Post-Modern Art (1992)
Excerpt fr. John A. Walker’s Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed.
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This text is an excerpt from Walker’s 1992 glossary previously published by Library Association Publishing, London.
Post-Modern Art
Broadly, all the visual fine art produced after the “death” of modern art considered to have occurred during the 1960s. In this case the term would encompass all the various strands within the art of the ’70s and ’80s: pattern painting, neo-expressionism, neo-geo, new British sculpture, etc. More narrowly, art that exemplified in its form and content the Post-Modern condition of post-history and stylistic pluralism, e.g. the paintings of Duggie Fields; or the multi-media work of Laurie Anderson, an artist aware of and taking advantage of the new mass-communication technologies. One could also include in this category the work of artists influenced by the ideas of fashionable Post-Modern theorists such as Lyotard and Baudrillard.
By the 1960s modern art had become the official culture of the West. The modernist dictum “rebel against the past” thus applied to modern art itself. This kind of art had always had its critics on the Right and among philistines but in the 1960s it also began to be criticized from within by artists unhappy with the seemingly inevitable, single-strand sequence of movements which resulted in reductive styles like minimalism. These artists were also concerned by the lack of social content and lack of relation to ordinary people typical of so much avant garde art.
Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s departed in some respects from the ideals of modern art and consequently was considered Post-Modern. However, it was the critique of art undertaken by the conceptualists in the second half of the ’60s which opened the way for various kinds of political art in the 1970s (e.g. feminist art, community art), but unfortunately it also opened the door to all kinds of other art not desired by the anti-modernists (e.g. academic and historicist works, a resurgence of traditional forms such as painting and sculpture). Subsequently, some writers argued that there existed two kinds of Post-Modern Art: a Post-Modernism of reaction and a Post-Modernism of resistance. Included in the former were artists like Carlo Maria Mariani who cynically recycled worn-out styles like neo-classicism. Included in the latter were Left-wing and feminist artists making work about political issues and undertaking critiques of the art-world, patriarchy, and so forth.
See also Minimal Art, Modern Art, Pop Art, Simulation / Simulacra / Hyperreality.
References and further readings
> Pico Miran. Manifesto for Post-Modern Art. (New York, American Art Gallery, 1951).
> Brian O’Doherty. “What is Post-Modernism?” Art in America, 59, May-June 1971, p. 19.
> Calvin Tomkins. The scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art. (New York, Viking Press, 1976).
> Peter Fuller. “Fine art after modernism”, New Left Review, (119), January-February 1980, pp. 42-59.
> Hilton Kramer. “Post-Modern: Art and culture in the 1980s”, New Criterion, 1(1), September 1982, pp. 36-42.
> Hal Foster (Ed.). The anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. (Port Townsend, Washington, Bay Press, 1983); reprinted as Post-Modern culture, (Pluto Press, 1985).
> Brian Wallis (Ed.). Art after modernism: Rethinking representation. (New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art/ Boston, David Godine, 1985).
> Hal Foster. Recodings: Art, spectacle, cultural politics. (Port
Townsend, Washington, Bay Press, 1986).
> Michael Newman. “Revising Modernism, Representing Postmodernism”. In Lisa Appignanesi (Ed.), Post-Modernism. (ICA Documents, 1986).
> Stanley Trachtenberg (Ed.). The Post-Modern moment: A handbook of contemporary innovation in the arts. (Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Books, 1986).
> Sandy Nairne. State of the art. (Chatto, 1987), book of TV series.
> Brandon Taylor. Modernism, Post-Modernism, realism: A critical perspective for art. (Winchester School of Art Press, 1987).
> Kim Levin. Beyond modernism. (Harper & Row, 1988).
> Howard Risatti (Ed.). Post-Modern perspectives: Issues in contemporary art. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1990).
> John Roberts. Post-Modernism, politics & art. (Manchester University Press, 1990).
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