Society Sucks, Product and Process, and the Well-Fed Artist

The term postmodernism is used in a confusing variety of ways. For some it means anti-modern; for others it means the revision of modernist premises.  It avoids, as much as possible, the modernist desire to classify. Postmodernism partakes of uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, and accepts ambiguity.


The seemingly anti-modern stance involves a basic rejection of the tenets of Modernism - a rejection of reason, the notion of truth, the belief that it’s possible to create a better, if not perfect, society. This view has been termed Deconstructive Postmodernism.  An alternative understanding, which seeks to revise the premises of Modernism, has been termed Constructive Postmodernism.  


Maybe the entire film by the Coen Brothers, The Big Labowsky, reflected these competing themes.  There's The Dude and his life.  Then, there's Juliane Moore's character Maude.  And, who can forget Bunny, especially the scene where she asks The Dude to blow on her freshly painted toenails to help dry them, and he turns towards the pool then asks her "won't he mind?" (turning his head towards the pool to bring the passed out guy into view) with Bunny responding "Uli doesn't care about anything.  He's a nihilist."


The Surrealists (the Dali variety) had the modernist belief that their art could influence human destiny.  Later, after the war and in the period when humankind could be obliterated, surrealism of a different sort emerged (the Tapias variety).  Now, we have such practitioners as Keifer.  Maybe you wouldn't put him in the surrealist camp, but I find his work to be consistent with that view of human-kind.


In June 1970, the French writer Jean Clay observed: "It is clear that we are witnessing the death throes of the cultural system maintained by the bourgeoisie in its galleries and its museums."  Well, that certainly seems debatable.  I do agree that the church, aristocracy, and state were being replaced by a rising group who came along with the rise of a professional middle-class.  Also, we have seen a growth in Outsider Art, and street art of all sorts.  Yet, it's hard for me to see that Clay's observation as more fantasy than reality.  Though, Conceptual art helped to turn our attention towards "making" and the manipulation of materials where process was the product, there's the artist Dove Bradshaw who produces 'things' that are themselves about process and that change and degrade with time.


We can continue this line to include all of performance art including the “Happenings” of the post-WWII era, the Arte Povera and Arte Brut movements, Abstract Expressionism, and so forth.  Yet, even here, a society that values the object as our does exerts a tremendously powerful force in the art world.  That along with artist's desire to both make good work and live in heated spaces and have good food!