At three 32 on the 15th of July 1972, as this photograph was taken, modernism suffered another fatal blow.
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.
The place was Saint Louis, Missouri.
And the occasion was the destruction of housing complex Prewett ego built amid the prosperity and optimism of the early 1950s.
This sprawling urban renewal project had replaced a poor neighbourhood on the city's
north side with a complex of high rise buildings designed by Minoru Yamasaki.
Just two decades after its construction, amid plummeting demand from residents and escalating crime problems,
its 33 towers were declared a failure packed with dynamite and razed to the ground.
The story of this development's rise and fall is a little more complex than this.
But for postmodern architectural theorists Charles Jencks, its significance was clear.
This was the day he said that, quote, Modern architecture died.
The differences between two more celebrated buildings that remain standing can
provide a useful comparison to suggest the shift from modernism to postmodernism.
In the second half of the 20th century, the building on the left is may spend a rose Seagram building completed in 1958,
a landmark in the architectural style known as international style.
Its glass skin and structural elements are rigorously austere, stripped of decorative ornamentation.
Although with its steel beams clad inexpensive bronze and its flaws in travertine, its form is somewhat more lavish than the famous modernist demand.
That form follows function. Equally extravagant is the building's large open plaza,
a public space presented as evidence of its builders desire to improve the life of all New Yorkers,
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.
The rigid order of the Seagram building's external surfaces penetrated its interiors to its rigorously
gridded and carefully planned interiors by Modern Museum of Modern Art curator and architect Philip Johnson,
equally aligned with the building's modernist devotion to clarity and structure.
Twenty five years later,
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.
Just a few blocks north of the modernist icon to which he had earlier contributed.
Though its shape owes much to the rectilinear filing cabinet form of its is Johnson's sandstone face design includes grandiose decorative flourishes,
a spectacular arched entranceway at the building's base and a giant open pediment decorating the top of the building.
The latter feature wasn't really even a reference to historical architectural styles,
as it was sourced without regard to scale or function from the style of 18th century.
Cabinet maker Thomas Chippendale by the mid 1980s, when Johnson's AT&T building was completed.
The term postmodernism had been in circulation for some time, but it was this building which more than any other,
declared its legitimacy as a major architectural movement on an international scale.
So architecture is a particularly clear stylistic territory to distinguish modernism from postmodernism.
But I think we can go some way to finding an equivalent juxtaposition in the visual arts by considering these two works.
On the left is Brand Kruse's Bird in Space, first created in 1928,
a sleek form in which almost all realist detail is jettisoned to suggest streamlined speed.
It's highly polished surface suggests something made by a machine like the propeller blade that Duchamp famously, famously told Brent koozie.
No sculpture could do any better than given the sense of futuristic optimism in a work like this.
I think it should come as no said.
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,
they unsuccessfully approached Brancusi to suggest the production of a rocket scaled enlargement of this work.
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.
Kearns's sculpture was cast in steel from an inflatable storable toy,
resulting in a substantial sculptural materiality that contradicts its appearance as a cheap inflatable by appropriating and recontextualize thing.
This manufactured object and confusing its status with the aesthetics of the avant garde,
Koons flaunts distinctions between popular taste and high art and suggests the implication of art in systems of luxury and consumption.
So we've now had some modern and post-modern art and architecture.
But given that such confusions between high and low that Koons and acts are so central to postmodernism for this lecture,
I've also tried to include design, fashion, film,
writing and music with in my Raymont not only to indicate postmodernism, his breadth of influence as style,
but also to suggest its persistent blurring of the genres and categories that modernism had tried so hard to control.
In many of these fields, the pinnacle of the postmodern moment came in the 1980s.
But their emergence can also be seen as continuous with the growing pluralism
of styles and movements that have characterised the arts since the 1960s.
My lecture today will touch on a variety of the visual expressions of the postmodern
differentiating them from the modern isms which they both extended and rejected.
I'll also start to explore postmodernism as an idea,
a set of theoretical tools that occupy a central position in the intellectual history of the late
20th century and a major field for critical approaches to the study of art and visual culture.
So the postmodern is not simply after modernism. It is also often explicitly against modernism.
Sometimes even anti modernist formulated as an explicit rejection of that which preceded it.
This negative relation makes it useful to sketch some of those modernist beliefs that it sought to supplant for art historians.
One of the central ideas of modernism is the idea of an avant garde envisaging art as a
frontier for the discovery of progressively new and ever more innovative artistic inventions.
Its ideal of a vanguard complies with the broader modernist face.
Faith in progress under modernism. Rational thought was seen to offer an objective, dependable and transcendent basis for knowledge.
The dissatisfaction in such beliefs falls into what theorist Jean-Francois Lee ATAR characterised as post-modern isms, quote, War on totality,
an effort to replace the so-called grand narratives of master narratives of modernism with something more pluralistic,
allowing for local and marginal differences. For Leotta and others,
postmodernism is properly sceptical of the idea of such large scale systems
regarding them as tools designed to naturalise ideology and mask social inequality.
So how might we understand this rejection of master narratives in visual terms, in the context of our history?
Alfred Barr's famous flowchart, which I'm sure you have all seen before,
and I feel as though it is not possible to write any historical lecture that
doesn't include this image in it might be taken as an expression of such goals,
a kind of family tree for modernism,
arranging its families according to the Darwinian rules of descent and species, or to consider another very modernist system,
a kind of organisational chart for the proper chains of influence and command by which we are meant to understand its operation here.
By way of comparison, I show you an influential organisational chart by management expert Alfred Sloan,
which was done for General Motors in the early 1920s, then revolutionary.
Now the entirely standard form by which businesses, as well as I would say in museums and universities,
organised staff for clear management, responsibility and maximum efficiency.
Perhaps even more suggestive of modernism is faith in science and technology.
Is this less famous bar diagram in which the moment collection is itself envisaged as a missile, its pointy end?
Well, sort of pointy end representing the forward thrust of new art into which the museum would unstoppably speed forward.
So these are the kinds of historical modernist models that modernism constructs.
What then might a postmodern history of art look like in diagrammatic form?
Here is a diagram that Charles Jenckes uses in his essay Postma Modern and Late Modern,
to chart the characteristics of postmodern architecture like parse diagram.
Jenckes allows for multiple tendencies to coexist,
but he frequently puts the same architects across different fields in his expanding and contracting thematic graphs,
or sometimes at entirely different historical points in the lineage.
He sketches another, yet more complex possibility comes from theorist theorists Geo Deluce and Felix Guitar, his model of the rhizome,
a term that they adopt from biology with its endlessly connected semiotic chains, rejecting linear chronologies and the treelike systems of modernism.
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.
In this case, the four thousand five hundred and ninety two applicants to the Berlin banali using their written applications to the event,
the work maps they had declared political sympathy's into a complex,
interwoven network of three hundred and ninety five common terms,
jettisoning those whose statements don't mention such goals for their art into the amorphous state shape to the left and.
You can see that just sort of hovering to the left outside of this network diagram that he creates as the
Internet age has made such network relationships like friend networks and tag clouds ever more familiar.
The structure of the rhizome has become an increasingly legible form in culture at large.
Or perhaps to more fully abandoned modernist logic,
maybe a postmodern art history would look something like this poster that I'm sure you've seen out in the hallway.
The Great Bear by Simon Patterson here.
The familiar order of the London subway map becomes the site for a constellation of engineers, philosophers, explorers, artists and more.
The endlessly rich possibilities of such a text complies with the interpretive freedom advocated by de constructivists such as schoch Derrida,
and pulled the man who argued that because the meanings of texts relied on their interpreter and context, stable meanings were themselves impossible.
Patterson's work encourages such interpretive instabilities,
as each line intersects in quite inexplicable ways such that on the blue line we follow a journey from Fusari,
Brong, Zino, Chelo, Michaelangelo and Rafaelle.
And then footballer Gary Lineker has one line crosses another, followed by Tatian and then actor Kirk Douglas.
Such an embrace of semiotic instability had been a key strategy for many conceptual artists working in the wake of modernism.
Martha Rosellas The Bowery in2 Inadequate Descriptive Systems from 1972 juxtaposes the documentary style images of downtown New York streets littered
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.
It refuses to represent here.
The linguistic mismatch not only destabilises the possibility of fixed meanings,
but appoints more politically to the inadequacy of the social system she depicts.
While critics of postmodernism might decry its refusal of absolutes as cultural relativism gone wild.
Its efforts to destabilise those systems, which we might accept as Nathuram from city planning to scientific names to the legal system,
do remind us that these systems are themselves the product of human imagination.
Because these systems often serve very particular interests, their destruction disruption can therefore also be political.
Such as the intervention in the social situation of depressed Lower Manhattan, which is made in Brussels work.
The incorporation of performance represented another radical alternative to the individualism of art and the artist presented under modernism.
The Herot ization of the modernist artist centred on the idea that these
singular geniuses were able to produce a completely unique vision of the world.
But for postmodernists, the identification of a singular,
static and stable self was merely a matter of representation and self representation, especially for feminist artist artists.
The acceptance of unstable,
fragmented identities often turned to self portraiture as a means to destabilise modernist assumptions about individual subjectivity.
Most famously, Cindy Sherman's untitled film Stills transformed the artist's body into an infinitely malleable material not one identity,
but multiple personas drawn from Hollywood cinema's stock of stereotypes but emptied largely of their narrative intelligibility in subsequent works.
Sherman has used costume and prosthetics to inhabit portrait genres whose reference points ranged from Renaissance painting
to television franchise Real Housewives in the collaborative work of performance artists such as Gilbert and George,
such as their 1973 transformation into singing sculptures or in L.A. and Marina Abramovic,
his marathon 17 hour performance in which their conjoined hair slowly unravelled.
The modernist privileging of the single and stable artistic gesture is further compounded by the ephemeral nature,
prolonged duration and difficulty in distinguishing identity from performance that such works affect.
So such concerns were felt. Well, outside the world of performance art.
The work of Madonna. To take a more popular although I do realise now very much historical example,
also complied with this emphasis on performance and transformation in postmodernism.
With her endless string of makeovers, masquerade and self-conscious artifice,
Madonna became a kind of darling for postmodern theorists for her challenge to gender norms and sexual boundaries.
In the video clip for her 1984 hit Material Girl Madonna, Ripa formed scenes from Marilyn Monroe's 1954.
Diamonds are a Girl's best friend sequence in the film. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
In the 1990s, Madonna's track Vogue references a shopping list of references from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
And in its video clip. She poses in the style of famous photographs of many of its stars.
Such performances were extended in her appearance as a sultry starlet, Breathless Mahoney in the cartoon inspired 1990 film Dick Tracy.
But cutting across such quotations were also more contemporary reference points.
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,
at least as Madonna would see it, restrictive undergarments as signs of female sexuality and empowerment.
Performers such as Madonna made theoretical questions about gender perform activity,
a matter for mainstream pop culture and of course, a million means to sell millions of albums.
As artists working within a post-modernist mode sought to date destabilised values of originality and authenticity.
Another key tactic to which they turned was appropriation. The well-known extreme of such practises is exemplified in 1980s photography.
Sherri Levine, for instance, rephotographed the 1930s work of documentary photographer Walker Evans for her 1981 series after Walker Evans making
no or little modification to the content of the original images that she reproduced from the pages of a book.
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.
And the other thing that someone pointed out to me recently about this series is that it is the copyright implications of these works,
which are fascinating. The original series of Walker Evans photographs were commissioned by the US government through
the WPA Farm Administration photography programmes and therefore in the public domain.
So her active progression also produces a very interesting commercial transport, were a publicly owned image, is able,
through the act of appropriation, to transform itself into something that Cherry Levine herself has copyright over.
Similarly, the work of Richard Prince rephotographed and cropped images from an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes,
taking its commercial imagery of dubious moral standing as the basis for his grainy images of America's frontier sublime.
Such strategies not only contravene the principles of artistic production under modernism,
they flagrantly flaunted the legal and financial ownership of the visual material on which art, ownership and exchange is premised.
In an important early essay on Postmodern Not written in 1980, Craig Owens understood these tactics of quotation.
As efforts to debunk modernist originality in Owens account postmodern isms, use of appropriation is ambivalent and contradictory.
It both upholds and destabilises ideology.
Always complicit, complicit with its low and commercial sources, but simultaneously remaining critical of them.
Such optimistic claims for the radical potential of postmodernism were, however, more optimistic than those held by many of its critics.
Amongst conservative commentators like Hilton Kreimer, postmodernism was a, quote, creation of modernism.
At the end of its tether for Kramer writing in the early 1980s,
the growing interest of art historians in 19th century academic painting and the Prerana highlights,
both of which had been condemned as middle class kitsch.
According to the dictates of modernism itself was a symptom of postmodern isms, abandonment of principles, of quality and seriousness.
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,
which opened in 1986 here.
Visitors were presented with the masterpieces of Manet and Monet alongside previously dismissed painters like Jerome and Carbonell.
To make things worse,
this mingling of categories occurred in an architectural space no less concerned with crossing the boundaries between high and low.
A former railway station converted by postmodern Italian architect, gay or LNT.
Interestingly, the conservative condemnation of postmodernism by Kramer and others comes strikingly
close to the concerns of theorists at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
For the Marxist left, postmodern isms embrace of the popular and commercial represented the disillusion of modern isms,
faith in progress into an endlessly circular system of novelty in their reading certain capitalism as a ploy to increase consumption.
A key proponent of this characterisation is Frederick Jamerson,
published in the same year that Philip Johnson completed the iconic postmodern skyscraper we saw earlier.
Jemison's essay Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Logic of Capitalism,
appeared in the neo Marxist journal New Left Review and would become the opening chapter of his ninety nine,
1991 book of the same name, arguing that global capitalism had become less concerned with the production
of goods and more with the reproduction of images Jemison's model imagines.
The shift from modernism to postmodernism as a symptom of economic change for Jamerson,
while modernism retained the ability to critique capitalism in postmodernism.
The victory of commodification is complete with little opportunity for resistance or escape.
So I should be clear.
One of the central themes that unites many of these ideas around postmodernism is the breakdown of boundaries between high and low culture.
These distinctions with which postmodernism has sought aggressively to undermine again to turn to the field of architecture is instructive.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's 1972 book, Learning from Los Vegas, exemplifies the postmodern enthusiasm for the lowbrow.
The book celebrates the diversity and decoration of commercial architecture as an antidote to the uniformity of modernism,
embracing spectacle and humour as positive qualities.
Their architectural model is not Le Corbusier, but instead decorated commercial buildings and giant signs such as this 1950s drive in doughnut store.
They're valorised valorisation of kitsch and the everyday certainly finds expressions in the early buildings are Frank Gehry, such as his advertising,
his headquarters for advertising agency Chiat Day in Los Angeles and in the visual arts in monuments such as this by Klaus Oldenburg,
an inventor whose own architecture they were principles through which he would tackle the conventions of the museum itself.
In this, his 1993 design for the Houston Children's Museum,
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,
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.
It was such interests that caused Jamerson and other observers of postmodernism to regard Pop as its
first art movement with its embrace of low cultural forms like supermarket packaging and comic books.
Pop was indeed received by many critics at the time as an affront to the proper concerns of modern,
not a vulgar corruption of its definitions and categories.
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.
In other words,
these artists made significant transformations to their source materials as they took them from the dime store to the gallery in Warhols,
Warhol, Campbell's soup cans, for instance.
What are we to make of the flat yellow disk that to which he reduces the central medallion on the ship can?
Or his inclusion of monochrome canvases alongside his reproductions of news photography?
And how should we understand Warhol quotation from mass culture in relation to mass cultures?
Recruit quotation of Warhol. Such as this 1965 paper address produced as a promotion by the makers of Campbell's Soup,
but clearly referencing the pop aesthetics that Warhol had provided for their brand.
Modernism had itself long been obsessed with, quote, quoting from diverse historical and non Western sources,
seeing so-called primitive and historical art forms as a vehicle to return to some kind of better premodern culture.
Consider, for instance, the appropriation of imagery from posters by the French impressionists or Picasso's use of wallpaper,
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.
Such borrowed sources can equally be seen as a defining quality of modernism itself, as Jamerson saw it.
However, postmodern ism's interest in the low sources was different.
But Jamerson postmodern quotations do not transform their source material.
They remain just as commercial and degraded as the materials from which they quote.
Four artists working at one purported cusp of between modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts.
Let's say the 1950s and early 1960s, the proximity of modernist prototypes to their own made such critiques even more urgent.
Here, for instance, is Robert Rauschenberg, 1953 work erased.
De Kooning drawing, thumbing its nose at the heroine's nation of the injured individual artist genius.
So central to modernist ideology by matriculate, meticulously erasing the marks of abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning,
reassigning the newly blank object as the work of Rauschenberg himself.
The purity of abstraction taken to its logical extreme end is a great story about this work that I always love,
which is that when Rauschenberg visited de Kooning to ask for a drawing to which he could do this to de Kooning,
hunted around forever to find a drawing that was rendered with sufficient force into
the paper such that it would be very difficult for Rauschenberg to erase his marks,
to make it as hard as possible to diminish his achievement.
If you like, it was in fact, Rauschenberg later works.
That prompted art historian Leo Steinberg to first use the term postmodernism in the world of Art,
explaining in 1969 how Rauschenberger embrace of a wide range of cultural images and
artefacts were incompatible with the constraints of preme modernist and modernist painting.
To this end, consider these two works by Rauschenberg, Factum one and Factum two.
Two different paintings that individually appear to be the very image of unique expression by reproducing its marks in precise detail.
Though they're not quite identical and I love these kind of spot.
The difference games in the history of art,
their enthusiasm often exposing the reproducibility of supposedly unrepeatable modernist gestures such as the drip, abstract expressionism.
And above all, the work of Jackson Pollock has been amongst the richest sources of parody at the cusp between modernism and postmodernism.
For those wishing to destabilise the heroism of modernism, its achievements have produced an almost unlimited stream of riffs.
Such works, I think best thought of as postmodern for their ironic time,
cannot properly be regarded as simply taking abstract expressionist innovations and pushing them towards ever more advanced forms of modernism.
For example, the splashy brush strokes of friends Klein rendered as nothing less reproducible than printed marks
in the brush stroke series of Roy Lichtenstein or the sculptures of Linda Bangui's on the left,
where Pollak's flung paint remains ingloriously on the floor in viscously puddles of Dayglo latex or on the right.
One of the drawing machines of John tangling with which the operator can make machine made abstractions,
where spontaneity and directness of expression become just a matter of pressing a button or Andy Warhol
oxidation paintings where Pollock famously Muchow gestures were transformed into the act of studio visitors,
leaving their own unrepeatable gesture by urinating on a copper panel.
There is even, I think, a way to read David Hockney's a big a splash into this trajectory with its streams of flung
white paint incorporated into the Braasch flat realism of a Los Angeles swimming pool scene,
turning the paradigmatic clay abstract marks of the great American painter into the stuff of lowly pictorial illustration.
In fact, perhaps the realism of the latter painting makes it the most post-modern of all of these works.
With its return to realism representing in the late 60s the most profound rejection of modernist values.
By the 1970s, the embrace of realism would reach new heights with the rise of so-called hyper realism,
such as the work of painter Richard Estes for Jamerson.
Such works. Evidence, what he called a, quote, new get lifelessness,
blandly reproducing their source material with blank photographic accuracy, apparently devoid of meaning or emotion.
SD flashy display of technical skill is also deployed to nostalgic ends in representing a scene that,
although it is from the artists present, appears distinctly like that, something from the past.
But in other instances, hyper realism can have profoundly destabilising potential.
Consider the effect of Duane Hanssens sculptures in the space of the museum,
where their cliches of lower middle class workers and tourists draws attention to the very different demographics of the gallery going public.
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,
not the flatness famously advocated by Clement Greenberg, but instead the flatness of screens and mirrors,
the victory of superficial surface appearances over deeper truth.
So the latter ideas were most prominently argued by French theorist John Baudry are drawing on semiotics and communication theory.
Like Marshall McLuhan, Beaudry defended the postmodern world as one of hyperreal image saturation and simulation in which the distinction between
the real and the fake dissolves and where what he calls Simke the simulacrum or an identical copy without an original.
And he might like to think of factum one, in fact, and two that I showed you becomes the cultural norm.
Beaudry, our famously turned to Disneyland as an example exemplar of this phenomenon in his work simulacra and simulation.
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.
According to Beaudry, a Los Angeles itself is an artificial construction, a hyper real image that is more real than reality.
Such that these self-contained illusions of the theme park serve to fool its visitors into thinking that everything in the outside world,
in their everyday lives, is in fact reality. The excesses,
the evident excesses of such claims and the tendency of much writing about postmodernism to be the site of considerable
confusion and sometimes incomprehensibility became the basis for many attacks on postmodern theory in the 90s and 2000s.
Some of these used parody to make their point. One of my favourites of these is an Australian Web site called The Postmodern Generator,
which was developed in 1968 by nineteen ninety six by an academic at Monash University.
And it uses random algorithms to generate imitations of postmodern writing.
I ran it last night again and got a fascinating essay called This Time Constructivism and Neo Dielectric Appropriation.
I would like to have given you all a copy to read, but I didn't want to waste the paper.
But if you Google this website, you will find it yourselves and you too can generate extraordinary,
extraordinarily convincing postmodern writing techniques with that.
I trust you all now know not to imitate and to avoid,
no matter how often postmodern theorists get sent to you by people like me with a more serious intent.
NYU physics professor Alan Sokol submitted a hoax article written in a postmodern style to the journal
Social Text in 1996 and then used its acceptance by this supposedly peer review journal to argue against
the failure of postmodern theory to meet the requirements of evidence and rationality that he judged
as necessary for the academic study of the humanities as well as the sciences in the world of art.
The frequently postmodern journal October was spoofed in an underground and I would say quite difficult to get your hands on parody,
which was titled November, I believe, written by graduate students.
I'm not quite sure where. Which comprised an entire full issue of the magazine, complete with fake authors, fake essays.
And even fake footnotes, all of which I think every footnote cites books published by the M.I.T. Press
that the publisher favoured by so many of these journals contributors in a way,
such textural character caricatures are themselves eminently postmodern,
with their often meaningless combinations of quotation and imitations of style.
But the critical edge also sets them apart from how many theorists have distinguished the
modernist strategy of parody from what Jamerson calls the postmodern strategy of pastiche.
In making this distinction, Jamerson criticises the latter appropriations of the past as a sign of what he dubs postmodern isms,
quote, historical deafness. According to Jamerson, parody has in the postmodern age been replaced by pastiche.
And I quote here quote, Pastiche is like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique,
idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask speech in a dead language.
But it is a neutral practise of such mimicry without any of Paradies ulterior motives.
Amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter in such a world of pastiche.
Then history gets turned into a series of mere styles.
Here we might consider a sculpture such as this one by Roy Lichtenstein,
in which the glamorous Balas striding of the art deco period becomes a kind of free-standing sculpture or a design such as this.
Hans Hollonds, Maryland's sofa from 1981, a Hollywood casting couch that takes art deco to its outlandish extreme.
Both are objects whose march to the 1930s can be seen to show little awareness of the historical circumstances,
technological capacities or social conditions from which they derive.
The example that Jamerson uses is the way in which postmodern architecture randomly and again,
this is a quote, quite randomly and without principle, but with gusto.
cannibalises all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.
By Jamieson's account,
postmodernism encourages us to understand the past as nothing more than a repository of genres and codes ready for re commodification.
Here, Jamerson follows the position of Litoff, who saw the apparent cultural diversity of postmodern style as just the triumph of capitalism.
As he writes, quote, By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the taste of the patrons,
artists, gallery owners, critics and public wallow together in the quote.
Anything goes. And the epoch is one of slackening.
But the realism of anything goes is in fact that of money.
In the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art.
According to the profits, they yield no less than its connexions with popular cultures of music, fashion and film.
The global character of postmodernism in the fine arts is for later an expression of its profit motives.
It is appropriate, then, that Jamerson uses examples from Hollywood film to exemplify the postmodern favour for revival,
describing what he calls nostalgia films.
He explains that the cinematic mode of particular to the 80s and 90s created collages that tapped into past times and past films,
pasting these fragments together in a pastiche.
One might think of the cross historical and into textual references in Back to the Future films such as when?
In the third film of the franchise, Michael J.
Fox's character arrives in the Wild West, calls himself Clint Eastwood, and mocks Western movie cliches in a Main Street shootout.
Or to cite a more recent example, the strangely familiar image of the 20s as seen in bars,
Loman's Great Gatsby through the lens of 21st century Times Square and strobe lit dance clubs.
And I don't know if anyone saw Hail Caesar on the weekend.
Has anyone seen it yet? No. I'm the only one.
Silly, silly enough to fork out 14. Quick to say it.
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.
And it's kind of continued resonance in contemporary cinema.
So see it for that reason alone. For Jamerson, the failure to understand history as anything other than me style is dangerous.
Suffering from, quote, historical amnesia. Locked into the discontinuous flow of protect perpetual presence on the nostalgia film, he argues,
has lost its sense of history and a sense of a possibility of a future different from the present.
A deep politicisation that jemison's Marxism cannot abide.
For the writers of October, it was the return to realism of 1980s painters that seemed to be especially retrograde in its political leanings.
In the work of European artists such as Sigma Poca and Francesco Clemente, and then in New York,
without a such as Julian Schnabel and David Sollie, work was characterised by their embrace of the personal.
The biographical. The expressive and figurative for theorists of postmodernism concerned about the conservatism of such work.
The collage of the imagery and expressive styles it used represented a superficial and
cynical attempt to cater to a booming art market starved for large scale paintings.
Since the rise of conceptual art. It is true, I think, that the ironic tone of the kind of Perrotti takes on abstract expressionism.
I showed you earlier have a wit that is missing from such self-declared oddly postmodern quotations of the 1980s.
But I also think its reputation as cold and superficial is sometimes just a
matter of historians having not yet subjected its forms to serious scrutiny.
In the works of Hame Steinbock, for example, the triangular laminate shelves float on the wall,
operating somewhere between home decoration and the modulus.
Modula Minimalism of Wool Sculptures by Donald Judd.
On the surface of this work, Steinback mounts readymades from the world of consumer goods.
But I think here his choices are no mere random selections.
On the left is a modernist picture in the streamlined art deco mode designed by Frederick Reed.
Its styling having trickled down from cubism to the mass produced fiesta where range.
On the right, a three supermarket packages of washing detergent.
They're designed equally connected to the stripes and acute angles of 60s hard edged abstract painting,
the sort of painting for which the highest critical claim was to be dubbed bold here,
multiplied by three, both in the title of the powder and in Steinbeck's repetition.
Just as Reed's jug had been reissued in new colours for the 1980s,
the idea that slick neo geo abstraction was remaking real modernism into mere commodities
ignores the fact that modern art and commodity culture had long been deeply entangled.
Far from a superficial assemblage of meaningless objects,
a work such as this strikes me as a powerful intervention into the commercial entanglements of modernism itself.
And if critics of postmodernism have worried that its forms merely comply with the incorporation of into the world of money,
I think there are signs that contemporary art continues to seek to challenge that system or at least wreak havoc with its values.
Iwai Ways edition of a Coca-Cola logo to an ancient urn.
Seems to me powerfully postmodern in its failure to respect the authority of the original art artefact in its gesture of appropriation.
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.
In the former case, however, as much as the urn was a valuable artefact when the artist appropriated it,
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.
Such paradoxes are especially rife, I think,
in the world of street art and as the example of Banksy and his varied commercial incorporation suggest, not long ago.
Another of Iwai ways pot became itself the subject of an intervention.
As an artist, too, as a artist,
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,
one of his paint dripped urns onto the floor of the museum. So I began with the destruction of a building.
And one way to end this lecture lecture would be to turn to the destruction of another building.
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,
then it should come as no surprise that the collapse of the World Trade Centre it's 110 story towers,
also by Minoru Yamasaki, has been claimed by some as an end of postmodernism.
In some quarters, postmodernism was condemned for rejecting the very possibility of objective truth,
insisting instead instead that reality is only a construction of culture or of the mind.
But of course, those plummeting bodies were no mere representation.
And given that I've ruined my real ending to this lecture by fast forwarding, it's, I think,
kind of telling my inability to include an image of that in this slide and and
the kind of real power that represent that images can and do have in culture.
On 9/11, objective reality made its presence felt in the most horrifying of ways.
And now we get there. So but I think to end the lecture on postmodernism on that note would be entirely wrong.
And so at the risk of sounding horribly flippant, I will in turn instead to Lady Gaga,
whose last album, ARTPOP Madonna, became in the 1980s and 1990s, a staple for postmodern theorists.
The appropriations and self trauma transformations of Lady Gaga have carved an even more strategic relation with post-modernist art.
Two examples that straddle the worlds of art and music seem particularly relevant for the new album.
Gaga collaborated with Jeff Koons on sculptural installations for the album, cover and launch, and she worked with Robert Wilson,
experimental theatre producer, to produce distinctly Cindy Sherman style videos in which she appears in Jack Clwyd of AIDS.
Death of Morat. And in other historical paintings. And also with Marina Abramovic, with whom she studied performance art techniques.
Such shifts between art and popular culture are the declared theme of her trek.
Applause. Quote, One second. I'm a coon. Then suddenly the Koons is made.
Its lyrics declare,
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.
But they end up sounding like terribly boring postmodern theory.
But postmodern poet pop culture was in art now arts in pop culture.
In May, Gaga, since her arrival on the pop scene, has frequently referred to her interest in video and performance art.
So all of this is perhaps not so surprising,
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.
So I conclude with two images from the recent, well, the 2013 performances.
Jay-Z did at New York's Pace Gallery, which took inspiration from Marina Abramovic, his 2010 performance.
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.
More recently, Kanye West has also compared himself to Picasso, and he likes DaVinci, too, I believe.
And in addition to the ambiguous reference of his new album title,
Life of Picasso has repeatedly collaborated with global art stars like Takashima or Karmi and Vanessa
Beecroft to bolster his self-declared genius in the corridors of museum taste making in part,
I think, disturbed by the boundary crossing commercial success of names such as Koons, Abramovitch, Murakami and Beecroft.
These names are largely verboten, but in the colliding worlds of global contemporary art, popular music,
consumer culture and celebrity, the tenants of postmodernism, I suspect, are alive and well.
Thank you.