system envisioned by these artists led
them to reject the anti-aesthetes’ goal of resistance as vain and delusional.
Instead, they embraced the media-generated desires that held them in thrall,
acknowledging their own cheerful complicity in the wider dissemination of
consumer culture. The market was no longer the enemy and the commodity
status of art was a fact to be ironically celebrated.
The art created under this aegis took two different, though related,
directions. It focused either on art as a commodity or on the commodity ASialte
The stage for the former had been set by the anti-aesthetes’ campaign against
the mystification of modernist art. Louise Lawler, more anti-aesthete than
commodity critic, produced a series of photographs that showed artworks by
modernist masters on display in collectors’ homes (fig.32). Surrounded by
expensive sideboards, ceramic pottery and other high-priced knick-knacks,
modernist paintings created as expressions of high-flung individualism became
mere collectibles, easily domesticated by the highest bidder.
Allan McCollum took the logic of Lawler’s work the next step in his Plaster
Surrogates (fig.33). Vhese were intentionally ‘fake’ paintings — cast plaster objects
shaped and painted to suggest little pictures with black rectangular interiors
and white frames. Aside from the absence of a ‘real’ painting in the centre, these
works had all the essential elements of a certified artwork: they were framed,
 dated, numbered and signed by the artist and arranged on the wall in salon-
style groupings. In effect, they operated like stage props, yet they sold like hot
cakes during the late 1980s, demonstrating the artist's point that trappings
alone could create a marketable work of art.
In their different ways, each of these artists suggested that modernist
abstraction had been emptied of its utopian aspirations. No longer the
outcome of historical necessity, abstraction became just another style to be
peddled in the marketplace. This idea was graphically illustrated by the
abstract paintings of Sherrie Levine, who seamlessly made the transition from

anti-aesthete to commodity critic. In the late 1980s, she presented a series of

small geometric paintings that were appropriations, not of the specific style of
any artist, but of the general appearance of geometric abstraction. Her grid
compositions (fig.34) had a vague family resemblance to works by artists such
as Kenneth Noland, John McLaughlin and Brice Marden, but the checkerboard
format also gave a nod to Duchamp, the master chess player and art world
strategist.
One of the points of Levine's new works, endlessly belaboured by
sympathetic critics, was that they presented the idea of a copy without a model.

44
 They cannibalised the look of modernist abstraction without grounding tt in
any specific historic moment or artist. This made them, in the lexicon of the
day, ‘simulations’. This term owes everything to Jean Baudrillard, who briefly
became the guru of this new movement until he publicly disavowed the whole
thing. According to Baudrillard, simulation is ‘the generation by models of a
real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’. In this new age of simulation, ‘there
is no longer any God to recognise his own, nor any last judgement to separate
true from false, the real from its
artificial resurrection, since
everything is already dead and risen
in advance’.
What exactly Baudriliard meant
by such overheated rhetoric was
never entirely clear, but for the
artists who adopted him, he
34 provided the map for a world in
Sherrie Levine which reality had been replaced by
Lead Check #10 1988 signs and images. He bespoke the
Casein on lead
triumph of mass culture and
50.8 x 50.8
(20 x 20) consumer capitalism over any
Courtesy of Paula remaining vestige of genuine
Cooper Gallery, New
York selfhood or authentic feeling.
No acolyte was more devoted
35 to Baudrillard than Peter Halley,
Peter Halley
who laced his commentaries on
White Cell with Conduit
1985 contemporary art with endless
Day-glo acrylic and references to hyperreality and the
Roll-a-tex on canvas simulacrum. Halley painted
213.4 x 106.7
(84 x 42) geometric paintings of garishly
Grant Selwyn Fine Art, coloured squares and rectangles
New York and Los
Angeles
connected with thick black lines.
Like Levine, his work looked back
to modernist predecessors, among
them Piet Mondrian, Barnett
Newman and Frank Stella. However,
Halley had a more specific agenda.
Decrying what he referred to as ‘the
geometricisation of modern life’, he
offered his paintings as visual maps
of post-industrial society's networks
of circulation and mechanistic movement. He believed he was describing a new,
highly abstracted kind of social space, one akin, in his words ‘to the simulated
space of the videogame, of the microchip, and of the office tower’,
Thus, Halley intended the rectangles and the lines in his works to represent
systems of cells and conduits which, he maintained, underlie all contemporary
systems of social, political and economic exchange (fig.35). Interestingly, in
describing these dematerialised networks of communication, Halley seems to

45
 have anticipated the widespread use of the internet by ten years. However, in
his formulation, this development was anything but liberating. Rather, these
all-encompassing cybernetic networks were the final triumph of ‘late
capitalism’ (a term coined by Frederic Jameson) and technology over the
human spirit. He muses, ‘Yet behind the mask of humanism there exists not the
truths of materialism but the nightmare scenarios of logic and determinism.
There emerges a crystalline world responsive only to numerical imperatives,
formal manipulation, and financial control’.
Halley painted with Day-glo paint over a textured surface produced by
Roll-a-tex, a simulated stucco used on interior walls. Thus he piled simulation
on simulation — in the process, transforming the signs of modernist
abstraction into a postmodern exposition on the failure of all its ideals.
The other side of commodity critique was the assertion of the commodity
as art. Again, simulation was an underlying theme, here creating not products
that looked like old-fashioned art, but artworks that looked like commercial
products. This approach had been anticipated, not only by Warhol’s Brillo Boxes,
but also by the work of Richard Artschwager, who in the 1960s married
Minimalism and Pop to create furniture-like sculptures. In works such as Table
and Chair (fig.36) he delineates the outlines of familiar pieces of domestic
furniture on a pair of Minimalist forms, using wood-grain Formica as a veneer.
In the terminology of the late 1980s, Artschwager’s simulated furniture was
created out of simulated material. He further undermined art’s special status
by pointing out that Formica ts a material more often found in suburban
bathrooms and kitchens.
Haim Steinbach went the next step, substituting for commodity-like

46
 sculptures the commodities
themselves. While his work owed a
powerful debt to Duchamp’s
readymades, he was interested in a
reverse operation. He sought not to
deflate the pretensions of high art, =
but to glamorise the mass-produced )
object so that it could be he hut
appreciated from a purely aesthetic
point of view.
Steinbach placed newly purchased
products on brightly painted
Minimalist shelves that recalled the
sculptures of Donald Judd (fig.37).
He was particularly attracted to objects with a high kitsch component — Star
Wars masks, designer toilet brushes and lava lamps — or which spoke of certain
36 lifestyle expectations — colour-coordinated kitchen utensils, expensive running
Richard Artschwager
shoes and digital alarm clocks. Objects like these, he felt, were particularly
Table and Chair
1963-4
imbued with the calculated seductiveness through which consumer desire 1s
Melamine laminate
stimulated. His careful arrangements were designed to meld the ambiance of
and wood the art gallery with that of the department store in order to capture the
DSIRE PES)
(29% x 52 x 374)
peculiarly late twentieth-century fascination with consumer products. ‘Ali
Tate Baba’s cave is not unlike Macys’, he noted. In Steinbach’s view, shopping had
replaced art-making as the ultimate act of self-expression. He viewed the
37
Haim Steinbach department store as the cathedral of postmodern desire and the act of
Ultra-red 2 1986 shopping as the postmodern version of democratic choice.
Mixed media Glamorised appliances and commodities reappeared in the work of Jeff
construction
Koons. He placed new, unused vacuum cleaners in Minimalist-style Plexiglas
160.6 x 193
(63% x 76) boxes. Hermetically sealed off from the corrupting environment, these works
Courtesy of Sonnabend were intended to contrast the state of the object, forever new and immutable,
Gallery, New York
with the constantly aging, mortal viewer. Koons followed these works with a
series of Equilibrium Tanks (fig.38) in which basketballs inflated with water and
mercury were unnaturally suspended in aquariums full of salt water. Again,
Koons’ point was that stasis and equilibrium are states reserved for inanimate
obyects. Thus, in works like these, he suggests that commodities are our more
perfect selves, and that our desire for them is the desire for unsustainable states
of being.
There is a whiffof the apocalypse in Koons’ work, because, of course, the
closest we living creatures can come to the stasis of commodities is death. This
romance with nothingness is further articulated in the work of Ashley
Bickerton. Bickerton first emerged in the late 1980s with hybrids of painting
and sculpture that stressed their own objecthood. Resembling a strange cross
between footlockers and pinball machines, these works exaggerated the physical
attributes of artworks to the point of parody. They were boxes outfitted with
large brackets for hanging, neatly stored packing materials, oversized handles,
digital counters for recording the work’s minute-by-minute price increases and
lists of the materials that went into them and their toxic effects. Their surfaces

47
48
38
Jeff Koons
Three Ball Total
Equilibrium Tank (Two
DrJ Silver Series,
Spalding NBA Tip-Off)
1985
Mixed media
153;6% 1238 x 33:6
(604 x 48% x 13%)
Tate

39
Ashley Bickerton
Biofragment #2 1990
Wood, anodised
aluminium, glass,
rubber, nylon and coral
294 x 213.6 x 113.8
(115% x 84™« 44%)
Tate, on loan from
The American Fund for
the Tate Gallery
Ka ie AS ateBy
Se ER RS RIN eo
Be ON RES a RR

49
 were covered with real and invented corporate logos, slickly painted images that
suggested unidentifiable machine parts and brightly painted plaster rocks. One
work, identified as a self-portrait, was lined with labels from the products that
the artist consumed ona regular basis.
Such works were graphic illustrations of the simulationist model of the
disappearance of all distinctions between self and world, nature and culture,
art and commodity, ‘fake’ and ‘real’. In the early 1990s, Bickerton expanded on
the ecological theme touched on in this earlier works. His boxy hanging
sculptures turned into time capsules filled with agricultural substances and
industrial waste. Entitled Biofragments (fig.39)they retained the emphasis on
sturdy, industrial-looking casing, but now, Bickerton explained, tongue firmly
in cheek, they were meant to be survival kits designed to outlast the upcoming
nuclear or environmental holocaust, providing hapless survivors with the
materials to start again.
Thus, with these works, Bickerton took the commodity critique's latent
nihilism to its logical conclusion, envisioning a scenario in which the whole
sorry structure of late capitalism was swept away to give humankind a chance
to begin anew.
Having moved from the end of art to the end of civilisation, the commodity
critics implicitly mocked any effort to deflect history from the inevitable
apocalypse. By maintaining that left is right, right is left, truth is fiction and
capital 1S beyond morality, the simulationist faith posed a world in which
politics is a stmulacrum and all meaningful action is impossible.
Needless to say, these views were not universally accepted, even among those
who agreed with some aspects of their critique of mass media and consumer
capitalism. Naysayers pointed out that, despite the efforts to reduce all human
experience to a play of signifiers, something ‘real’ did seem to exist out there.
Commodity critics could argue that nature was simply a cultural construct,
that, in the words of critic and dealer Jeffrey Deitch, “The jungle ride at Disney
World may in fact be more real to most people than the real jungle in the
Amazon’. They could say the same of the body, reducing consciousness to the
model of the computer, in which the software is divorced in every substantial
way from the hardware. Such clever formulations were easily refuted by the
larger social and environmental issues of the day, among them AIDS, global
warming and ecological devastation.
Other developments indicated that the dead end of commodity critique was
not the only course for those of a deconstructive bent. The 1980s and 1990s also
saw the burgeoning of a postmodern feminism and multiculturalism for which
the analyses provided by poststructuralism offered tools for intervening in the
power structures of the supposedly dear-departed ‘real’ world.

50
POSTMODERN FEMINISM
It ts now time to introduce another term that ts crucial to any discussion of
postmodernism. This is the ‘Other’, a word that seems simple but is in fact
heavily weighed down with conceptual and linguistic complexities. Like
postmodernism itself, the Other is a thing that only exists in relation to
something else. It has no independent essence. However, and this is where
deconstruction comes back in, the apparent integrity of the Other's opposite
(in other words, the thing that it 1s the other of) depends on the suppression of
whatever contradictory material is designated as Other.
Thus, for example, Greenberg's modernism assumed the universality of
its forms and its definition of art. However, this ‘universality’ left out the
experiences and the creations of women, non-whites and non-Western cultures.
Its status as the historically necessary next stage of art history depended on
relegation of these elements to the margins.
The more socially oriented versions of postmodernism that we turn to next
bring these Others back into focus. In doing so, they shatter the illusion of
universality fostered by modernism. However, by its very nature, the Other
cannot simply dethrone modermsm, replacing one false universality with
another. Rather, the Other must operate as a saboteur, continually undermining
the effort to install any group or philosophy as the privileged purveyor of truth
and reality.
Lest this be getting too esoteric, it may be easier to follow the logic of the
argument through the evolution of feminism and multiculturalism,
postmodernism’s favourite Others. In this chapter, we will take up the former.

51
 In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin published a groundbreaking essay that
asked, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ Nochlin’s essay was
designed not to confirm the dismal judgement suggested by the question but
to challenge the assumptions about artistic genius that lay behind it. Rejecting
the notion of art history as a parade of great artists, she chose instead to
investigate the institutional, educational and economic factors that had
prevented talented women from achieving the same stature as their male
counterparts. Moving beyond the defensive stance implied by the question,
Nochlin served notice that a feminist art history must ask new kinds of
questions and reformulate the model for art-historical knowledge.
Other feminist art historians joined the cause. Some investigated forgotten
figures, introducing a new roster of women artists into Western art history.
Others extended into the psychological realm Nochlin’s original study of the
barriers faced by women, suggesting that a damaged ego might be just as
powerful a drag on female creativity as such external limitations as lack of
schooling and the demands of the domestic role.
By the 1980s, a second school of thought was emerging. This held fierit was
not enough simply to unearth forgotten women or recount the barriers they
faced. Instead, feminist scholars like Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker
argued that it was necessary to examine the rules by which the game 1s played.
They noted that the language of art history — with its emphasis on gender-
loaded words like ‘mastery’ and ‘masterpiece’ — 1s rife with hidden assumptions
about the nature of genius. Similarly, they argued that the visual language of
Western art embodies assumptions about the essential nature of femininity and
masculinity. Why, feminist art historians began to ask, is the female nude the
quintessential motif of post-Renaissance art? What messages are conveyed by
all that nubile flesh served up as allegories of Virtue, Justice and Truth? Why
are men and women represented so differently? In his book Ways of Seeing (1972)
Marxist critic John Berger had one answer: in art, as in advertising, Men act
and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being
looked at’. Western art, in other words, replicates the unequal relationships
already embedded in Western culture.
The evolution of feminist art follows a similar trajectory. In the 1970s,
women artists began to explore the idea that there were essential differences in
the experiences of men and women and that these could be discerned in their
approach to art. Looking at the work being produced during this period by
women artists, feminist critic Lucy Lippard discerned recurring motifs that she
believed suggested a female sensibility. She pointed, for instance, to the
abstracted sexuality inherent in circles, domes, eggs, spheres, boxes and
biomorphic shapes. She noted a preoccupation with the body and body-like
materials. She perceived a fragmentary, non-linear approach in the work of
women that set it off from their male counterparts. She believed that such
dissimilarities reflected the different way in which women organise their
experience of the world.
In what has come to be known as First Wave Feminism, women artists
immersed themselves in female experience — revelling in the hitherto forbidden
territory represented by vaginal imagery and menstrual blood, posing

52
themselves naked as goddess figures, defiantly recuperating ‘low’ art forms like
embroidery and ceramics, which had traditionally been dismissed as ‘women’s
work’. They formed women’s co-operative galleries, put together exhibitions of
women's work, and generally saw their art as a form of feminist consciousness
raising,
Again, there was a reaction. Absorbing the lessons of postmodernism,
another group of feminist artists argued that First Wave Feminism was guilty
of ‘essentialism’, that is, of perpetuating the futile search for female essence.
Worse, they claimed to reach this essence by embracing the designations
imposed on women by patriarchal culture — woman as nature, woman as body,
woman as emotion — and changing them from negative to positive qualities.
By contrast, the postmodern feminists insisted that art should not try to
provide positive images of female experience, as these inevitably ended up
serving one ideology or another. Rather, they believed their job was to reveal
the ways 1n which all our ideas of womanhood and femininity are socially
constructed. They pursued the idea of femininity as a masquerade — that it is a
set of poses adopted by women in order to conform to societal expectations
about womanhood. They maintained that there is no female essence — rather,
woman 1s only an internalised set of representations. [his conformed to the
general postmodern view of reality. As feminist theorist Kate Linker put 1t,
‘Since reality can be known only through the forms that articulate it, there can
be no reality outside of representation’.
In order to understand the process by which our visions of femininity are
produced, feminist theorists turned to psychoanalysis. [hey were particularly
taken with the writings of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who took
Freud's theories about infant development and gave them a poststructural spin.
According to Lacan, the unconscious ts structured like a language. He rewrites
Freud's prvotal Oedipal Complex in terms of the relationship between signs
and signifiers. The father, who interrupts the infant’s total identification with
its mother, becomes in Lacan’s scenario, the Name of the Father or the Law.
He is the representative of the Symbolic order, the world of language that the
child must enter to become a functioning member of society. But because
language 1s always a matter of deferred meanings and of signifiers disconnected
from their signs, the child gains language only to lose the sense of wholeness
that he enjoyed in his pre-Oedipal state. Thus, humans are forever haunted by a
sense of Lack, and long to repair the severed union with what the child once
imagined to be his all-powerful mother. For Lacan, this Lack is the key to
human psychology. It initiates a search for substitutes that might stand in for
the lost, so-called Phallic Mother (an apparently contradictory notion that
reflects the Lacanian transformation of the phallus from male organ to signifier
of power). These substitutes, known as fetishes, are objects or images (or in
poststructural terms, detached signifters )on which the bereft individual fixates
to alleviate an impossible desire.
It should not escape notice that this whole scenario focuses on the
formation of male desire. This is where feminist theory steps in. In an
enormously influential essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,
theorist Laura Mulvey applies the notion of fetish to film theory. She argues

53
 that Hollywood cinema ts structured around the male gaze. It assumes the
existence of a male spectator who transforms women into fetishes, either of the
feared yet desired phallic mother lost after the intervention of the father, or of
the castrated woman. This latter is an equally symbolic fixture whose
diminished state reminds the man of the threat castration poses to his own
power. Hence, she ts the figure whom he must subjugate to regain his lost
mastery over the world. In her analysis of classic films by directors like
Hitchcock and von Sternberg, Mulvey notes how narratives, visual presentation
and female characters are constructed to satisfy the male viewer's voyeuristic
desires.
Mulvey ends her essay with the pronouncement: ‘It ts said that analysing
pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. Many
feminist artists shared her discomfort with an aesthetic that linked visual
pleasure with the objectification of women. And they found support in her
essay for the idea that one could attack the unequal treatment of women in
society by challenging the sexist representations of woman in art and the mass
media.
However, as other feminists pointed out, there were limitations to such an
approach. One had to do with its blind spot with respect to female psychology.
Like the Freudian system on which it was based, Lacanian theory made male 40
experience the centrepiece of the Oedipal drama. As a result, it had little to say Barbara Kruger
about the psychic structures underlying female desire. In fact, at times the Untitled (We Will No
Longer Be Seen and
theory seemed to be positing desire as a purely male phenomenon. There was a
Not Heard 1985
male gaze, but evidently no complementary female gaze. Pleasure was bad Nine colour lithographs
because it reinforced male supremacy. But what about female pleasure? Was it with photo-lino and
silkscreen, each
really just a misguided identification with the male position?
52 x 52 (204 x 204)
At its extremes, postmodern feminism assumed a puritanical tone. First Tate
Wave Feminists who had celebrated female sexuality and publicly exposed their
own, often voluptuous, naked bodies were criticised for playing into patriarchal
power structures. Postmodern feminists seeking to destroy the aesthetic
pleasure that satisfied men at the expense of women often pursued a form of
iconoclasm, choosing to work with media images of women ina way that
undercut their seductiveness. Or they opted to avoid representing the female
body altogether on the theory that any form of representation perpetuates the
objectification of women.
One of the most influential artists of this persuasion was Barbara Kruger.
As an art director in the 1970s, Kruger worked on layouts for Condé Nast
women’s magazines. From this job, she learned both the graphic skills that
she employed in her subsequent art work, and a sense of how magazines
manipulate their readers through images. As she noted, ‘It’s the magazine's duty
to make you their image of their own perfection’.
In her own art, Kruger juxtaposed texts and found or created photographic
images in a way that subverted media conventions. Fragmented, lifted from
their original contexts and reproduced in black and white, the images were open
to new interpretations. [hese were supplied by the pithy texts slapped like
advertising banners across the images. These texts assumed the authoritative
tone of conventional advertising, but Kruger subtly manipulated the voice,

54
a 2. fee
+e
Oe ee OH
“ves ee8ee@:
eee 4¢8¢
e@eeeeecete

55
 reversing the implied order in which the dominant male speaks to a submisstve
female. Here, the voice is that of woman addressing man about the conditions
of her inequality, noting Your Gaze Hits The Side Of My Face or announcing We Will
No Longer Be Seen And Not Heard ( fig.4.0 ). In the latter work, Kruger has matched
each word with its counterpart in deaf sign language, suggesting that, despite
their suppression, women will find a language with which to communicate.
Sarah Charlesworth also mines the visual language of women’s magazines.
However, she retains the seductive gloss of fashion and advertising tmages. She
subverts their original purpose by isolating details of glamorised objects
against lustrous monochrome backgrounds, and surrounding the whole with
black lacquer frames. Unlike Kruger, she supplies no words. Instead, combined

photo fragments — the head of a Japanese geisha, a lotus flower, a gold necklace,
or as in Figures (fig.41) a disembodied evening gown and a bound figure
completely encased in a bondage outfit, become free-floating fantasy images.
They recall the Freudian concept of the fetish. However, while the Freudian
fetish is embraced to restore a psychological wholeness, Charlesworth’s
fragmented, tsolated images have the opposite effect, revealing the essential
emptiness beneath the objects of male fantasy.
While Kruger and Charlesworth address themselves to the prerogatives of
male power, Laurie Simmons explores the way 1n which media images shape the
imagination of prepubescent girls. Her work plays off the role of dolls as
surrogates through which young girls enact the shadowy rituals of adulthood.

56
 By photographing cheap knock-offs of the ever-popular Barbie against
photographic backdrops of domestic or travelogue settings, Simmons creates
humorous tableaux that underscore the rigidity of traditional female roles
(fig.42). Simmons’ circa 1950 moulded plastic housewives and career girls pose
stiffly against backgrounds which themselves evoke the picture-perfect world of
that era’s television and advertising. Yet the disjunction between the three-
dimensional dolls and the obviously two-dimensional backgrounds make it
clear that this is an unreal world, which they can never actually enter.
Female fantasy also plays a part in the work of Cindy Sherman, who has
confessed that her staged photographs are inspired by her childhood game of
dress up. In many ways, Sherman's work might seem to be a textbook
illustration of Mulvey’s notions about cinematic fetishism. Her Untitled Film
Stills from 1978 are a set of black and white photographs in which Sherman has
costumed herself to suggest the female types available in the Hollywood movies
of her childhood. These range from femme fatale, rural naif, career girl, fallen
woman (fig.43) to wide-eyed innocent. As the series title suggests, they were
41
designed to suggest stills from 1950s-era B movies, and the illusion is so
Sarah Charlesworth successful that some critics have been lured into describing their memories of
Figures 1983 the non-existent films from which these stills originated.
Laminated cibachrome Sherman's Film Stills were embraced by feminist theorists who saw in it a
and lacquered frames
104.1 « 157.5
brilliant exposition of the idea of femininity as masquerade. Noting the ease
(41 x 62) with which Sherman slipped from one fictive pose to another, never betraying
Courtesy of Gorney
any sense of essential selfhood, they
Bravin + Lee, New York
hailed her work as a critique of the
42 objectifying operations of the male
Laurie Simmons
gaze. Others put it in a media
Red Library #2 1983
context, noting that her Film Stills
Colour photograph
123.2 x 97.2 demonstrate how our contemporary
(48% x 38%) sense of self is a commercial
Courtesy of the artist
and Metro Pictures creation subject to the whims of the
film industry. And yet others took a
more deconstructive stance, seeing
in her work a representation of the
postmodern world’s decentred self, a
fictional creature composed of
ATT tems a

Hi stcatcttt eed
‘) a

i
fictions. Re
PEED at

What all these interpretations

had in common was a tendency to
see Sherman as a stern polemicist
taking on the evils of patriarchy,
consumerism and late capitalist
fragmentation. But they missed the
obvious pleasure that Sherman took
in making these images and which
the spectator felt in viewing them.
True, Sherman assumed a series of
media-based roles, but she did so as

SM
 a form of play, embracing the human capacity for fantasy without linking it to
a negation of selfhood.
This has become ever more clear in Sherman’s subsequent work, as she has
explored the personas constructed in pornography, fairy tales, art history and
fashion. Critical efforts to pin her toa politics of resistance are forever
shattering in the face of the works themselves. For instance, in the mid-1980s,
she produced several bodies of work dealing with the world of high fashion.
Commissioned by top fashion designers to create advertising images from their
clothes, she turned the conventions of fashion photography upside down
(fig.44). Unglamorous, slightly sinister and even downright weird, her images
could be seen as anti-fashion statements, revealing, as one critic put it, ‘the
monstrous otherness behind the

cosmetic facade’. Yet they were

embraced by the designers who
commissioned them, suggesting
that fashion may not be the
uncompromising tool of patriarchy
43 that some feminists have styled it.
Cindy Sherman
Sherman herself has always
Untitled Film Still #27
resisted the Interpretations that pose
1978
Photograph on paper
her as a feminist ideologue. Thus,
97.5 x 68.3 though the work seems at time to
(38% x 27)
Operate as a textbook case of certain
Tate
strains of postmodernism, it eludes
44
the more puritanical aspects of
Cindy Sherman
postmodern feminism. Her Film Stills
Untitled #126 1983
can be read as critiques of the male
Photograph on paper
182.8 x 121.8 gaze and the mass media's tendency
(72 x 48) to objectify women. But they also
Tate
are permeated with Sherman's own
enjoyment of the time-honoured
adolescent girl’s game of dress up.
They are powerful reminders that
there is a feminine form of pleasure
that cannot be theorised out of
existence.
Working in a very different mode, Mary Kelly also challenged the
devaluation of female desire. Her Post-Partum Document (fig.45) is a six part,
135-piece document of the first six years of her son's life. It encompasses the
minutiae of infanthood, incorporating diagrams, annotated letters, stained
nappies, the child's drawings, feeding charts and analyses of the child's first
utterances and sentences. But unlike the conventional scrapbook, Kelly’s
document interrogates the Lacanian account of the child’s process of
socialisation.
Kelly is aware of the Lacanian scenario in which the child moves from
Imaginary wholeness to the sense of loss associated with the entry into the
Symbolic. However, as she experiences the growth of her child first hand, she

59
 becomes aware that something crucial is missing from Lacan's account —
namely the reciprocal experience of the mother, and her side of the Oedipal
drama. The woman is socialised into the role of mother just as the child is
socialised into the outside world. And if the child learns to fetishise certain
objects as substitutes for the once-seamless connection to its mother, so the
mother also comes to embrace fetish objects that bring back her lost
connection to the child, among them scraps of her son's clothing and plaster
imprints of his hands. Thus, while Kelly reafirms the postmodern belief that
femininity, or in this case, motherhood, is socially constructed, she also reveals
that it is a far more complex process than much theory would maintain. And
she takes issue with the reductive formulations that would ascribe desire,
pleasure and fetishism strictly to the male domain.

45
Mary Kelly
One of thirteen
individually framed
panels from
Post-Partum Document.
Analysed Markings
And Diary Perspective
Schema
(Experimentum Mentis
Ill: Weaning from the
Dyad) 1973
Collage, pencil, crayon,
chalk, and printed
diagrams on paper
Panel size 28.5 « 36
(11% x 14%)
Tate

46
Gilbert and George
DEATH
from DEATH HOPE LIFE
FEAR 1984
Handcoloured
photograph, framed
42.2 x 25 (16% x 9% )
Tate

The Lacanian account slights another area of human experience. The gaze it
critiques 1s not just male, it 1s also resolutely heterosexual. During the 1980s,
questions of alternative sexualities and homosexual desire began to surface
within a population galvanised by the threat of AIDS. The same kind of
discussions that had risen around female identity emerged among artists and
theorists in the gay world. Again, much of the focus involved questions of
representation and the possibility of a homosexual gaze.
Among the few highly visible practitioners of an unabashedly homoerotic
sensibility prior to this period were the British duo Gilbert and George. They
burst on the scene in the late 1960s with their ‘singing sculpture’, in which they
posed as stilted bourgeois types awkwardly performing an old music-hall ditty.
Later, they moved on to flamboyant photographic murals, which combined the
radiant colours of stained-glass windows with provocative texts and images.

60
61
 DEATH (fig.46), for instance, is one of a quartet of photo-pieces devoted to
the eternal themes of Death, Hope, Life and Fear. The artists themselves
appear repeatedly in their signature suits and ties, stiffly stacked tn a column
that rises from an open rose to a pair of yawning mouths. Their onward march
toward mortality is observed by a pair of tmpassive working-class youths, a
motif that recurs throughout their work as a symbol of erotic and perhaps
unattainable desire.

Gilbert and George's buttoned-up personas seem to reflect a class-based,

slightly repressed and deeply British form of homosexual sensibility. By
contrast, the American artist Robert Mapplethorpe created highly charged,
often shockingly explicit photographs exploring the sexual practices and
fantasies of his gay subculture. Following Mapplethorpe's death in 1988, a
posthumous exhibition of his photographs became a political fireball in the
United States, as conservative Congressmen used them as proof that the

62
 Federal Government, through the National Endowment for the Arts, was
funding ‘pornography’.
In fact, Mapplethorpe’s figure photographs drew on traditions of high art
photography and old master paintings to create seductive images whose sheer
beauty served as a foil for their unrestrained sexuality. For instance, Dennis
Speight with Calla Lilies (fig.47) makes obvious reference to the tradition of
Renaissance religious art. However, Mapplethorpe makes explicit the erotic
nature of the idealised bodies and seductive poses used to depict saints and
sacred figures. Even more transgressive, the model here ts a beautiful black man,
suggesting that Mapplethorpe’s sexual desires refuse to be confined by
conventional barriers of gender or race.
As the 1980s wore on, the sterner definitions of postmodern feminism, with
their iconoclasm, their emphasis on the intricacies of psychoanalytic theory
and their discomfort with visual pleasure, began to seem counterproductive to
47 feminist artists wishing to conyey their message to a larger audience. While
Robert Mapplethorpe postmodern feminists may have analysed the nature of the problem, it began to
Dennis Speight with seem to many women artists that this had done little to alter the situation of
Calla Lilies 1983
Cibachrome print
61x 50.8 (24 x 20 )
Copyright © The
Estate of Robert
Mapplethorpe. Used by
permission

48
Guenrilla Girls
Do women have to be
naked to get into the
Met Museum? 1989

Offset printing on paper

28.1 * 71.2
(11 x 28)
Spencer Museum of
Art, The University of
Kansas. Museum women even in the realm closest to hand. When tn 1984, the Museum of
purchase: Lucy Shaw
Schultz Fund
Modern Art in New York reopened after a renovation with an enormous
exhibition billed as an ‘International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture’,
the museum apparently Saw no problem with presenting a roster of artists that

was only 10 per cent female and too per cent white.
Coming in the middle of a decade that had centred on a male-dominated
return to painting, this exhibition was the last straw for one group of women
artists. [hey decided to forma guerrilla group that would take their case to the
public at large. Dubbing themselves “The Conscience of the Art World’, the
Guerrilla Girls donned gorilla masks and set about fly-posting messages on
walls and buildings in New York's SoHo drawing attention to the dismal
representation of women in the art world. They rated the critics according to
their sensitivity to women, listed the galleries with the most and fewest women
artists, and pointed out the absence of one-woman shows at the major

museums.
These activities quickly earned the Guerrilla Girls media attention and soon
they were appearing in their gorilla costumes on talk shows, at college Campuses

63
 and in museum panels. They adopted many of the tactics of postmodernism,
borrowing the street posters from Jenny Holzer, and adopting the media savvy
of the Neo-expressionists and the faux advertising style of artists such as
Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin. But they also wore short skirts and high
heels with their gorilla masks, and laced their posters and personal appearances
with flashes of humour. Breaking away from the stridency of much
postmodern feminism, they decided, as one member put it, to be ‘sexy and
funny’. As contributions poured in, they were able to produce more elaborate
statements, including several billboards that made their point with playful
wit (fig.48).
The Guerrilla Girls were of the postmodern era, but they were less
interested in excavating the hidden structures of exclusion than in shaming the
powers that be into bringing more women into the art establishment. They
played with representations, but they wanted real results. In the latter part of
their active years, which continued into the mid-1ggos, the Guerrilla Girls
began to broaden their agenda to deal with larger social issues, among them the
art world’s abysmal record of racial and ethnic inclusion. In this, feminism
merged with the other great Other of postmodernism, which came to be
referred to as ‘multiculturalism’.

64
POSTMODERN MULTICULTURALISM
According to feminist and multiculturalist analysis, the notion of the Other
inevitably implies a hierarchy. To be Other ts to be considered less than the male
and less than the individual of white European heritage. The Other ts viewed as
marginal, a sideshow in the grand narrative of world history.
Postmodern feminists attack this assumption by seeking the origin of their
Otherness in human development. By using the tools of psychoanalysis, they
expose the way in which the self ts constructed to reinforce this sense of female
inferiority.
Postmodern multiculturalists take a different tack. They seek the origin of
racial and ethnic Otherness in the way 1n which history is constructed. They
point to the distortions created by modernism, which envisioned history 28 A
linear development towards universally embraced social, political and
philosophical goals. These goals, set out by thinkers of the Enlightenment,
involve the rule of reason, the universal establishment of democracy and the
unfettered progress of science and technology. Such ideals, they note, were
believed to be most thoroughly embodied tn the histories of Western nations.
Thus, modernist history justified the European colonialisation of Africa, Asia
and North and South America as ‘the White Man’s Burden’, invoking their
moral imperative to introduce more ‘primitive’ cultures to the benefits of
European civilisation.
In this schema, the histories of non-white and non-Western cultures were
only of interest to the extent that they threw light on the larger course of
Western history. The least technologically advanced societies were viewed as

65
 An employee may have an incentive to remain with his employer, no matter how he is
treated, in order to qualify for urban residence; and it has been argued that contract workers’
rights to work in urban areas are so tenuous that, regardless of how uncongenial their
employment or how poor their pay, they are forced to stay in their job for fear of being
endorsed out of their area and back to the homelands.
UK Parliamentary Select Committee on African Wages. 1973

Leyland Vehicles. Nothing can stop us now.

Leyland advertising slogan

66
 time capsules, pockets of arrested history where ‘civilised’ man could literally
view his own past. A corollary to this was the idea that preliterate societies had
no records of their own, and existed in a timeless present until forced into
history by the onslaught of Western modernity. Modernism in art (or at least
the Greenbergian version we are considering here), reflected many of these
assumptions. It upheld a universal standard of taste, judged artworks as they
reflected the historically necessary progress of art, and adhered to a canon that
was almost exclusively white, male and American or European.
By 1984, the modernist facade was crumbling against attacks on all sides. Yet,
even at this late date, it was still possible to mount an exhibition that viewed
African art solely in its role as inspiration for the geniuses of Western
modernism. ‘Primitivism’in20th Century Art (the quotation marks are part of the
original title, signifying a few qualms about the historical assumptions the term
embodies), was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was
designed to show how an exposure to African art in the collections of Paris
museums had a crucial impact on the early modernism of artists such as
Picasso, Miré and Giacomettt.
If the exhibition had rested there, it would have been a fine example of art-
historical research. However, the organisers went further, suggesting that there
were universally discernable ‘affinities’ between the ‘primitive’ and modern
49
Hans Haacke
works, and that it was through harnessing the wild irrationality of African art
One of seven that modernist artists were able to reinvent Western art.
photographs from Critics savaged the exhibition, arguing that the notion of affinity ignored the
A Breed Apart 1978 very different functions and meanings that the African works carried in their
Photograph on paper original contexts. hey noted that ‘Art’, the idea of objects created simply for
laid on hardboard
91 x 91 (35% x 35%) aesthetic delectation, was completely foreign to the cultures that had created
Tate these objects. They pointed out that, while the Western paintings and
sculptures were carefully labelled with the artists’ names and dates, the African
works were treated as anonymous, timeless creations to which any notions of
attribution and historical dating were irrelevant. They condemned the
exhibition's ‘eurocentric’ bias and called for a different approach to art outside
the Western tradition. The reaction against the show marked a turning point in
the art world’s awareness of the Other. Critics, curators and artists began to
espouse the ideal of multiculturalism as opposed to modernism’s exhausted
mono-culturalism. Like feminism, such explorations assumed a variety ot
forms. One of the most pervasive paralleled feminist essentialism, and sought
from art authentic expressions of ractal and ethnic identity. Artists from non-
white or non-Western backgrounds searched for native traditions that had
resisted the homogenisation of modernism. They created works based on
native crafts, mythology, folklore and natural materials. Meanwhile, scholars
began to rewrite the history of art to include cultures that had been deliberately
excluded. Some went so far as to completely invert the familiar historical
narrative by suggesting that in fact, Africa or India were the original sources of
Western culture.
However, in the scramble for usable traditions, some strange things began to
happen. It appeared that only certain traditions and approaches to art were
culturally correct. Underlying the fascination with multiculturalism was the

67
 tendency to equate the modern with the Western and to deliberately avoid
expressions associated with either. As artists came to be categorised by race,
ethnicity, gender and sexuality, an unspoken demand arose that they must speak
for their group and for a certain vision of anti-modernism. But as critics of
multiculturalism were quick to point out, these expectations merely reinforced
the differences that modernism had asserted to justify the West's dominant
position. Like the essentialist position that embraced women’s designation as
representative of nature, emotion and body, multiculturalism appeared to
accept non-Western cultures as purveyors of spirituality, instinct and the
irrational.
There were other difficulties. The search for authentic identity ignored the
realities of migration and immigration. Was an artist of African descent whose
family had lived in Britain or the United States for four generations closer to
his African heritage or his Western one? Where was an artist of multiple
ethnicities to turn for her identity?
In response to such questions, writers such as Thomas McEvilley and -
Cornal West proposed a different version of multiculturalism. They argued
that the key issue was not identity, but representation. In a world where images
govern reality, the important questions were: who represents whom? How and 50
why are images of the Other created? Can marginal groups regain control of Krzysztof Wodiczko
their own representations? WORK from Public
Projections 1988
White artists resolved to refrain from any attempt to picture the Other,
Projection onto the
assuming instead the task of analysing their own privileged positions and the Hirshhorn Museum,
structures that upheld them. Such investigations were designed to reveal the Washington DC
Courtesy of Hirshhorn
architecture of an invisible system of oppression.
Museum and Sculpture
Hans Haacke, for instance, ts a German-born artist who has made a career Garden, Smithsonian
of exposing the hidden ties between economics, politics and aesthetics. Museum
Photography by Lee
A Breed Apart (fig.49) 1s typical of his concerns. Here, he creates a mock Stalsworth
advertising campaign to suggest how Leyland Vehicles, a British-based
automobile manufacturer, was able to elude the economic boycott of South
Africa, thereby profiting from apartheid while claiming to be Operating in the
public good. A set of seven panels mixes slick promotional texts and images
with information on the real conditions of apartheid. Photographs of sleek
Leyland cars are played against images of South African military forces using
Leyland vehicles to subdue South African rebels. The complex interplay of
different kinds of information reveals how corporate collusion helped keep
the apartheid government in power.
In a similar spirit, Krysztof Wodiczko, a refugee from Communist Poland,
creates work that suggests a relationship between Communism’s totalitarian
rhetoric and the authoritarian messages that emanate from the US Government
and corporate America. He presents his case by projecting huge photographic
images on corporate and public buildings. These introduce reminders of
realities that the proprietors of these buildings may wish to suppress —
for instance, hands gripping bars on the otherwise anonymous facade of a
federal prison, or for a brief, unauthorised moment during the apartheid
era, a Nazi swastika on the South African embassy in London.
In WORK (fig.50), which appeared on the facade of the Hirshhorn Museum

68
in Washington DC, Wodiczko revealed how race had been injected into the
1988 Presidential Campaign. Republican political advertisements had
relentlessly focused on the release of a notorious black convict during the
Democratic candidate's tenure as governor of Massachusetts. Playing on racial
fears, the implication of the advertisements was that a ‘liberal’ Democratic
administration would be overly sympathetic to blacks and hence dangerously
lax on crime. Wodiczko’s projection transformed the facade of the museum
into a speaker's platform, in which the alternating rhetorics of hope and fear
were symbolised by a hand holding a candle and a hand brandishing a revolver.
Haacke and Wodiczko suggest how oppressive hierarchies are kept in place
through systems of public address controlled by government or corporations.
Postmodern artists from non-white and non-Western backgrounds also
borrow the language of public address to suggest how the experience of
Otherness feels from the inside. Native American artist Edgar Heap of Birds
uses the format of the road sign to remind us that history is written by the
winners. Native Hosts (fig.51) revives the forgotten history of New York,
welcoming its present inhabitants in the name of the Indian tribes whom they
have so completely replaced. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar similarly challenges
assumptions of universality by programming the electronic signboard over
Times Square witha map of the United States and the message “T his is not

69
 America’ (fig.52). His point, of course, is that the casual identification of the
label ‘America’ with the United States effectively obliterates the existence of the
other nations that inhabit the North and South American continents.
Other non-white artists address the stereotypes that determine white
responses to them. Lorna Simpson focuses on the way in which being a black
women gives her a double invisibility. In Guarded Conditions (fig.53), she lines up a
set of identical images of a black woman photographed from the back, her
hands gripped behind her in a defensive gesture. Her double vulnerability is
emphasised in a text composed of the repeated phrases ‘sex attacks’, ‘skin
attacks’. Meanwhile, Adrian Piper confronts what she regards as the sublimated
racism of white society. In the video Cornered (f1g.54), she speaks directly to the
viewer across a barricade created by an upended table. In measured tones she
reveals that, despite her light
complexion, she ts actually black,
and challenges viewers to consider
how that affects their response: 51
Edgar Heap of Birds

I’m black ... If I don’t tell you who I am, I Native Hosts 1988

have to pass for white. And why should I Six aluminium signs
each 45.7 x 91.4
have to do that? ... The problem is not (18 x 36)
simply my personal one, about my racial City Hall Park, New York
Courtesy of Public Art
identity. It's also your problem if you have a
Fund, New York
tendency to behave in a derogatory or
52
insensitive manner toward blacks when you
Alfredo Jaar
see none present nears: Some researchers
A Logo for America from
estimate that almost all purportedly white Messages to the Public
Americans have between 5 per cent and 20 1987
Spectracolor
per cent black ancestry. Now, this country's
Lightboard, Times
entrenched conventions classify a petson as Square, New York
black if they have any black ancestry. So Courtesy of Public Art
Fund, New York
most purportedly white Americans are, in
fact, black ... What are you going to do
about 1t?

If most whites are actually black, Piper suggests, their assumption of

superiority ts groundless.
By focusing on representation rather than identity, postmodern multi-
culturalists find themselves wrestling with a different set of questions. Cana
member of the dominant group represent the marginal group, or only analyse
himself? Can a member of a marginal group speak for herself, or have her
responses been too contaminated by the ruling ideology? Do restrictions on
who can speak for whom ultimately lead to a situation in which no one can
speak for anyone?
A further problem was raised by a controversial exhibition mounted by the
Whitney Museum in 1994. Entitled Black Male, it was designed to investigate,
not the reality of black maleness in America, but the nature of the
representations that govern public perceptions of it. As a result, the works

70
in the show, largely but not exclusively created by black male artists, revolved
mainly around negative stereotypes. For instance, Carl Pope's Some of the Greatest
Hits of the New York City Police Department (fig.55) focused on police violence
and the white public’s perception of the criminality of young black men. Pope's
installation consisted of a set of sportsman’s trophies, each labelled with
the names and dates of death of young black men killed by New York City
Police. Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (fig.56)
reinvents an iconic American history painting by substituting the black inventor
George Washington Carver for the founding father George Washington. In
Colescott’s version, the black characters are realised as degrading cartoons,
which humorously challenge white viewers to question how heroism ts

represented in history. Fred Wilson's Guarded View (fig.57) presented a set of

headless black mannequins in the garb of museum guards. Devoid of
individuality or even humanity, they represent, Wilson suggests, the most
common image of the black man to be found in a contemporary art museum.
While Black Male drew large audiences, critics on both sides of the political
spectrum questioned its exclusive focus on negative stereotypes. Black men,
seen through the eyes of white society, were thugs, criminals, victims, fools and
menial workers. While the show intended to deconstruct and discredit these
images, the absence of any alternative view brought it close to reinforcing the
racist clichés it was meant to dispel.
Thus postmodern multiculturalism butts up against some of the same

Tel
 GUARDED CONDITIONS

SEX ATTACKS |Skt ATTACK

SEX Ai

12
 difficulties that beset postmodern feminism. An exclusive focus on
representation offers little in the way of a map for positive change. At tts
most extreme, it suggests that giant walls separate Whites and Others tn a
world divided into oppressors and victims.
However, a more nuanced view ts possible. One voice of moderation ts
provided by James Clifford, an ethnographer who rejects the isolationism
inherent in both versions of multiculturalism. While he agrees that the
search for authentic identity is a futile goal, he argues that the idea of
53
authenticity itself need not be abandoned. Instead, he proposes that
Lorna Simpson
Guarded
authenticity be reconceived as an ongoing creative activity in which elements
Conditions 1989 of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ cultures collide, meld and restructure themselves
Eighteen colour into something new. More optimistic than the standard scenario of ruthless
Polaroids, twenty-one
coloniser and helpless victim, this view has spurred an interest 1n hybridity =
plastic plaques
Overall dimensions
231M < 3325 _— TLR RSS Seva
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54
Adrian Piper
Cornered 1988
Mixed media
installation
Dimensions variable
Museum of
BOGE
SE
IRE
REESE
Contemporary Art,
Chicago k

55
Carl Pope
Some of the Greatest
Hits of the New York
City Police Department:
A Celebration of
Meritorious
Achievement in
Community Service
1994
Mixed media
Dimensions variable the idea of cultures and individual identities continually being remade through
Whitney Museum
of American Art.
their contact with each other.
Gift of Carl and Karen One can see how this might work with artists who straddle the local and
Pope, Christopher and
international. Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura has been referred to as the
Ann Stack and A.W.
Stuart Japanese Cindy Sherman, but his work has more to do with subtle interplays
between the erotic fantasies of East and West. Morimura poses himself in
tableaux drawn from Western art history or Hollywood publicity photos. With
few exceptions, he makes himself up as a beautiful female, taking on roles like
Marilyn Monroe, Ingres’ odalisques or, as here, Manet’s Olympia (fig.58).
In part, Morimura’s work ts a reminder that Western fantasies have
traditionally placed Asians in a female, and hence subject position — Madame
Butterfly, the exotic but discardable concubine, being the archetypal model.
Here, a Japanese male overtly assumes this ‘feminised’ role. But more is going
on than simple critique. Morimura lets us feel the pleasure he experiences in

hs}
 submitting to this fantasy, and in turn the lushness of the photograph invites
us to share his pleasure. For the Western viewer there 1s a discomfiture that
derives from the model’s obviously dissonant gender and race. ‘Our’ traditions
have been absorbed and remade for another's purposes.
Something similar happens in the work of Chinese artist Wang Guangy1. In
a style known in China as ‘Political Pop’, he melds the surprisingly similar
languages of Communist propaganda and Western advertising to suggest that
their ends also are also compatible. His works reflect the realities of China's
post ‘Tiananmen Square society, where making Money has overshadowed all

G THE DELAWARE

SSR

oy

other pursuits. In keeping with this new order, in Wang's Great Castigation Series:
Coca Cola (fig.59), stalwart worker heroes of the Cultural Revolution find
themselves promoting an American soft drink.
In works like these, representations become raw materials for transformations
and new kinds of meaning. No longer the prison that confine us, nor the subtle
instrument of an oppressive ideology, the representation becomes an elastic
marker that maps out new possibilities. Thus, Clifford’s hybridity takes us on
beyond postmodernism to a world remade by globalism. But that’s another
Story.

74
56
Robert Colescott
George Washington
Carver Crossing the
Delaware: Page from
American History 1975
Acrylic on canvas
213.4 x 274.3
(84 x 108)
Private collection.
Courtesy of Phyllis Kind
Gallery, New York

57
Fred Wilson
Guarded View 1991
Wood, paint, steel and
fabric
Dimensions variable
Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York.
Gift of the Peter Norton
Family Foundation

58
Yasumasa Morimura
Portrait (Futago) 1988
Colour photograph
210.2 x 299.7
(82% x 118)
Courtesy of Luhring
Augustine, New York

10)
 Chee

ed “ e

965 965... : : cS Ae Ves HES<

16
59
Wang Guangyi CONCLUSION
Great Castration Series:
Coca Cola 1991-4
In tts heyday, postmodernism provided a much-needed corrective to the
Oil on canvas exclusionary and falsely universal world view of Greenberg-style modernism.
718% x 18% But it also set in motion a series of negations that ultimately led to unacceptable
(200 x 200)
consequences. At its most radical, postmodernism espoused arelativistic view
Private collection
of history that makes it impossible to refute absurd and dangerous ideas like
Holocaust revisionism, recovered memory and alien abduction. Its obsession
with representation led to an embrace of media that does nothing to counter the
narcotic effect of film and tele-viston on the public at large. Its reduction of politics
toa game of shifting signifiers displaced political activism from the streets to the
ivory tower. And finally, the fashtonable denunciations of the commodification
of art, far from leading to the withering away of the art object, coincided with the
most heated art market in history. Have we reached the post-postmodern era?
There is evidence everywhere of the return of the real. Art today ts full of
celebrations of the body, nature, tradition, religion, beauty and the self. Plenitude
has returned. Modernism, or at least modernisms, are back in vogue. Meanwhile,
even the most ardent advocates of postmodernism have been forced to admit that
the term has become discredited by its very popularity. As erstwhile postmodernist
Hal Foster remarked recently, We did not lose. Ina sense a worse thing happened:
treated as a fashion, postmodernism became démodé’. But a close look reveals that
the landscape has subtly changed. The real has returned in forms that reveal a shift
of consciousness enacted by postmodernism. It is no longer possible to imagine
that history takes a single course, or that the reader is not an essential component
of any text, or that our sense of self is not deeply implicated in relationships of
power and authority. For all its contradictions and occasional absurdities, it is
clear that postmodernism has remade the world in ways that Can never be retracted.

if
 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, The
BIBLIOGRAPHY Foster, Hal (ed.), The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Sources of quotations and Culture, Port Townsend, WA, Knowlege, trans, Geoff
further reading 1983 Bennington and Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis, 1984
Foster, Hal, Recodings: Art,
Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Port Mariant, Carlo Maria, quoted
Barthes, Roland, Image-Music- Townsend, WA, 1985 in Nairne, State of the Art, 1987,
Text, trans. Stephen Heath, pp-27-30
New York, 1977 Foster, Hal, The Return of the
Real: The Avant-Garde at the End Mulvey, Laura, “Visual
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, of the Century, Cambridge, Pleasure and Narrative
trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton MA, 1996 Cinema’, in Screen, Autumn
and Philip Beitchman, New 1975, vol.16, no.3, pp-6-18;
York, 1983 Halley, Peter, Collected Essays reworked version in The Sexual
1981-87, Zurich, 1988 Subject: A Screen Reader in
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, Sexuality, London and New
trans. Harry Zohn, New Jameson, Frederic, York, 1992
York, 1969 ‘Postmodernism and
Consumer Society’ in Foster, Nairne, Sandy, in
Bernstein, Cheryl, “The Fake The Anti-Aesthetic, 1983 collaboration with Geoff
as More’, in Idea Art, ed. Dunlop and John Wyver, State
Gregory Battock, New York, Jencks, Charles, What is Post- of the Art: Ideas and Images in the
1973, Pp-41—5 Modernism?, London, 1986 1980s, London, 1987

Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure Nochlin, Linda, “Why Have
London 1972 of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, There Been No Great Women
1962 Artists? Art News, vol.6o,
Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘Pierre no.9, Jan. 1971, pp.22-39,
Menard, Author of Don Kuspit, Donald, ‘Flak from 67-71
Quixote’, in Labyrinths: Selected the “Radicals”: The American
Stories and Other Writings, trans. Case against Current German Pollock, Griselda, Vision &
Donald A. Yates and James Painting’, in Jack Cowart Difference: Femininity, Feminism
Irby, New York 1964, (ed.), Expressions: New Art from and the Histories of Art, London,
PP30—44 Germany, St Louts Art 1988
Museum, 1983, reprinted in
Buchloh, Benjamin, ‘Figures Wallis, Art After Modernism: Sandler, Irving, Art ofthe
of Authority, Ciphers of Rethinking Representation, 1984, Postmodern Eva: From the Late
Regression’, October, no.16, Pp-137-51 1960s to the Early 1990s, New
Spring 1981, pp.39—68 York, 1996
Lacan, Jacques, The Four
Burgin, Victor, The End ofArt Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course
Theory: Criticism and analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain in General Linguistics, trans.
Postmodernity, London, 1986 Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, Wade Baskin, New York, 1966
New York, 1978
Clifford, James, The Predicament Steinbach, Haim, statements
of Culture, Cambridge, MA, Lawson, Thomas, ‘Last Exit: from ‘From Criticism to
1988 Painting’, Artforum, Oct. 1981, Complicity’, roundtable
pp-40-7 discussion moderated by
Danto, Arthur, Approaching Peter Nagy, Flash Art, Summer
the End of Art’, in The State of Linker, Kate, ‘Representation 1986, p.46
the Art, New York, 1987 and Sexuality’, Parachute,
no.32, Fall 1983, reprinted in Toynbee, Arnold, A Study in
Deitch, Jeffrey, Artificial Wallis, Art After Modernism: History, written 1938, pub.
Nature’ in Artificial Desire, Rethinking Representation, 1984, 1947, quoted in Charles
exh. cat., Deste Foundation Pp-391—-416 Jencks, What is Postmodernism?,
for Contemporary Art, London, 1986
Athens 1991 Lippard, Lucy, Mixed Blessings:
New Art in a Multicultural Wallis, Brian (ed.), Art
Fineberg, Jonathan, Art Since America, New York, 1990 After Modernism: Rethinking
1940: Strategies of Being, Representation, New
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995 York/Boston, 1984

78
INDEX Conceptualism
38
1—12, 13, 28, Heap of Birds, Edgar
Native Hosts 69; fig.51
Lawson, Thomas 29, 30, 33
Le Brun, Christopher
consumerism 42, 47 Heisenberg's Uncertainty Dream, Think, Speak 245
critical complicity 41 Principle 7 fig.13
historical references 11, 18, 20 Lear, Edward 26
Hitchcock, Alfred 54 Levine, Sherrie 36, 38, 40,

Abstract Expressionism 13
Danto, Arthur_ 13-14, 27, 42 Holzer, Jenny 28—o, 63 44-5
De Chirico, Giorgio 1, 18, 20 Inflammatory Essays 29; fig.17 After Walker Evans 38; fig.29
advertising 30, 35-6, 38, 40, 59,
The Painter’s Family 18; fig.6 Truisms 28 Lead Check #10 44; fig.34
63-4; fig.44 ‘Death of the Author’ 10, 38 homosexuality 60-3 Lichtenstein, Roy 29
anti-aesthetes 13, 27—40, 41,
deconstruction 9-10, 50 hyperreality 41, 45 Lippard, Lucy 52
43
Deitch, Jeffrey 50 Longo, Robert 30, 32, 33, 40
architecture 11;fig.2
Delacroix, Eugéne 24 Jules, Gretchen, Mark, State I
art market 10
Derrida, Jacques 9 Immendorff, Jorg 15-16, 18 30; fig.22
Artschwager, Richard 46
digital sampling 6 Café Deutschland 16; fig.3 Sword of the Pig 32; fig.23
Table and Chair 46; fig.36
Disney Corporation 7 International style 11
Bacon, Francis 24
Duchamp, Marcel Italy, Neo-expressionism 13,
Baldessart, John 35, 36
readymades 11, 41, 47 15, 18, 20-2 McCollum, Allan
Heel 35; fig.27
Plaster Surrogates 43-4; fig.33
Barthes, Roland 10—1, 15, 27,
McLaughlin, John 44
29,38
Einstein, Albert 7 Jaar, Alfredo 69-70 Manet, Edouard
Baselitz, Georg 16-17
embroidery 53 A Logo
for America 69-70; Olympia 73
Adieu 17; fig.4
Enlightenment 7, 65 fig.52 Mapplethorpe, Robert 62-3
Basquuat, Jean-Michel 23-4
essentialism 53 Jameson, Frederic 14-15, 27 Dennis Speight with Calla Lilies
Horn Players 233 fig.11
Evans, Walker 36, 38 Johnson, Philip 63; fig.47
Baudrillard,
Jean 43, 45
AT&T Building 11;fig.2 Marden, Bruce 44
Benjamin, Walter
Judd, Donald 47 Mariant, Carlo Maria 18, 20
“The Work of Art in the
fascism 18, 20 Offspring of Helios 20; fig.7
Age of Mechanical
fashion 6 Marxism 14-15, 18, 42-3
Reproduction’ 35
feminism 12,50, 51-64, 67 Kelly, Mary 59-60 mediated images 7
Berger, John
First Wave 52-3, 54 Post-Partum Document 59; Minimalism 11-12, 46
Ways of Seeing 52
Bernstein, Cheryl 38
postmodern 53,54, 63 fig.45 Miro, Joan 67
fetishism 42-3, 53-4, 57, 60 Kiefer, Anselm 17—18 Miyake, Issey 6
Beuys, Joseph 15, 29
film 7, 35, 53-4, 57 Parsifal cycle 17-18; fig.s modernism 6, 10, 11-12, 42, 51,
Bickerton, Ashley 47, 50
Fischl, Eric 24 Kitaj, R.B. 24 67,77
Biofragments 50; fig.39
Bad Boy 24; fig.12 Koons, Jeff 47 Mondrian, Piet 45
Black Male (Whitney Museum
Foster, Hal 27,77 Equilibrium Tanks 7; fig.38 Mortmura, Yasumasa 73-4
exhibition 1994) 70-1
Freud, Lucian 24 Kosuth, Joseph Portrait (Futago) 73-4;
Blake, William 24
Freud, Sigmund 9, 53-4 Clock (One and Five) hig.58
Body art 12
English /Latin Version 28; multiculturalism 12, 50, 64,
Borges, Jorge Luts
fig.15 65-74
‘Pierre Menard, Author of
Gaudi, Antonio 22 Kruger, Barbara 54,56, 64 Mulvey, Laura
Don Quixote’ 38
Gaultier, Jean Paul 6 We Will No Longer Be Seen And “Visual Pleasure and
Buchloh, Benjamin 18
Germany Not Heard 54,56; fig.4o0 Narrative Cinema’ 53-4,
Burgin, Victor 35—6, 64
anti-aesthetes 29-30 Your Gaze Hits The Side Of My 57
Lei-Feng 35-6; fig.28
Neo-expressionism 13, Face 54
Campbell, Steven 24, 26
15-18,
22, 29 Kuhn, Thomas
The Dangerous Ea rly and Late
Giacometti, Alberto 67 The Structure of Scientific nationalism and national
Life of Lytton Strachey 24, 26;
Gilbert and George 60, 62 Revolutions 8, 9,10 identity 15-16, 18
fig.14
DEATH 60, 62;fig.46 Kuspit, Donald 18 Neo-expressionism 12, 13-26,
capitalism 15, 24, 46
graffiti 23-4 27,20) 08)
Celebration, Florida 7
Greenberg, Clement. 10, 112, neoclassical style 20
ceramics 53
51, 67,77 Lacan, Jacques 15, 53-4, 59, 60 Newman, Barnett 45
Charlesworth, Sarah 56
Guerrilla Girls 63-4 Landart 12 Nochlin, Linda
Figures 56; fig.41
Do women have to be naked to get language “Why Have There Been
Chia, Sandro 20-1
into the Met Museum? 64; artwork as text 10-11, 12 No Great Women Artists?”
Water Bearer 20-1; fig.8
fig.48 Conceptual art 28 52
Clemente, Francesco 21—2, 23
deconstruction 9—10 Noland, Kenneth 44
Midnight
Sun I 21-2;
poststructuralism 9
Clifford, James 73,74
Haacke, Hans 68—9 structuralism 8—9o Oedipal Complex 53-4
Colescott, Robert
A Breed Apart 68; fig.49 Lascaux caves 7 Other, concept of 51, 60, 64,
George Washington Carver
Halley, Peter 43, 45-6 Lawler, Louise 43 65
Crossing the Delaware... 71;
White Cell with Conduit 45-6; Pollock and Tureen... 433
fig.56
commodity critics 41-50
fig.35
gg fig.32
Si
 painting 24, 33, 35
Neo-expressionism 13,1
Schnabel, Julian 22-3
Humanity Asleep Wee fig.10
PHOTOGRAPHIC COPYRIGHT
16

surrogate 42
Portrait of God 22
Saint Sebastian — Born in 1951
CREDITS CREDITS
paradigm, notion of 8,9 22
Parker, Rozstka 52 sexuality, alternative 60-3
pastiche 15 Sherman, Cindy 57 59
The Andy Warhol Every effort has been made to
performance art 141,12 advertising images 503
Foundation, Inc./Art trace the copyright owners of
photography 33, 35—6, 38, 54, fig.44 Resource, New York works reproduced.
The
$7359 Film Stills 571 593 fig.43
Courtesy of the artist 16, 54, publishers apologise for any
photomontage 25—6 signifiers and seeiied Qs 53
59; David Atkins RA 45; omissions that may
Picasso, Pablo 11, 67 Simmons, Laurie 56-7
Courtesy Barbara Gladstone inadvertantly have been made.
om Piper, Adrian Red Library #2 57;£19.42
Gallery 30; The Broad Art
Cornered 70; fig.54. Simpson, Lorna
Foundation 1m; Curt Marcus Artschwager, Kosuth, Weiner
plagiarism 12 Guarded Conditions 70; fig.53
Gallery, New York 1; Gorney © ARS, NY and DACS,
pluralism 14-15,27 simulacra 41, 43, 45
Bravin + Lee, New York 41; London 2001
Political Pop 74 Star Wars films 6, 47
Grant Selwyn Fine Art, New
Polke, Sigmar 29-30 Steinbach, Haim 46-7
York and Los Angeles 35; Basquiat © ADAGBP Paris
Figure with Hand 20; fig.18 Ultra-red 2.47; fig.37
Courtesy of Hirshhorn and DACS, London 2001
Pollock, Griselda 52 Stella, Frank 45
Pop art 1-12, 29, 32, 42, 46 Sternberg, Josef von 54 Museum and Sculpture
pop imagery 1 Garden, Smithsonian Chia © Sandro Chia/VAGA,
structuralism 8—
Pope, Carl surrogate BS 42
Institution/ Photo: Lee New York/DACS, London
Some of the Greatest Hits of the Stalsworth 50; piaWeber 2001

New York Police Department. . . Gallery, New York 3 7 ©)

Oe tes De Chirico, Haacke © DACS
71; fig.55 Tansey, Mark
Postminimalism 12, 13 A Short History of Modernist Association 2; Los Angeles 2001

postmodernism Painting 10; fig.1 County Museum of Art. All

history 1-12 television 6,7 rights reserved 27; Luhring Mariani © Carlo Maria
use of term 6-7, 11 text, artwork as 1o—t1, 12 Augustine, New York 58; Mariani/ VAGA, New
poststructuralism 9-10, 15, Toynbee, Arnold 1 ©The Estate of Robert York/DACS, London 2001
27-8, 50 ‘Turner, J.M.W. 24 Mapplethorpe 47; Mary
‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art Boone Gallery, New York Rosenquist © James
(MOMA exhibition 1984) Metro Pictures, New York Rosenquist/ VAGA, New
67 Venturi, Robert 32, 42; Paula Cooper Gallery, York/DACS, London 2001
Prince, Richard 38, 40 Learning from Las Vegas 11 New
w York 20, 34; Phyllis
Untitled (cowboy) 38, 40; vernacular forms 1 Kind Gallery, New York 56; Salle © David Salle /VAGA,
. fig.30 Public Art Fund, Inc. 51, 52; New York/DACS 5, London
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 2001

Wagner, Richard 17 533 Sonnabend Gallery, New

Quantum Mechanics 7 Wang Guangyi York 37; Spencer Museum of Warhol © The Andy Warhol
Great Castigation Series: Coca Art, The University of Foundation for the Visual
Cola 74; fig.s9 Kansas 48; Tate Photography Arts, Inc./ARS, NY and
Reagan era 22,24, 40 Warhol, Andy 33, 35, 41 ase Gy Fon VO MOY 18s IY TA aes, DACS, London 2001
relativity, theory of 7 Brillo Box 14, 41-2, 46; fig.31 Gs sy Hey HON Al, ID wary Nis
repression 9 Marilyn Diptych 33; hg. 26, 28, 36,938, 39, 40, 43, 44. All other copyright works
Richter, Gerhard 29, 30 Weiner, Lawrence 46, 49; © 2001 Whitney ©The artist or estate of the
Abstract Painting No.439 30; MANY COLORED Museum of American Art, artist 2001
fig.19 OBJECTS PLACED SIDE New York 55; © 2001
Elizabeth I 30; fig.21 BY SIDE 28: fig.16 Whitney Museum of
Oil Sketch No.432/11 30; Weston, Edward 36 America Art, New York/
fig.20 Wilson, Fred Photo: Geoffrey Clements wrN
Rosenquist, James Guarded View 71; fig.57
Marilyn 32; fig.24 Wodehouse, PG. 26
Wodiczko, Krysztof 68-9
WORK 68=9; fig.50
Salle, David 32-3, 40
Satori [bree Inches within Your
Fleart 33; fig.25
Sandler, Irving 22
Saussure, Ferdinand de LEARNING RESOURCES
Course in General Linguistics 9 CENTRE
schizophrenia 15 Havering College
ation
of Further and Higher Educ

80
 |Te
HAVER

3
Movements in Modern Art
This series introduces the most important movements in late nineteenth and
- twentieth-century art. Each book is illustrated chiefly in colour with works —
from the Tate and other major collections around the world.

Perhaps few words have been as overused and misunderstood in recent times as the term |

‘postmodernism’. This book presents a lively, wide-ranging and highly readable eyo) (e)¢=\((e ane

Marcia elesianrere|-aal
Sasha cxkeelan-hohan-lellamia-kelal(cncmeli contemporary art.

The postmodern revolution replaced the Modernist faith in universality, authenticity, and

artistic progress VViidane! world view that turned artworks into texts, history into mythology, the

relatsie into a fictional character and reality into an ereitanrerel=e! convention. Postmodernism ‘

examines the key developments in thehistory of postmodern art. It includes a discussion of

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feminism and postmodern multiculturalism. In the processittouches on a number of intriguing

questions, among them: What is art without an artist? Why ISH e)are)
(ore|e-lela Nation Ulliaitosscial
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foressi(anvele(>aanani=ce)(6 paralmelwae (ene! movement (o]colu

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With 60 illustrations. Also available in the series:

POP ART David McCarthy
o10]=}1S)\V MeBYWale mOrelad larencola
oa EXPRESSIONISM. Shulamith Behr
‘FUTURISM Richard Humphreys
MINIMALISM David Batchelor Ve
_~MODERNISM Charles Harrison po
. POST-IMPRESSIONISM Belinda Thomson
-REALISM James Malpas
~~ SURREALISM Fiona Bradley
_ » General Editor: Simon Wilson, a curator at Tate
2 ~S
=