1 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:14,370 At three 32 on the 15th of July 1972, as this photograph was taken, modernism suffered another fatal blow. 2 00:00:14,370 --> 00:00:25,260 One of many that one might choose as evidence of its falling fortunes and the decline of its once firm position in all fields of culture. 3 00:00:25,260 --> 00:00:27,720 The place was Saint Louis, Missouri. 4 00:00:27,720 --> 00:00:38,160 And the occasion was the destruction of housing complex Prewett ego built amid the prosperity and optimism of the early 1950s. 5 00:00:38,160 --> 00:00:43,410 This sprawling urban renewal project had replaced a poor neighbourhood on the city's 6 00:00:43,410 --> 00:00:50,550 north side with a complex of high rise buildings designed by Minoru Yamasaki. 7 00:00:50,550 --> 00:00:58,450 Just two decades after its construction, amid plummeting demand from residents and escalating crime problems, 8 00:00:58,450 --> 00:01:06,690 its 33 towers were declared a failure packed with dynamite and razed to the ground. 9 00:01:06,690 --> 00:01:11,970 The story of this development's rise and fall is a little more complex than this. 10 00:01:11,970 --> 00:01:18,240 But for postmodern architectural theorists Charles Jencks, its significance was clear. 11 00:01:18,240 --> 00:01:24,900 This was the day he said that, quote, Modern architecture died. 12 00:01:24,900 --> 00:01:31,260 The differences between two more celebrated buildings that remain standing can 13 00:01:31,260 --> 00:01:36,540 provide a useful comparison to suggest the shift from modernism to postmodernism. 14 00:01:36,540 --> 00:01:45,810 In the second half of the 20th century, the building on the left is may spend a rose Seagram building completed in 1958, 15 00:01:45,810 --> 00:01:50,750 a landmark in the architectural style known as international style. 16 00:01:50,750 --> 00:01:57,990 Its glass skin and structural elements are rigorously austere, stripped of decorative ornamentation. 17 00:01:57,990 --> 00:02:09,300 Although with its steel beams clad inexpensive bronze and its flaws in travertine, its form is somewhat more lavish than the famous modernist demand. 18 00:02:09,300 --> 00:02:17,810 That form follows function. Equally extravagant is the building's large open plaza, 19 00:02:17,810 --> 00:02:25,290 a public space presented as evidence of its builders desire to improve the life of all New Yorkers, 20 00:02:25,290 --> 00:02:37,440 in line with the often utopian social ambitions of a modern of modernism to improve or as some would have it, to control the life of its subjects. 21 00:02:37,440 --> 00:02:44,910 The rigid order of the Seagram building's external surfaces penetrated its interiors to its rigorously 22 00:02:44,910 --> 00:02:52,560 gridded and carefully planned interiors by Modern Museum of Modern Art curator and architect Philip Johnson, 23 00:02:52,560 --> 00:02:59,700 equally aligned with the building's modernist devotion to clarity and structure. 24 00:02:59,700 --> 00:03:01,320 Twenty five years later, 25 00:03:01,320 --> 00:03:12,690 Philip Johnson's idea of what might make a great skyscraper skyscraper had changed a shift epitomised by his AT&T building on the right. 26 00:03:12,690 --> 00:03:19,290 Just a few blocks north of the modernist icon to which he had earlier contributed. 27 00:03:19,290 --> 00:03:30,690 Though its shape owes much to the rectilinear filing cabinet form of its is Johnson's sandstone face design includes grandiose decorative flourishes, 28 00:03:30,690 --> 00:03:40,500 a spectacular arched entranceway at the building's base and a giant open pediment decorating the top of the building. 29 00:03:40,500 --> 00:03:46,410 The latter feature wasn't really even a reference to historical architectural styles, 30 00:03:46,410 --> 00:03:52,560 as it was sourced without regard to scale or function from the style of 18th century. 31 00:03:52,560 --> 00:04:00,870 Cabinet maker Thomas Chippendale by the mid 1980s, when Johnson's AT&T building was completed. 32 00:04:00,870 --> 00:04:08,130 The term postmodernism had been in circulation for some time, but it was this building which more than any other, 33 00:04:08,130 --> 00:04:15,660 declared its legitimacy as a major architectural movement on an international scale. 34 00:04:15,660 --> 00:04:22,650 So architecture is a particularly clear stylistic territory to distinguish modernism from postmodernism. 35 00:04:22,650 --> 00:04:30,630 But I think we can go some way to finding an equivalent juxtaposition in the visual arts by considering these two works. 36 00:04:30,630 --> 00:04:35,520 On the left is Brand Kruse's Bird in Space, first created in 1928, 37 00:04:35,520 --> 00:04:43,230 a sleek form in which almost all realist detail is jettisoned to suggest streamlined speed. 38 00:04:43,230 --> 00:04:52,770 It's highly polished surface suggests something made by a machine like the propeller blade that Duchamp famously, famously told Brent koozie. 39 00:04:52,770 --> 00:05:00,060 No sculpture could do any better than given the sense of futuristic optimism in a work like this. 40 00:05:00,060 --> 00:05:01,760 I think it should come as no said. 41 00:05:01,760 --> 00:05:09,410 Cries that when me spanned a row and his colleagues were trying to identify a sculpture for the plaza of the Seagram Building in the 50s, 42 00:05:09,410 --> 00:05:18,800 they unsuccessfully approached Brancusi to suggest the production of a rocket scaled enlargement of this work. 43 00:05:18,800 --> 00:05:27,830 Fast forward to 1986, and we moved from the grace of a bird in flight to the kitsch of a fairground bunny in Jeff Koons is rabbit. 44 00:05:27,830 --> 00:05:33,560 Kearns's sculpture was cast in steel from an inflatable storable toy, 45 00:05:33,560 --> 00:05:45,050 resulting in a substantial sculptural materiality that contradicts its appearance as a cheap inflatable by appropriating and recontextualize thing. 46 00:05:45,050 --> 00:05:53,080 This manufactured object and confusing its status with the aesthetics of the avant garde, 47 00:05:53,080 --> 00:06:04,010 Koons flaunts distinctions between popular taste and high art and suggests the implication of art in systems of luxury and consumption. 48 00:06:04,010 --> 00:06:08,030 So we've now had some modern and post-modern art and architecture. 49 00:06:08,030 --> 00:06:16,250 But given that such confusions between high and low that Koons and acts are so central to postmodernism for this lecture, 50 00:06:16,250 --> 00:06:19,550 I've also tried to include design, fashion, film, 51 00:06:19,550 --> 00:06:27,860 writing and music with in my Raymont not only to indicate postmodernism, his breadth of influence as style, 52 00:06:27,860 --> 00:06:38,720 but also to suggest its persistent blurring of the genres and categories that modernism had tried so hard to control. 53 00:06:38,720 --> 00:06:44,300 In many of these fields, the pinnacle of the postmodern moment came in the 1980s. 54 00:06:44,300 --> 00:06:49,700 But their emergence can also be seen as continuous with the growing pluralism 55 00:06:49,700 --> 00:06:55,580 of styles and movements that have characterised the arts since the 1960s. 56 00:06:55,580 --> 00:07:00,560 My lecture today will touch on a variety of the visual expressions of the postmodern 57 00:07:00,560 --> 00:07:06,860 differentiating them from the modern isms which they both extended and rejected. 58 00:07:06,860 --> 00:07:11,150 I'll also start to explore postmodernism as an idea, 59 00:07:11,150 --> 00:07:17,330 a set of theoretical tools that occupy a central position in the intellectual history of the late 60 00:07:17,330 --> 00:07:27,330 20th century and a major field for critical approaches to the study of art and visual culture. 61 00:07:27,330 --> 00:07:34,620 So the postmodern is not simply after modernism. It is also often explicitly against modernism. 62 00:07:34,620 --> 00:07:42,510 Sometimes even anti modernist formulated as an explicit rejection of that which preceded it. 63 00:07:42,510 --> 00:07:51,780 This negative relation makes it useful to sketch some of those modernist beliefs that it sought to supplant for art historians. 64 00:07:51,780 --> 00:07:58,650 One of the central ideas of modernism is the idea of an avant garde envisaging art as a 65 00:07:58,650 --> 00:08:05,730 frontier for the discovery of progressively new and ever more innovative artistic inventions. 66 00:08:05,730 --> 00:08:10,560 Its ideal of a vanguard complies with the broader modernist face. 67 00:08:10,560 --> 00:08:23,070 Faith in progress under modernism. Rational thought was seen to offer an objective, dependable and transcendent basis for knowledge. 68 00:08:23,070 --> 00:08:34,170 The dissatisfaction in such beliefs falls into what theorist Jean-Francois Lee ATAR characterised as post-modern isms, quote, War on totality, 69 00:08:34,170 --> 00:08:41,640 an effort to replace the so-called grand narratives of master narratives of modernism with something more pluralistic, 70 00:08:41,640 --> 00:08:47,310 allowing for local and marginal differences. For Leotta and others, 71 00:08:47,310 --> 00:08:53,490 postmodernism is properly sceptical of the idea of such large scale systems 72 00:08:53,490 --> 00:09:01,350 regarding them as tools designed to naturalise ideology and mask social inequality. 73 00:09:01,350 --> 00:09:09,510 So how might we understand this rejection of master narratives in visual terms, in the context of our history? 74 00:09:09,510 --> 00:09:14,700 Alfred Barr's famous flowchart, which I'm sure you have all seen before, 75 00:09:14,700 --> 00:09:20,100 and I feel as though it is not possible to write any historical lecture that 76 00:09:20,100 --> 00:09:26,460 doesn't include this image in it might be taken as an expression of such goals, 77 00:09:26,460 --> 00:09:29,220 a kind of family tree for modernism, 78 00:09:29,220 --> 00:09:39,180 arranging its families according to the Darwinian rules of descent and species, or to consider another very modernist system, 79 00:09:39,180 --> 00:09:49,110 a kind of organisational chart for the proper chains of influence and command by which we are meant to understand its operation here. 80 00:09:49,110 --> 00:09:55,860 By way of comparison, I show you an influential organisational chart by management expert Alfred Sloan, 81 00:09:55,860 --> 00:10:02,460 which was done for General Motors in the early 1920s, then revolutionary. 82 00:10:02,460 --> 00:10:09,750 Now the entirely standard form by which businesses, as well as I would say in museums and universities, 83 00:10:09,750 --> 00:10:16,380 organised staff for clear management, responsibility and maximum efficiency. 84 00:10:16,380 --> 00:10:21,990 Perhaps even more suggestive of modernism is faith in science and technology. 85 00:10:21,990 --> 00:10:30,370 Is this less famous bar diagram in which the moment collection is itself envisaged as a missile, its pointy end? 86 00:10:30,370 --> 00:10:39,270 Well, sort of pointy end representing the forward thrust of new art into which the museum would unstoppably speed forward. 87 00:10:39,270 --> 00:10:46,020 So these are the kinds of historical modernist models that modernism constructs. 88 00:10:46,020 --> 00:10:52,740 What then might a postmodern history of art look like in diagrammatic form? 89 00:10:52,740 --> 00:10:59,430 Here is a diagram that Charles Jenckes uses in his essay Postma Modern and Late Modern, 90 00:10:59,430 --> 00:11:05,490 to chart the characteristics of postmodern architecture like parse diagram. 91 00:11:05,490 --> 00:11:09,360 Jenckes allows for multiple tendencies to coexist, 92 00:11:09,360 --> 00:11:18,090 but he frequently puts the same architects across different fields in his expanding and contracting thematic graphs, 93 00:11:18,090 --> 00:11:22,350 or sometimes at entirely different historical points in the lineage. 94 00:11:22,350 --> 00:11:36,900 He sketches another, yet more complex possibility comes from theorist theorists Geo Deluce and Felix Guitar, his model of the rhizome, 95 00:11:36,900 --> 00:11:48,480 a term that they adopt from biology with its endlessly connected semiotic chains, rejecting linear chronologies and the treelike systems of modernism. 96 00:11:48,480 --> 00:11:59,040 To this end, I show you this work by Turkish contemporary artist Burack Eric Haren, in which he takes a slice of the contemporary art world. 97 00:11:59,040 --> 00:12:08,730 In this case, the four thousand five hundred and ninety two applicants to the Berlin banali using their written applications to the event, 98 00:12:08,730 --> 00:12:13,650 the work maps they had declared political sympathy's into a complex, 99 00:12:13,650 --> 00:12:18,720 interwoven network of three hundred and ninety five common terms, 100 00:12:18,720 --> 00:12:26,020 jettisoning those whose statements don't mention such goals for their art into the amorphous state shape to the left and. 101 00:12:26,020 --> 00:12:35,450 You can see that just sort of hovering to the left outside of this network diagram that he creates as the 102 00:12:35,450 --> 00:12:42,710 Internet age has made such network relationships like friend networks and tag clouds ever more familiar. 103 00:12:42,710 --> 00:12:55,790 The structure of the rhizome has become an increasingly legible form in culture at large. 104 00:12:55,790 --> 00:13:00,170 Or perhaps to more fully abandoned modernist logic, 105 00:13:00,170 --> 00:13:07,670 maybe a postmodern art history would look something like this poster that I'm sure you've seen out in the hallway. 106 00:13:07,670 --> 00:13:11,900 The Great Bear by Simon Patterson here. 107 00:13:11,900 --> 00:13:21,500 The familiar order of the London subway map becomes the site for a constellation of engineers, philosophers, explorers, artists and more. 108 00:13:21,500 --> 00:13:31,340 The endlessly rich possibilities of such a text complies with the interpretive freedom advocated by de constructivists such as schoch Derrida, 109 00:13:31,340 --> 00:13:43,190 and pulled the man who argued that because the meanings of texts relied on their interpreter and context, stable meanings were themselves impossible. 110 00:13:43,190 --> 00:13:47,270 Patterson's work encourages such interpretive instabilities, 111 00:13:47,270 --> 00:13:55,940 as each line intersects in quite inexplicable ways such that on the blue line we follow a journey from Fusari, 112 00:13:55,940 --> 00:14:00,200 Brong, Zino, Chelo, Michaelangelo and Rafaelle. 113 00:14:00,200 --> 00:14:09,050 And then footballer Gary Lineker has one line crosses another, followed by Tatian and then actor Kirk Douglas. 114 00:14:09,050 --> 00:14:18,650 Such an embrace of semiotic instability had been a key strategy for many conceptual artists working in the wake of modernism. 115 00:14:18,650 --> 00:14:30,710 Martha Rosellas The Bowery in2 Inadequate Descriptive Systems from 1972 juxtaposes the documentary style images of downtown New York streets littered 116 00:14:30,710 --> 00:14:39,830 with empty liquor bottles and the detritus of a Skid Row neighbourhood with a panoply of synonyms for the drunken state of those invisible subjects. 117 00:14:39,830 --> 00:14:44,000 It refuses to represent here. 118 00:14:44,000 --> 00:14:49,310 The linguistic mismatch not only destabilises the possibility of fixed meanings, 119 00:14:49,310 --> 00:14:56,180 but appoints more politically to the inadequacy of the social system she depicts. 120 00:14:56,180 --> 00:15:04,340 While critics of postmodernism might decry its refusal of absolutes as cultural relativism gone wild. 121 00:15:04,340 --> 00:15:14,150 Its efforts to destabilise those systems, which we might accept as Nathuram from city planning to scientific names to the legal system, 122 00:15:14,150 --> 00:15:21,020 do remind us that these systems are themselves the product of human imagination. 123 00:15:21,020 --> 00:15:29,180 Because these systems often serve very particular interests, their destruction disruption can therefore also be political. 124 00:15:29,180 --> 00:15:39,340 Such as the intervention in the social situation of depressed Lower Manhattan, which is made in Brussels work. 125 00:15:39,340 --> 00:15:50,530 The incorporation of performance represented another radical alternative to the individualism of art and the artist presented under modernism. 126 00:15:50,530 --> 00:15:54,340 The Herot ization of the modernist artist centred on the idea that these 127 00:15:54,340 --> 00:16:01,290 singular geniuses were able to produce a completely unique vision of the world. 128 00:16:01,290 --> 00:16:06,880 But for postmodernists, the identification of a singular, 129 00:16:06,880 --> 00:16:17,830 static and stable self was merely a matter of representation and self representation, especially for feminist artist artists. 130 00:16:17,830 --> 00:16:20,320 The acceptance of unstable, 131 00:16:20,320 --> 00:16:30,040 fragmented identities often turned to self portraiture as a means to destabilise modernist assumptions about individual subjectivity. 132 00:16:30,040 --> 00:16:40,300 Most famously, Cindy Sherman's untitled film Stills transformed the artist's body into an infinitely malleable material not one identity, 133 00:16:40,300 --> 00:16:52,180 but multiple personas drawn from Hollywood cinema's stock of stereotypes but emptied largely of their narrative intelligibility in subsequent works. 134 00:16:52,180 --> 00:17:01,090 Sherman has used costume and prosthetics to inhabit portrait genres whose reference points ranged from Renaissance painting 135 00:17:01,090 --> 00:17:10,240 to television franchise Real Housewives in the collaborative work of performance artists such as Gilbert and George, 136 00:17:10,240 --> 00:17:17,230 such as their 1973 transformation into singing sculptures or in L.A. and Marina Abramovic, 137 00:17:17,230 --> 00:17:24,400 his marathon 17 hour performance in which their conjoined hair slowly unravelled. 138 00:17:24,400 --> 00:17:32,350 The modernist privileging of the single and stable artistic gesture is further compounded by the ephemeral nature, 139 00:17:32,350 --> 00:17:45,640 prolonged duration and difficulty in distinguishing identity from performance that such works affect. 140 00:17:45,640 --> 00:17:50,390 So such concerns were felt. Well, outside the world of performance art. 141 00:17:50,390 --> 00:17:57,920 The work of Madonna. To take a more popular although I do realise now very much historical example, 142 00:17:57,920 --> 00:18:06,350 also complied with this emphasis on performance and transformation in postmodernism. 143 00:18:06,350 --> 00:18:11,750 With her endless string of makeovers, masquerade and self-conscious artifice, 144 00:18:11,750 --> 00:18:20,240 Madonna became a kind of darling for postmodern theorists for her challenge to gender norms and sexual boundaries. 145 00:18:20,240 --> 00:18:29,210 In the video clip for her 1984 hit Material Girl Madonna, Ripa formed scenes from Marilyn Monroe's 1954. 146 00:18:29,210 --> 00:18:35,600 Diamonds are a Girl's best friend sequence in the film. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 147 00:18:35,600 --> 00:18:43,430 In the 1990s, Madonna's track Vogue references a shopping list of references from the Golden Age of Hollywood. 148 00:18:43,430 --> 00:18:49,790 And in its video clip. She poses in the style of famous photographs of many of its stars. 149 00:18:49,790 --> 00:19:00,140 Such performances were extended in her appearance as a sultry starlet, Breathless Mahoney in the cartoon inspired 1990 film Dick Tracy. 150 00:19:00,140 --> 00:19:05,780 But cutting across such quotations were also more contemporary reference points. 151 00:19:05,780 --> 00:19:15,620 The New York gay subcultures that provided the dance style of Vogue or her use of the postmodern fashion of John Paul got here to reclaim, 152 00:19:15,620 --> 00:19:25,070 at least as Madonna would see it, restrictive undergarments as signs of female sexuality and empowerment. 153 00:19:25,070 --> 00:19:30,350 Performers such as Madonna made theoretical questions about gender perform activity, 154 00:19:30,350 --> 00:19:40,070 a matter for mainstream pop culture and of course, a million means to sell millions of albums. 155 00:19:40,070 --> 00:19:48,740 As artists working within a post-modernist mode sought to date destabilised values of originality and authenticity. 156 00:19:48,740 --> 00:20:01,430 Another key tactic to which they turned was appropriation. The well-known extreme of such practises is exemplified in 1980s photography. 157 00:20:01,430 --> 00:20:13,220 Sherri Levine, for instance, rephotographed the 1930s work of documentary photographer Walker Evans for her 1981 series after Walker Evans making 158 00:20:13,220 --> 00:20:21,270 no or little modification to the content of the original images that she reproduced from the pages of a book. 159 00:20:21,270 --> 00:20:30,700 And I add that provides a little because I think there are differences in terms of scale and cropping that are interesting to consider in these works. 160 00:20:30,700 --> 00:20:39,110 And the other thing that someone pointed out to me recently about this series is that it is the copyright implications of these works, 161 00:20:39,110 --> 00:20:47,630 which are fascinating. The original series of Walker Evans photographs were commissioned by the US government through 162 00:20:47,630 --> 00:20:55,610 the WPA Farm Administration photography programmes and therefore in the public domain. 163 00:20:55,610 --> 00:21:06,170 So her active progression also produces a very interesting commercial transport, were a publicly owned image, is able, 164 00:21:06,170 --> 00:21:15,800 through the act of appropriation, to transform itself into something that Cherry Levine herself has copyright over. 165 00:21:15,800 --> 00:21:23,780 Similarly, the work of Richard Prince rephotographed and cropped images from an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes, 166 00:21:23,780 --> 00:21:34,310 taking its commercial imagery of dubious moral standing as the basis for his grainy images of America's frontier sublime. 167 00:21:34,310 --> 00:21:40,760 Such strategies not only contravene the principles of artistic production under modernism, 168 00:21:40,760 --> 00:21:51,500 they flagrantly flaunted the legal and financial ownership of the visual material on which art, ownership and exchange is premised. 169 00:21:51,500 --> 00:21:59,990 In an important early essay on Postmodern Not written in 1980, Craig Owens understood these tactics of quotation. 170 00:21:59,990 --> 00:22:11,000 As efforts to debunk modernist originality in Owens account postmodern isms, use of appropriation is ambivalent and contradictory. 171 00:22:11,000 --> 00:22:14,840 It both upholds and destabilises ideology. 172 00:22:14,840 --> 00:22:27,370 Always complicit, complicit with its low and commercial sources, but simultaneously remaining critical of them. 173 00:22:27,370 --> 00:22:37,540 Such optimistic claims for the radical potential of postmodernism were, however, more optimistic than those held by many of its critics. 174 00:22:37,540 --> 00:22:44,500 Amongst conservative commentators like Hilton Kreimer, postmodernism was a, quote, creation of modernism. 175 00:22:44,500 --> 00:22:49,990 At the end of its tether for Kramer writing in the early 1980s, 176 00:22:49,990 --> 00:22:56,830 the growing interest of art historians in 19th century academic painting and the Prerana highlights, 177 00:22:56,830 --> 00:23:01,000 both of which had been condemned as middle class kitsch. 178 00:23:01,000 --> 00:23:11,620 According to the dictates of modernism itself was a symptom of postmodern isms, abandonment of principles, of quality and seriousness. 179 00:23:11,620 --> 00:23:20,530 In the world of museums. The kind of example that once attracted the ire of such critics was the revisionist programme of the music will say in Paris, 180 00:23:20,530 --> 00:23:24,190 which opened in 1986 here. 181 00:23:24,190 --> 00:23:34,000 Visitors were presented with the masterpieces of Manet and Monet alongside previously dismissed painters like Jerome and Carbonell. 182 00:23:34,000 --> 00:23:35,620 To make things worse, 183 00:23:35,620 --> 00:23:44,560 this mingling of categories occurred in an architectural space no less concerned with crossing the boundaries between high and low. 184 00:23:44,560 --> 00:23:52,330 A former railway station converted by postmodern Italian architect, gay or LNT. 185 00:23:52,330 --> 00:23:58,660 Interestingly, the conservative condemnation of postmodernism by Kramer and others comes strikingly 186 00:23:58,660 --> 00:24:04,480 close to the concerns of theorists at the opposite end of the political spectrum. 187 00:24:04,480 --> 00:24:12,430 For the Marxist left, postmodern isms embrace of the popular and commercial represented the disillusion of modern isms, 188 00:24:12,430 --> 00:24:24,640 faith in progress into an endlessly circular system of novelty in their reading certain capitalism as a ploy to increase consumption. 189 00:24:24,640 --> 00:24:29,530 A key proponent of this characterisation is Frederick Jamerson, 190 00:24:29,530 --> 00:24:36,760 published in the same year that Philip Johnson completed the iconic postmodern skyscraper we saw earlier. 191 00:24:36,760 --> 00:24:42,430 Jemison's essay Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Logic of Capitalism, 192 00:24:42,430 --> 00:24:49,470 appeared in the neo Marxist journal New Left Review and would become the opening chapter of his ninety nine, 193 00:24:49,470 --> 00:24:57,670 1991 book of the same name, arguing that global capitalism had become less concerned with the production 194 00:24:57,670 --> 00:25:03,670 of goods and more with the reproduction of images Jemison's model imagines. 195 00:25:03,670 --> 00:25:11,380 The shift from modernism to postmodernism as a symptom of economic change for Jamerson, 196 00:25:11,380 --> 00:25:17,410 while modernism retained the ability to critique capitalism in postmodernism. 197 00:25:17,410 --> 00:25:26,740 The victory of commodification is complete with little opportunity for resistance or escape. 198 00:25:26,740 --> 00:25:28,150 So I should be clear. 199 00:25:28,150 --> 00:25:38,590 One of the central themes that unites many of these ideas around postmodernism is the breakdown of boundaries between high and low culture. 200 00:25:38,590 --> 00:25:50,710 These distinctions with which postmodernism has sought aggressively to undermine again to turn to the field of architecture is instructive. 201 00:25:50,710 --> 00:26:02,770 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's 1972 book, Learning from Los Vegas, exemplifies the postmodern enthusiasm for the lowbrow. 202 00:26:02,770 --> 00:26:12,460 The book celebrates the diversity and decoration of commercial architecture as an antidote to the uniformity of modernism, 203 00:26:12,460 --> 00:26:16,300 embracing spectacle and humour as positive qualities. 204 00:26:16,300 --> 00:26:32,710 Their architectural model is not Le Corbusier, but instead decorated commercial buildings and giant signs such as this 1950s drive in doughnut store. 205 00:26:32,710 --> 00:26:44,070 They're valorised valorisation of kitsch and the everyday certainly finds expressions in the early buildings are Frank Gehry, such as his advertising, 206 00:26:44,070 --> 00:26:55,330 his headquarters for advertising agency Chiat Day in Los Angeles and in the visual arts in monuments such as this by Klaus Oldenburg, 207 00:26:55,330 --> 00:27:02,470 an inventor whose own architecture they were principles through which he would tackle the conventions of the museum itself. 208 00:27:02,470 --> 00:27:08,320 In this, his 1993 design for the Houston Children's Museum, 209 00:27:08,320 --> 00:27:20,440 whose target I think is not simply the neoclassical facade of the museum that we all know in Oxford and I know in London very well, 210 00:27:20,440 --> 00:27:33,280 but also may stand a rose design for Houston's Museum of Fine Art, located just a couple of blocks east of Century's confection. 211 00:27:33,280 --> 00:27:40,510 It was such interests that caused Jamerson and other observers of postmodernism to regard Pop as its 212 00:27:40,510 --> 00:27:49,270 first art movement with its embrace of low cultural forms like supermarket packaging and comic books. 213 00:27:49,270 --> 00:27:56,240 Pop was indeed received by many critics at the time as an affront to the proper concerns of modern, 214 00:27:56,240 --> 00:28:02,290 not a vulgar corruption of its definitions and categories. 215 00:28:02,290 --> 00:28:14,230 But it is equally clear now, I think, that the art of Warhol, Lichtenstein and others did not represent a straightforward imitation of such low forms. 216 00:28:14,230 --> 00:28:14,890 In other words, 217 00:28:14,890 --> 00:28:24,020 these artists made significant transformations to their source materials as they took them from the dime store to the gallery in Warhols, 218 00:28:24,020 --> 00:28:26,740 Warhol, Campbell's soup cans, for instance. 219 00:28:26,740 --> 00:28:38,740 What are we to make of the flat yellow disk that to which he reduces the central medallion on the ship can? 220 00:28:38,740 --> 00:28:47,830 Or his inclusion of monochrome canvases alongside his reproductions of news photography? 221 00:28:47,830 --> 00:28:54,880 And how should we understand Warhol quotation from mass culture in relation to mass cultures? 222 00:28:54,880 --> 00:29:04,690 Recruit quotation of Warhol. Such as this 1965 paper address produced as a promotion by the makers of Campbell's Soup, 223 00:29:04,690 --> 00:29:14,090 but clearly referencing the pop aesthetics that Warhol had provided for their brand. 224 00:29:14,090 --> 00:29:22,730 Modernism had itself long been obsessed with, quote, quoting from diverse historical and non Western sources, 225 00:29:22,730 --> 00:29:31,850 seeing so-called primitive and historical art forms as a vehicle to return to some kind of better premodern culture. 226 00:29:31,850 --> 00:29:40,260 Consider, for instance, the appropriation of imagery from posters by the French impressionists or Picasso's use of wallpaper, 227 00:29:40,260 --> 00:29:51,470 a newspaper in his collages. As much as the breakdown between high and low cultural forms has been regarded then as a key trait of postmodernism. 228 00:29:51,470 --> 00:30:00,810 Such borrowed sources can equally be seen as a defining quality of modernism itself, as Jamerson saw it. 229 00:30:00,810 --> 00:30:06,920 However, postmodern ism's interest in the low sources was different. 230 00:30:06,920 --> 00:30:12,140 But Jamerson postmodern quotations do not transform their source material. 231 00:30:12,140 --> 00:30:20,810 They remain just as commercial and degraded as the materials from which they quote. 232 00:30:20,810 --> 00:30:28,370 Four artists working at one purported cusp of between modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts. 233 00:30:28,370 --> 00:30:39,500 Let's say the 1950s and early 1960s, the proximity of modernist prototypes to their own made such critiques even more urgent. 234 00:30:39,500 --> 00:30:44,330 Here, for instance, is Robert Rauschenberg, 1953 work erased. 235 00:30:44,330 --> 00:30:53,390 De Kooning drawing, thumbing its nose at the heroine's nation of the injured individual artist genius. 236 00:30:53,390 --> 00:31:03,500 So central to modernist ideology by matriculate, meticulously erasing the marks of abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, 237 00:31:03,500 --> 00:31:11,030 reassigning the newly blank object as the work of Rauschenberg himself. 238 00:31:11,030 --> 00:31:18,110 The purity of abstraction taken to its logical extreme end is a great story about this work that I always love, 239 00:31:18,110 --> 00:31:27,200 which is that when Rauschenberg visited de Kooning to ask for a drawing to which he could do this to de Kooning, 240 00:31:27,200 --> 00:31:34,550 hunted around forever to find a drawing that was rendered with sufficient force into 241 00:31:34,550 --> 00:31:41,840 the paper such that it would be very difficult for Rauschenberg to erase his marks, 242 00:31:41,840 --> 00:31:46,580 to make it as hard as possible to diminish his achievement. 243 00:31:46,580 --> 00:31:51,710 If you like, it was in fact, Rauschenberg later works. 244 00:31:51,710 --> 00:31:59,660 That prompted art historian Leo Steinberg to first use the term postmodernism in the world of Art, 245 00:31:59,660 --> 00:32:06,500 explaining in 1969 how Rauschenberger embrace of a wide range of cultural images and 246 00:32:06,500 --> 00:32:13,790 artefacts were incompatible with the constraints of preme modernist and modernist painting. 247 00:32:13,790 --> 00:32:20,120 To this end, consider these two works by Rauschenberg, Factum one and Factum two. 248 00:32:20,120 --> 00:32:31,440 Two different paintings that individually appear to be the very image of unique expression by reproducing its marks in precise detail. 249 00:32:31,440 --> 00:32:34,910 Though they're not quite identical and I love these kind of spot. 250 00:32:34,910 --> 00:32:36,860 The difference games in the history of art, 251 00:32:36,860 --> 00:32:51,050 their enthusiasm often exposing the reproducibility of supposedly unrepeatable modernist gestures such as the drip, abstract expressionism. 252 00:32:51,050 --> 00:33:02,180 And above all, the work of Jackson Pollock has been amongst the richest sources of parody at the cusp between modernism and postmodernism. 253 00:33:02,180 --> 00:33:11,480 For those wishing to destabilise the heroism of modernism, its achievements have produced an almost unlimited stream of riffs. 254 00:33:11,480 --> 00:33:16,700 Such works, I think best thought of as postmodern for their ironic time, 255 00:33:16,700 --> 00:33:28,010 cannot properly be regarded as simply taking abstract expressionist innovations and pushing them towards ever more advanced forms of modernism. 256 00:33:28,010 --> 00:33:35,990 For example, the splashy brush strokes of friends Klein rendered as nothing less reproducible than printed marks 257 00:33:35,990 --> 00:33:44,030 in the brush stroke series of Roy Lichtenstein or the sculptures of Linda Bangui's on the left, 258 00:33:44,030 --> 00:33:53,390 where Pollak's flung paint remains ingloriously on the floor in viscously puddles of Dayglo latex or on the right. 259 00:33:53,390 --> 00:34:00,380 One of the drawing machines of John tangling with which the operator can make machine made abstractions, 260 00:34:00,380 --> 00:34:08,990 where spontaneity and directness of expression become just a matter of pressing a button or Andy Warhol 261 00:34:08,990 --> 00:34:17,750 oxidation paintings where Pollock famously Muchow gestures were transformed into the act of studio visitors, 262 00:34:17,750 --> 00:34:24,080 leaving their own unrepeatable gesture by urinating on a copper panel. 263 00:34:24,080 --> 00:34:31,820 There is even, I think, a way to read David Hockney's a big a splash into this trajectory with its streams of flung 264 00:34:31,820 --> 00:34:39,290 white paint incorporated into the Braasch flat realism of a Los Angeles swimming pool scene, 265 00:34:39,290 --> 00:34:50,480 turning the paradigmatic clay abstract marks of the great American painter into the stuff of lowly pictorial illustration. 266 00:34:50,480 --> 00:34:56,180 In fact, perhaps the realism of the latter painting makes it the most post-modern of all of these works. 267 00:34:56,180 --> 00:35:06,320 With its return to realism representing in the late 60s the most profound rejection of modernist values. 268 00:35:06,320 --> 00:35:13,880 By the 1970s, the embrace of realism would reach new heights with the rise of so-called hyper realism, 269 00:35:13,880 --> 00:35:18,470 such as the work of painter Richard Estes for Jamerson. 270 00:35:18,470 --> 00:35:23,940 Such works. Evidence, what he called a, quote, new get lifelessness, 271 00:35:23,940 --> 00:35:34,290 blandly reproducing their source material with blank photographic accuracy, apparently devoid of meaning or emotion. 272 00:35:34,290 --> 00:35:42,480 SD flashy display of technical skill is also deployed to nostalgic ends in representing a scene that, 273 00:35:42,480 --> 00:35:50,880 although it is from the artists present, appears distinctly like that, something from the past. 274 00:35:50,880 --> 00:35:57,450 But in other instances, hyper realism can have profoundly destabilising potential. 275 00:35:57,450 --> 00:36:03,090 Consider the effect of Duane Hanssens sculptures in the space of the museum, 276 00:36:03,090 --> 00:36:14,010 where their cliches of lower middle class workers and tourists draws attention to the very different demographics of the gallery going public. 277 00:36:14,010 --> 00:36:24,960 There is, I think, undoubtedly a cold and flat tone to these realisms that makes them seem particularly suited to the culture of postmodern spectacle, 278 00:36:24,960 --> 00:36:32,940 not the flatness famously advocated by Clement Greenberg, but instead the flatness of screens and mirrors, 279 00:36:32,940 --> 00:36:39,330 the victory of superficial surface appearances over deeper truth. 280 00:36:39,330 --> 00:36:48,060 So the latter ideas were most prominently argued by French theorist John Baudry are drawing on semiotics and communication theory. 281 00:36:48,060 --> 00:36:59,850 Like Marshall McLuhan, Beaudry defended the postmodern world as one of hyperreal image saturation and simulation in which the distinction between 282 00:36:59,850 --> 00:37:08,220 the real and the fake dissolves and where what he calls Simke the simulacrum or an identical copy without an original. 283 00:37:08,220 --> 00:37:17,380 And he might like to think of factum one, in fact, and two that I showed you becomes the cultural norm. 284 00:37:17,380 --> 00:37:28,050 Beaudry, our famously turned to Disneyland as an example exemplar of this phenomenon in his work simulacra and simulation. 285 00:37:28,050 --> 00:37:39,240 He argues that Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make people believe that its surroundings, i.e. everything outside the park, are real. 286 00:37:39,240 --> 00:37:48,120 According to Beaudry, a Los Angeles itself is an artificial construction, a hyper real image that is more real than reality. 287 00:37:48,120 --> 00:37:57,060 Such that these self-contained illusions of the theme park serve to fool its visitors into thinking that everything in the outside world, 288 00:37:57,060 --> 00:38:03,480 in their everyday lives, is in fact reality. The excesses, 289 00:38:03,480 --> 00:38:12,090 the evident excesses of such claims and the tendency of much writing about postmodernism to be the site of considerable 290 00:38:12,090 --> 00:38:22,650 confusion and sometimes incomprehensibility became the basis for many attacks on postmodern theory in the 90s and 2000s. 291 00:38:22,650 --> 00:38:32,130 Some of these used parody to make their point. One of my favourites of these is an Australian Web site called The Postmodern Generator, 292 00:38:32,130 --> 00:38:38,780 which was developed in 1968 by nineteen ninety six by an academic at Monash University. 293 00:38:38,780 --> 00:38:45,840 And it uses random algorithms to generate imitations of postmodern writing. 294 00:38:45,840 --> 00:38:56,370 I ran it last night again and got a fascinating essay called This Time Constructivism and Neo Dielectric Appropriation. 295 00:38:56,370 --> 00:39:00,930 I would like to have given you all a copy to read, but I didn't want to waste the paper. 296 00:39:00,930 --> 00:39:07,740 But if you Google this website, you will find it yourselves and you too can generate extraordinary, 297 00:39:07,740 --> 00:39:13,440 extraordinarily convincing postmodern writing techniques with that. 298 00:39:13,440 --> 00:39:18,030 I trust you all now know not to imitate and to avoid, 299 00:39:18,030 --> 00:39:27,540 no matter how often postmodern theorists get sent to you by people like me with a more serious intent. 300 00:39:27,540 --> 00:39:35,220 NYU physics professor Alan Sokol submitted a hoax article written in a postmodern style to the journal 301 00:39:35,220 --> 00:39:43,980 Social Text in 1996 and then used its acceptance by this supposedly peer review journal to argue against 302 00:39:43,980 --> 00:39:50,250 the failure of postmodern theory to meet the requirements of evidence and rationality that he judged 303 00:39:50,250 --> 00:39:57,780 as necessary for the academic study of the humanities as well as the sciences in the world of art. 304 00:39:57,780 --> 00:40:06,750 The frequently postmodern journal October was spoofed in an underground and I would say quite difficult to get your hands on parody, 305 00:40:06,750 --> 00:40:11,700 which was titled November, I believe, written by graduate students. 306 00:40:11,700 --> 00:40:19,390 I'm not quite sure where. Which comprised an entire full issue of the magazine, complete with fake authors, fake essays. 307 00:40:19,390 --> 00:40:28,540 And even fake footnotes, all of which I think every footnote cites books published by the M.I.T. Press 308 00:40:28,540 --> 00:40:35,180 that the publisher favoured by so many of these journals contributors in a way, 309 00:40:35,180 --> 00:40:40,670 such textural character caricatures are themselves eminently postmodern, 310 00:40:40,670 --> 00:40:47,150 with their often meaningless combinations of quotation and imitations of style. 311 00:40:47,150 --> 00:40:52,400 But the critical edge also sets them apart from how many theorists have distinguished the 312 00:40:52,400 --> 00:41:00,830 modernist strategy of parody from what Jamerson calls the postmodern strategy of pastiche. 313 00:41:00,830 --> 00:41:09,320 In making this distinction, Jamerson criticises the latter appropriations of the past as a sign of what he dubs postmodern isms, 314 00:41:09,320 --> 00:41:19,760 quote, historical deafness. According to Jamerson, parody has in the postmodern age been replaced by pastiche. 315 00:41:19,760 --> 00:41:28,070 And I quote here quote, Pastiche is like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, 316 00:41:28,070 --> 00:41:35,360 idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask speech in a dead language. 317 00:41:35,360 --> 00:41:41,840 But it is a neutral practise of such mimicry without any of Paradies ulterior motives. 318 00:41:41,840 --> 00:41:49,820 Amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter in such a world of pastiche. 319 00:41:49,820 --> 00:41:56,990 Then history gets turned into a series of mere styles. 320 00:41:56,990 --> 00:42:02,480 Here we might consider a sculpture such as this one by Roy Lichtenstein, 321 00:42:02,480 --> 00:42:10,820 in which the glamorous Balas striding of the art deco period becomes a kind of free-standing sculpture or a design such as this. 322 00:42:10,820 --> 00:42:21,260 Hans Hollonds, Maryland's sofa from 1981, a Hollywood casting couch that takes art deco to its outlandish extreme. 323 00:42:21,260 --> 00:42:28,400 Both are objects whose march to the 1930s can be seen to show little awareness of the historical circumstances, 324 00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:34,190 technological capacities or social conditions from which they derive. 325 00:42:34,190 --> 00:42:41,150 The example that Jamerson uses is the way in which postmodern architecture randomly and again, 326 00:42:41,150 --> 00:42:45,530 this is a quote, quite randomly and without principle, but with gusto. 327 00:42:45,530 --> 00:42:53,990 cannibalises all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles. 328 00:42:53,990 --> 00:42:55,400 By Jamieson's account, 329 00:42:55,400 --> 00:43:07,760 postmodernism encourages us to understand the past as nothing more than a repository of genres and codes ready for re commodification. 330 00:43:07,760 --> 00:43:17,870 Here, Jamerson follows the position of Litoff, who saw the apparent cultural diversity of postmodern style as just the triumph of capitalism. 331 00:43:17,870 --> 00:43:25,670 As he writes, quote, By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the taste of the patrons, 332 00:43:25,670 --> 00:43:30,680 artists, gallery owners, critics and public wallow together in the quote. 333 00:43:30,680 --> 00:43:36,020 Anything goes. And the epoch is one of slackening. 334 00:43:36,020 --> 00:43:40,490 But the realism of anything goes is in fact that of money. 335 00:43:40,490 --> 00:43:47,390 In the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art. 336 00:43:47,390 --> 00:43:58,160 According to the profits, they yield no less than its connexions with popular cultures of music, fashion and film. 337 00:43:58,160 --> 00:44:06,140 The global character of postmodernism in the fine arts is for later an expression of its profit motives. 338 00:44:06,140 --> 00:44:15,200 It is appropriate, then, that Jamerson uses examples from Hollywood film to exemplify the postmodern favour for revival, 339 00:44:15,200 --> 00:44:18,140 describing what he calls nostalgia films. 340 00:44:18,140 --> 00:44:28,370 He explains that the cinematic mode of particular to the 80s and 90s created collages that tapped into past times and past films, 341 00:44:28,370 --> 00:44:34,130 pasting these fragments together in a pastiche. 342 00:44:34,130 --> 00:44:44,630 One might think of the cross historical and into textual references in Back to the Future films such as when? 343 00:44:44,630 --> 00:44:47,680 In the third film of the franchise, Michael J. 344 00:44:47,680 --> 00:44:58,400 Fox's character arrives in the Wild West, calls himself Clint Eastwood, and mocks Western movie cliches in a Main Street shootout. 345 00:44:58,400 --> 00:45:05,030 Or to cite a more recent example, the strangely familiar image of the 20s as seen in bars, 346 00:45:05,030 --> 00:45:13,100 Loman's Great Gatsby through the lens of 21st century Times Square and strobe lit dance clubs. 347 00:45:13,100 --> 00:45:16,880 And I don't know if anyone saw Hail Caesar on the weekend. 348 00:45:16,880 --> 00:45:20,400 Has anyone seen it yet? No. I'm the only one. 349 00:45:20,400 --> 00:45:23,140 Silly, silly enough to fork out 14. Quick to say it. 350 00:45:23,140 --> 00:45:35,260 It's not very good, but it does make it a fascinating case for the endurance of these kind of intermingling of period references as style. 351 00:45:35,260 --> 00:45:39,580 And it's kind of continued resonance in contemporary cinema. 352 00:45:39,580 --> 00:45:49,750 So see it for that reason alone. For Jamerson, the failure to understand history as anything other than me style is dangerous. 353 00:45:49,750 --> 00:46:01,570 Suffering from, quote, historical amnesia. Locked into the discontinuous flow of protect perpetual presence on the nostalgia film, he argues, 354 00:46:01,570 --> 00:46:08,890 has lost its sense of history and a sense of a possibility of a future different from the present. 355 00:46:08,890 --> 00:46:16,810 A deep politicisation that jemison's Marxism cannot abide. 356 00:46:16,810 --> 00:46:29,020 For the writers of October, it was the return to realism of 1980s painters that seemed to be especially retrograde in its political leanings. 357 00:46:29,020 --> 00:46:35,050 In the work of European artists such as Sigma Poca and Francesco Clemente, and then in New York, 358 00:46:35,050 --> 00:46:42,900 without a such as Julian Schnabel and David Sollie, work was characterised by their embrace of the personal. 359 00:46:42,900 --> 00:46:52,390 The biographical. The expressive and figurative for theorists of postmodernism concerned about the conservatism of such work. 360 00:46:52,390 --> 00:46:58,540 The collage of the imagery and expressive styles it used represented a superficial and 361 00:46:58,540 --> 00:47:04,510 cynical attempt to cater to a booming art market starved for large scale paintings. 362 00:47:04,510 --> 00:47:16,810 Since the rise of conceptual art. It is true, I think, that the ironic tone of the kind of Perrotti takes on abstract expressionism. 363 00:47:16,810 --> 00:47:25,180 I showed you earlier have a wit that is missing from such self-declared oddly postmodern quotations of the 1980s. 364 00:47:25,180 --> 00:47:31,150 But I also think its reputation as cold and superficial is sometimes just a 365 00:47:31,150 --> 00:47:38,380 matter of historians having not yet subjected its forms to serious scrutiny. 366 00:47:38,380 --> 00:47:46,150 In the works of Hame Steinbock, for example, the triangular laminate shelves float on the wall, 367 00:47:46,150 --> 00:47:50,380 operating somewhere between home decoration and the modulus. 368 00:47:50,380 --> 00:47:56,350 Modula Minimalism of Wool Sculptures by Donald Judd. 369 00:47:56,350 --> 00:48:02,770 On the surface of this work, Steinback mounts readymades from the world of consumer goods. 370 00:48:02,770 --> 00:48:08,710 But I think here his choices are no mere random selections. 371 00:48:08,710 --> 00:48:17,080 On the left is a modernist picture in the streamlined art deco mode designed by Frederick Reed. 372 00:48:17,080 --> 00:48:26,980 Its styling having trickled down from cubism to the mass produced fiesta where range. 373 00:48:26,980 --> 00:48:32,220 On the right, a three supermarket packages of washing detergent. 374 00:48:32,220 --> 00:48:40,500 They're designed equally connected to the stripes and acute angles of 60s hard edged abstract painting, 375 00:48:40,500 --> 00:48:46,330 the sort of painting for which the highest critical claim was to be dubbed bold here, 376 00:48:46,330 --> 00:48:53,920 multiplied by three, both in the title of the powder and in Steinbeck's repetition. 377 00:48:53,920 --> 00:48:58,810 Just as Reed's jug had been reissued in new colours for the 1980s, 378 00:48:58,810 --> 00:49:06,520 the idea that slick neo geo abstraction was remaking real modernism into mere commodities 379 00:49:06,520 --> 00:49:13,990 ignores the fact that modern art and commodity culture had long been deeply entangled. 380 00:49:13,990 --> 00:49:18,690 Far from a superficial assemblage of meaningless objects, 381 00:49:18,690 --> 00:49:27,880 a work such as this strikes me as a powerful intervention into the commercial entanglements of modernism itself. 382 00:49:27,880 --> 00:49:36,220 And if critics of postmodernism have worried that its forms merely comply with the incorporation of into the world of money, 383 00:49:36,220 --> 00:49:46,180 I think there are signs that contemporary art continues to seek to challenge that system or at least wreak havoc with its values. 384 00:49:46,180 --> 00:49:50,650 Iwai Ways edition of a Coca-Cola logo to an ancient urn. 385 00:49:50,650 --> 00:50:00,640 Seems to me powerfully postmodern in its failure to respect the authority of the original art artefact in its gesture of appropriation. 386 00:50:00,640 --> 00:50:12,040 In other works, the artist is seen to show even less respect for the rare object as he drops them to the floor to watch them smash into pieces. 387 00:50:12,040 --> 00:50:18,030 In the former case, however, as much as the urn was a valuable artefact when the artist appropriated it, 388 00:50:18,030 --> 00:50:28,540 it ironically became still more valuable when it had been defaced with the image of capitalism and absorbed into the world of global contemporary art. 389 00:50:28,540 --> 00:50:31,540 Such paradoxes are especially rife, I think, 390 00:50:31,540 --> 00:50:40,390 in the world of street art and as the example of Banksy and his varied commercial incorporation suggest, not long ago. 391 00:50:40,390 --> 00:50:45,010 Another of Iwai ways pot became itself the subject of an intervention. 392 00:50:45,010 --> 00:50:47,260 As an artist, too, as a artist, 393 00:50:47,260 --> 00:50:58,000 visitor to a Miami art museum staged their own destructive performance in an exhibition of I Always Work following the artist's lead by smashing, 394 00:50:58,000 --> 00:51:08,540 one of his paint dripped urns onto the floor of the museum. So I began with the destruction of a building. 395 00:51:08,540 --> 00:51:15,830 And one way to end this lecture lecture would be to turn to the destruction of another building. 396 00:51:15,830 --> 00:51:26,690 If the collapse of Pruitt Igoe represents a that's not that ending is the collapse in Pretty Guy represents a milestone for cultural change, 397 00:51:26,690 --> 00:51:33,710 then it should come as no surprise that the collapse of the World Trade Centre it's 110 story towers, 398 00:51:33,710 --> 00:51:41,900 also by Minoru Yamasaki, has been claimed by some as an end of postmodernism. 399 00:51:41,900 --> 00:51:48,290 In some quarters, postmodernism was condemned for rejecting the very possibility of objective truth, 400 00:51:48,290 --> 00:51:55,490 insisting instead instead that reality is only a construction of culture or of the mind. 401 00:51:55,490 --> 00:52:00,740 But of course, those plummeting bodies were no mere representation. 402 00:52:00,740 --> 00:52:07,610 And given that I've ruined my real ending to this lecture by fast forwarding, it's, I think, 403 00:52:07,610 --> 00:52:13,940 kind of telling my inability to include an image of that in this slide and and 404 00:52:13,940 --> 00:52:21,050 the kind of real power that represent that images can and do have in culture. 405 00:52:21,050 --> 00:52:29,150 On 9/11, objective reality made its presence felt in the most horrifying of ways. 406 00:52:29,150 --> 00:52:35,780 And now we get there. So but I think to end the lecture on postmodernism on that note would be entirely wrong. 407 00:52:35,780 --> 00:52:41,420 And so at the risk of sounding horribly flippant, I will in turn instead to Lady Gaga, 408 00:52:41,420 --> 00:52:50,690 whose last album, ARTPOP Madonna, became in the 1980s and 1990s, a staple for postmodern theorists. 409 00:52:50,690 --> 00:53:00,890 The appropriations and self trauma transformations of Lady Gaga have carved an even more strategic relation with post-modernist art. 410 00:53:00,890 --> 00:53:07,640 Two examples that straddle the worlds of art and music seem particularly relevant for the new album. 411 00:53:07,640 --> 00:53:18,320 Gaga collaborated with Jeff Koons on sculptural installations for the album, cover and launch, and she worked with Robert Wilson, 412 00:53:18,320 --> 00:53:26,750 experimental theatre producer, to produce distinctly Cindy Sherman style videos in which she appears in Jack Clwyd of AIDS. 413 00:53:26,750 --> 00:53:36,710 Death of Morat. And in other historical paintings. And also with Marina Abramovic, with whom she studied performance art techniques. 414 00:53:36,710 --> 00:53:41,600 Such shifts between art and popular culture are the declared theme of her trek. 415 00:53:41,600 --> 00:53:47,200 Applause. Quote, One second. I'm a coon. Then suddenly the Koons is made. 416 00:53:47,200 --> 00:53:48,400 Its lyrics declare, 417 00:53:48,400 --> 00:53:58,280 I can't tell you how hard it is to read those lyrics without trying to imitate or effect some of some of some of the way, they said. 418 00:53:58,280 --> 00:54:03,200 But they end up sounding like terribly boring postmodern theory. 419 00:54:03,200 --> 00:54:08,600 But postmodern poet pop culture was in art now arts in pop culture. 420 00:54:08,600 --> 00:54:17,900 In May, Gaga, since her arrival on the pop scene, has frequently referred to her interest in video and performance art. 421 00:54:17,900 --> 00:54:21,170 So all of this is perhaps not so surprising, 422 00:54:21,170 --> 00:54:30,620 but it becomes it comes as more of a shock for hip hop impresario Jay Z to be engaging in the same genre mixing activities. 423 00:54:30,620 --> 00:54:38,120 So I conclude with two images from the recent, well, the 2013 performances. 424 00:54:38,120 --> 00:54:46,670 Jay-Z did at New York's Pace Gallery, which took inspiration from Marina Abramovic, his 2010 performance. 425 00:54:46,670 --> 00:54:58,700 The artist is present. Jay-Z rapped his single Picasso baby for six hours straight in front of a small crowd that included Abramovitch herself. 426 00:54:58,700 --> 00:55:08,780 More recently, Kanye West has also compared himself to Picasso, and he likes DaVinci, too, I believe. 427 00:55:08,780 --> 00:55:12,560 And in addition to the ambiguous reference of his new album title, 428 00:55:12,560 --> 00:55:19,850 Life of Picasso has repeatedly collaborated with global art stars like Takashima or Karmi and Vanessa 429 00:55:19,850 --> 00:55:29,240 Beecroft to bolster his self-declared genius in the corridors of museum taste making in part, 430 00:55:29,240 --> 00:55:39,770 I think, disturbed by the boundary crossing commercial success of names such as Koons, Abramovitch, Murakami and Beecroft. 431 00:55:39,770 --> 00:55:47,780 These names are largely verboten, but in the colliding worlds of global contemporary art, popular music, 432 00:55:47,780 --> 00:55:55,610 consumer culture and celebrity, the tenants of postmodernism, I suspect, are alive and well. 433 00:55:55,610 --> 00:55:59,660 Thank you.