1. Postmodernism emerged in the period following World War II and is characterized by a shift away from modernist paradigms. 2. Key aspects of postmodern art discussed include the rejection of notions of progress, originality, and the death of the artistic aura. Postmodern artists sought to transfer the aura through performance, installation, and conceptual works. 3. The document traces the development of modern art movements like cubism, abstract expressionism, and conceptualism and discusses how postmodern theorists have analyzed language, culture, and the mind.

1. Post-Modernism
1945-present

2. Shift in paradigm
Replication
Mass
Nature Art production

3. First, let’s consider the WORD
What does the word postmodernism mean?
• The confusion is advertised by the “post”
prefixed to “modern.” Postmodernism
identifies itself by something it isn’t. “It isn’t
modern anymore.” In what sense is it “post”?
– As a result of modernism?
– The aftermath of modernism?
– The afterbirth of modernism?
– The development of modernism?
– The denial of modernism?
– The rejection of modernism?

4. *Modo: “just now” in Latin
Modernism refers to what is new (avant-garde) or in
the “now” so naturally Postmodernism would
mean beyond the new or beyond “now”.
So if something is created using postmodernistic
ideals then the act of creation solidifies it in the
modernistic realm. How can something defined
in one manner when its tangible existence defines
it as something else?
Paradox

5. Modernism in Art
Picasso
van Gogh
Cézanne (1)
Gauguin (2)
George Seurat (3)
Chagall (4)

6. Cubism
Picasso’s Les Demoisells d’Avignon (1907)
*Many viewpoints shown
at once: amalgamous
combination of 3D turned
into a 2D image in order
to appear 3D, simplified
to simple geometric
figures.

7. Pointillism
Technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of
pure color are applied in patterns to form an image

8. Abstract Expressionism
Jackson Pollock: Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
1946: post WWII, defragmentation of society and
societal norms. Women in the work-place?!?
*American and European A.E. ends during Cold War and McCarthyism: A.E. is taking place
in Soviet Union so therefore it is communist and UNAMERICAN

9. Representation of the Sublime
Where’s the art?
In 1915 Russian artist Kasimir Malevich
presented the unrepresentable sublime by
painting a white square on a white background

10. What makes something ART?
The Aura
Mimetic: how well does something represent that
which it is representing?
Expressive: how well does the artist express himself?
Affective: how does the reader or viewer respond?
Objective: does the piece radiate within itself; thus
defining within itself that it is art?
Each form of criticism is discussing the same principle: the Aura

11. PoMo, the photograph, and the death of the Aura
In 1936 Walter Benjamin theorized that the
artistic aura, that which encapsulates the
force behind art, died when art could be
reproduced and then mass produced.
However, throughout Postmodern theorists and
artists have striven to show that the artistic
aura isn’t dead but transferred.

12. Transference
Yves Klein—Directed two naked women, smeared in blue paint, to roll
around on a canvas while a single-note symphony played in the
background: the artistic aura is transferred to The Event
Josef Beuys—fabricated installations or environmental pieces. Shifts
aura from object to place
Marcel Duchamp—placed “ready-made” non-art objects on display in
order to show that disassociation from its original context, use, and
meaning the object could harness the aura into the space that the
“ready-made” was on display
Gilbert and George—displayed themselves as “living sculptures”: used
their own fame as a way to harness the aura

13. Andy Warhol took photo images and transferred
them via silkscreen to a canvas. Fame is the art.

14. The aesthetic process is
thrown out all together
**Break from Dadaism by eliminating
all elements of expressiveness …the intermediate philosophy
Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
that is between nominalism and
realism that says universals exist
only within the mind and have
no external or substantial reality
Example of Dadaism Example of
by Hannah Höch Conceptualism by John
Baldessari

15. Conceptualism Today
Damien Hirst
Away from the Flock 1994. Glass, steel, lamb and
formaldehyde solution Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain 2007.
Silver

16. 3 stages of Modern Art
1. Crisis in the representation of reality
– Cézanne
– Cubism
– Dadaism (concentrated anti-war politics through a
rejection of the prevailing standards in art: punk music)
– Surrealism (features the element of surprise, unexpected
juxtapositions and non-sequitur: Salvador Dalí)
2. Presentation of the unpresentable
– Suprematism (focused on fundamental geometric forms)
– Constructivism (art as a practice for social purposes)
– Abstract Expressionism
– Minimalism
3. Non-presentation (abandoning of the aesthetic
process)
– Conceptualism

17. The Postmodern Condition and Jean-
Franḉois Lyotard
“Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its
end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”
*Modernism existed in order to represent the
conceivable which is not representable, and the
only way to present this is through Abstraction.
*Postmodernism exists in order to represent that
which is not conceivable and/or cannot be
conceivable and thus cannot be represented.
(Art that is aware this it is art)

18. The Genealogy of Postmodern Art
Begin by visiting an installation by the
Conceptual artist Daniel Buren entitled On
two levels with two colours (1976), which
features a vertically striped band at the floor
levels of two adjoining gallery rooms. Empty
rooms, nothing else…
Buren is not necessarily representative of
Postmodern art but it is a place to start, in the
sense of where modernism itself has arrived at

19. Death in the Post-
Modern would be
Walter Benjamin prophesized that with mass
production and producability art
dead (1936)
*With the rise of Capitalism the aura of art
had again shifted. The more something is
reproduced the more draw there is to own
the original.

20. Hyper-Reality
In the consumerist era there is a drive to recreate
the past.
Now living in an era where items that have been
mass produced are now being reproduced to give
the illusion of living in an era that has already
taken place: faux antiques

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22. Postmodern Literature

23. Where does thinking come from?
“Mankind always takes up only such problems
as it can solve…we will always find that the
problem itself arises only when the material
conditions for its solution already exist or at least
in the process of formation” –Karl Marx
Do humans create art to express what
they see in nature or is nature
expressed and understood through art?
Is nature art?

24. 5 stages in Literary Criticism
• Mimetic: reflects nature
– Judeo-Christian, Greek, Roman, Anglo-Saxon to
Renaissance
• Expressive: reflects the author
– Restoration to Romantic
• Affective: reflects the reader
– Romantic to Victorian
• Objective: reflects itself (Modern and Postmodern)
– Victorian to present
• Contemporary (Cultural): reflects society and
culture
– Present

25. What permits
The structure of
meaningful
language
thinking?
PoMo theory rooted in Structuralism founded by
Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913)
–Analyze social and collective dimension of language
rather than individual speech
–Find infrastructure of language common to all
speakers on an unconscious level
–Sounds of language: small sets of possible sounds or
phonemes (phone-eem) C/A/T=3 phonemes. Together
creates a significant 3 phoneme unit but individually
they are of no “value”

26. The Breakdown
Language can be divided into three parts:
• Signified=what is being talked about; the thing
• Signifier=what it is named or classified as
• Sign=end result of combination
Power in naming things:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God,
and the Word was God..and the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us.” John 1: 1-14
“He brought them to the man to see what he would name them;
and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its
name.” Genesis 2: 19-20
Limiting because it places false importance
on either the signified or the signifier

27. The Binary Model
Signified language is divided into two subsets:
Syntagmatic: Linear combinations
He shut the door
Paradigmatic: Substitution combinations
He shut the door
She closed the window
They opened the roof
Paradigmatic lends itself to various figures of
speech: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche

28. Semiology
Culture can be analyzed as a system of signs
C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) proposed that semiology can be broken into
three categories:
1. Icon: signifies the object through similarity:
(cartoon, sound effect, realistic painting)
2. Index: signifies the object through physical connection:
(smoke, footprint, sonic boom)
3. Symbol: signifies the object through arbitrary rule:
(alphabet, stop sign, punctuation)
Me

29. Structural Anthropology
• Claude Leví-Strauss (1908-2009): influenced by
digitalized aspect of information
– Thinking is the “system output” that occurs in the
interaction between human aspects and the
environment
– Language allows us to:
• Form social relationships
• Categorize our environment
–Tribal societies apply substitutions and combinations to
think about non-human nature (totems):
Gods then animals then vegetables
•Mind functions on binary sets: noise/silence, raw/cooked
•Human mind logically duplicates nature unconsciously.
Traffic-light system: Green=Go, Yellow=Yield, Red=Stop
Green=short wavelength, Red=long wavelength, Yellow=middle wavelength

30. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004): French philosopher
Defined Deconstructionalism
– Understanding is based on the known which limits
logic
Bricolage: small bits put together
Bricoleur: person that creates bricolage
–Even with metalanguage, a technical language used
to describe language, there is still a limitation of
logic because it is grounded in language
–Reason has been shaped by a dishonest pursuit
diagnosed as logocentricsm “the word made flesh”
(coined by Ludwig Klages in 1920s)
–How can we evaluate language and reason when
we are limited by our own humanity
–True objective criticism and reason cannot exist

31. Language and the Mind
• Sigmund Freud devised his theoretical trinity
of the mind: Id, Ego, and Superego
• Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) replaced Freud’s
trinity with structures of the Imaginary, the
Symbolic, and the Real
– The psyche is structured like a language
– Without language the unconscious mind does not
exist
– Marginalized women stating that women are
unable to escape from the imaginary into the
symbolic like men

32. Social Orders or
Contemporary Cultural Criticism
1990s-present: focus on how cultures interact
with each other
•Break from ordered and fixed reality of
Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida
Deconstruction peeled away the layers of
constructed meanings in order to create a “zero
degree” of sense. Contemporary criticism
embraces the layers and attempts to add more.

33. Postmodern
Feminism •Justice
•Liberty
Female models exist through metonymy: •Peace
•Grace
•Sexual Desire
Women are put into the
schizoid position of being
PoMo Feminism left with two options:
both IN history and NOT
1. Coexist WITH men on route to
in history: written out by
egalitarianism (soft compromise)
male theory (only
2. Come out AGAINST men on a radical
representative)
separatist route

34. Contemporary “non”-Eugenics
Eugenics: the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic
composition of a population by qualification and quantification
and then abolishing non-wanted traits.
Nazi Germany used anthropometrics (the measurement of the
human individual for the purposes of understanding human
physical variation) in order to classify what perfection would
look like and to eliminate any asymmetrical groups.
Golden Ratio of Beauty:
Uses Pi 3.14… and Contemporary “non”-Eugenics: studies
Fibonacci sequence1,1,2,3,5,8…
how groups relate to one another. Focused
less on symmetry vs. asymmetry.
-applied to Literature through study of
culture rather than classification and
stereotyping

35. The Post Modern Poem
*Can’t classify everything in the same manner
*The Post Modern period is a time of
experimentation
*Classical and non-classic poetry exist side by
side
*There is no good and bad just original and non-
original and “better”
*Post Modernism puts the Lit. timeline into flux