An Aesthetic Crisis

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An Aesthetic Crisis

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08/13/2009 - 13:46

Visual art moves from modernism to postmodernism to … what?Robin Laurence

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83A New Aesthetic

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The past 150 years have witnessed fast, vast and astonishing changes in the way humanbeings occupy the planet. It

s hardly surprising that the visual arts have also seen asuccession of movements, schools, styles and philosophies. Modernism, postmodernismand now what ... post-postmodernism? Whatever you label them, these movementsrepresent immense shifts in the ways artists experience the world and create an aesthetic.Take modern art. It seems as if the term should mean contemporary art, the art of themodern day. But to art historians, “modern” is a distinct era, running roughly from the1860s to the 1970s. The work of early modernists was inspired by forces sweepingthrough all aspects of western society: industrialization, urbanization and secularismprofoundly changed the way artists perceived the world.Lines begin to take precedence over form and color in Mondrian

s tree series. As his styleevolved from postimpressionism to pure abstraction, his attitude toward nature changed.Mondrian came to ﬁnd trees so disturbing that, seated at a restaurant table by a windowwith a view of them, he asked to change places.The European framework of art patronage shifted from commissions by the aristocracyand the church to a “free” market, and the popularity of photography liberated paintersfrom the task of realistically depicting their subjects. Both trends gave artists the freedomto experiment and to be acutely aware of their forms, materials and processes. Theaesthetic that they developed was deﬁned by self-consciousness and the notion of art forart

s sake.Breakthroughs in psychology and science also fueled the modernist aesthetic. Einstein

stheory of relativity, Freud

s writings on the unconscious and world-changing technologicalinventions led to artists

exploration of multiple viewpoints (cubism), the imagery of dreamsand the impulses of the unconscious mind (surrealism), the speed and energy of theautomotive age (futurism) and a direct emotional response to their subjects(expressionism).

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The modernist aesthetic also reﬂects the far reaches of colonialism and the introduction ofAsian, African, Latin American and Oceanic art to western eyes. A pivotal work from theearly modern era is Pablo Picasso

s oil painting,

Les Demoiselles d

Avignon

(1907). Thesubject matter, ﬁve naked prostitutes in a Barcelona brothel, shocked contemporaryviewers. So did the work

s tilted planes and fractured and “primitive” forms. All reveal ahost of inﬂuences, from Einstein to Cézanne to African tribal masks.The cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque exerted a major inﬂuence over anotherfamous modernist, Piet Mondrian. Mondrian

Apple Tree in Bloom

(1912) experimentswith faceting and abstraction: trunks, branches and leaves are broken down into a networkof vertical, horizontal and curving lines. His later paintings are “pure” geometricabstractions: employing a reduced palette and straight lines, squares and grids, theyanticipate the hard-edge and minimalist schools of late modernist art.In the public mind, abstraction may be 20th-century art

s most notable invention. Butequally inﬂuential was Marcel Duchamp

s introduction of the “found object” or

readymade

.His groundbreaking work,

Fountain

(1917), which consists of a urinal tipped on its backand signed “R.Mutt,” exempliﬁes his philosophy that art is anything an artist designates asart. Duchamp opened the way for neo-dadaism, pop art and conceptualism – for RobertRauschenberg

Bed

(1955), Andy Warhol

s Brillo boxes and Joseph Beuys

installationsand performances – and he exerts a powerful influence on the evolving aesthetic of ourown troubled age.A Damien Hirst shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde, a Jennie Holzer “truism” postedon a billboard in Times Square, a Thomas Ruff digital photograph of an urban forest – howcan these diverse works reflect the same postmodern aesthetic?Perhaps they can

t. Distinct as postmodern art is from modern art, it is marked bypluralism, by concurrent rather than successive styles, concerns and media. Since itsemergence in the early

70s, postmodern art has attacked modern art

s emphasis onformalism and instead embraced narrative content, social commentary and cultural theory.Postmodern artists also challenged modernist ideas about originality, authorial voice andavant-gardism. Still, like modernism, postmodernism was inspired by seismic social andscientiﬁc shifts. Artists responded to the erosion of national boundaries by mass mediaand multinational corporations, the ascendancy of electronic and digital technologies andthe failures of an industrial notion of “progress.”

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Robert Smithson

s emblematic earthwork,

Spiral Jetty

, is a massive 1,500-foot-long coilmade of black basalt rocks extending into Utah

s Great Salt Lake. Mark Tansey paintedPurity Test (1982) in response to Smithson

s work. He leaves it up to the group in theforeground to judge the purity and artistic merit of the iconic installation.Postmodern art often aims to dissolve the line between high and low culture. Jeff Koons

skitsch ceramic sculpture

Michael Jackson and Bubbles

(1988) and Takashi Murakami

Panda

(2003), a manga-like ﬁberglass panda standing on a Luis Vuitton trunk, exemplifythe appropriation of images, styles and strategies from popular culture. They also revealpostmodern art

s cheery embrace of late-capitalist consumerism.Ironically, postmodern art is seen to be inﬂuenced by conceptualism, feminism and culturaltheory; it is idea-driven and often aims to deconstruct the politics of representation and thebiases of gender, culture, race and sexual orientation. “Cultural hybridity,” reﬂectingglobalization, mass migration and displacement, is an important feature of the postmodernaesthetic. A positive aspect of postmodernism

s postcolonial condition is that artists inAsia, Africa and Latin America have rapidly emerged onto the world scene. Theirabsorption into the art market and their conversion into manufacturers of cultural productshave been equally rapid.During her iconic performance

Interior Scroll

(1975), Carolee Schneemann stood nakedon a table and painted her body with mud. Then she slowly withdrew a long paper scroll

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