POSTMODERNISM

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This is not a PowerPoint Presentation on
Postmodernism
Jeff Haig, The Treachery of Professors
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POSTMODERNISM
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images
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The (Post)Modern Crisis

• Things fall apart the centre cannot hold
• Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
• The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
• The ceremony of innocence is drowned
• The best lack all convictions, while the worst
• Are full of passionate intensity.
• William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1920)

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Modernism and Postmodernism

• Both styles are FORMALIST as much concerned with
  how a story is told, as the story itself. Both
  feature fragmentation, self-referentiality,
  irony, doubling and pastiche.

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Modernism and Postmodernism

• Postmodernism has many different definitions,
  depending on which art is being discussed. Pomo
  is different in architecture, for instance, than
  it is in film.

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POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism unlike Modernism, Postmodernism
starts from the assumption that grand utopias are
impossible. It accepts that reality is fragmented
and that personal identity is an unstable
quantity transmitted by a variety of cultural
factors. Postmodernism advocates an irreverent,
playful treatment of one's own identity, and a
liberal society. http//www.ffotogallery.org/th-e
du/glossary.htm
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POSTMODERNISM
Some features of postmodern styles ?Nostalgia
and retro styles, recycling earlier genres and
styles in new contexts (film/TV genres, images,
typography, colors, clothing and hair styles,
advertising images) ?"...the disappearance of a
sense of history, the way in which our entire
contemporary social system has little by little
begun to lose its capacity to retain its own
past, has begun to live in a perpetual present
and in a perpetual change that obliterates
traditions of the kind which all earlier social
formations have had in one way or another to
preserve... The information function of the media
would thus be to help us to forget, to serve as
the very agents and mechanisms of our historical
amnesia" (Jameson). ?Culture on Fast Forward
Time and history replaced by speed, futureness,
accelerated obsolescence.
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TRADITIONAL
POSTMODERN SINGLE NARRATIVE MULTIPLE
NARRATIVES (Single Coding) (Double
coding) ENCLOSED OPEN UNSELFCONSCIOUS SEL
FCONSCIOUS UNSELFREFERENTIAL SELFREFERENTIAL OB
JECTIVE SUBJECTIVE BELIEF IN VALUES
DISBELIEF IN VALUES (SINCERE) (IRONIC)

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REALIST At best Meaningful, engrossing, moving
At worst Deceptive, sentimental
POSTMODERN At best Playful, curious,
startling At worst Detached, nihilistic,
sexist, despairing, homophobic, racist

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Double Coding Film

• Knight's Tale Medieval setting, Queen's We Will
  Rock You song
• Moulin Rouge Victorian Paris setting, Smells
  Like Teen Spirit song
• Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors Playing with
  different possible scenarios
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John
  Malkovich
• Reality is fragmented, memory unreliable, past
  and present indistinguishable,
• identity uncertain
• Shrek Princess fights like martial-artist,
  cross-references to Disney

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Double Coding
Britney Both Innocent and Not That Innocent
Madonna Both Virgin and Not-Virgin
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Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory
Matt Groening, The Persistence of the Simpsons
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Yo Mama's Last Supper Renee Cox (1996)
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Postmodernism
Andy Warhol, Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan), 1985
Andy Warhol, Campbells Soup, 1968
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Postmodernism
Roy Lichtenstein, Untitled, 1968
Charles Ray, Untitled, 1991
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POSTMODERN NO REALITY, ONLY PERCEPTIONS,
COPIES (SIMULACRA) NO SUSPENSION OF
DISBELIEF PAST AND PRESENT SAME MASS-PRODU
CED INDIVIDUALISM (These jeans are you!)
TRADITIONAL (REALIST) REALITY SUSPENSION OF
DISBELIEF HISTORY INDIVIDUALISM

SIMULACRA JEAN BEAUDRILLARD
Paris, Las Vegas
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The Self-Referential Text

• But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised
  spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold
  to bring forthSo great an object can this
  cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may
  we cramWithin this wooden O the very
  casquesThat did affright the air at
  Agincourt?O, pardon! since a crooked figure
  mayAttest in little place a millionAnd let us,
  ciphers to this great accompt,On your imaginary
  forces work.
• -- Shakespeare, Henry V

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Self-Referentiality

• Lisa Dont worry, Bart. It seems like every
  week something odd happens to the Simpsons. My
  advice is to ride it out, make the occasional
  smart-aleck quip, and by next week, well be back
  to where we started from, ready for another wacky
  adventure.
• Homer Loves Flanders, The Simpsons

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Self-Referentiality

• Seinfeld A sitcom in which nothing happens,
  about a man named Jerry Seinfeld, played by Jerry
  Seinfeld, who writes a sitcom in which nothing
  happens.

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The Postmodern Hero

• Postmodern heroes in realist narratives

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Double-Coding (Doubling)

• Double-coding is the practice of creating a work
  of art that speaks to two different audiences in
  different ways.
• For example, Animaniacs, Shrek, Toy Story and
  the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons are double-coded
  - they have many references that a child wont
  get but will amuse an adult.

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Double-Coding (Doubling)

• Other examples are things such as hip-hop, which
  will use an old song as the basis for the new
  one, and the Sprite ad showing an athlete who
  both sells the product, and pops up top deny
  selling the product.

Geico Tiny House ad
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Pastiche

• Can mean either a (satirical) imitation of
  another work, or a hodge-podge of different
  styles all thrown together in one work.
• Family Guy is often a pastiche of other TV, film
  and musical genres or specific work, to the
  extent that any given episode may have no other
  meaning.

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Pastiche

• Richard Hamilton, "Just What Is It That Makes
  Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? 1956

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Kitsch

• theoristshave linked kitsch to
  totalitarianism. The Czech writer Milan Kundera,
  in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  (1984), defined it as the absolute denial of
  shit. His argument was that kitsch functions by
  excluding from view everything that humans find
  difficult to come to terms with, offering instead
  a sanitised view of the world in which all
  answers are given in advance and preclude any
  questions.
• In its desire to paper over the complexities
  and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera
  suggested, is intimately linked with
  totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse
  interest groups compete and negotiate with one
  another to produce a generally acceptable
  consensus by contrast, everything that
  infringes on kitsch, including individualism,
  doubt, and irony, must be banished for life in
  order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera
  wrote, Whenever a single political movement
  corners power we find ourselves in the realm of
  totalitarian kitsch.
• (wikipedia.org)

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Kitsch
Margaret Keane, Wistful, 1978
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Margaret Keane
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Kitsch
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Kitsch
Anne Geddes (1956-)
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Kitsch
LOL Cats
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Collectible Plates
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Collectible Figurines
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Kitsch Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons, Michael and Bubbles, 1988 Sold for
5.6m in 1991.
Jeff Koons, Ushering in Banality, 1988
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Kitsch Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons, Elvis, 2003
Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Yellow), 1994-2000
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Kitsch Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons, Pink Panther, 1988 Sold for 1.8m
Jeff Koons, Puppy, 2000
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Kitsch Thomas Kinkade
Thomas Kinkade, Lamplight Lane, 1999
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Mark Ryden
Sophia's Mercurial Waters
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Mark Ryden
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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Mark Ryden
The Meat Train
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Mark Ryden
Inside Susan (1997)
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Mark Ryden
Saint Barbie
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Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is
the "real" country, all of "real" America that is
Disneyland.... Disneyland is presented as
imaginary in order to make us believe that the
rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
America that surrounds it are no longer real, but
belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of
simulation. Jean Baudrillard-- Simulacra and
Simulation p. 12-13
Epcot Center