Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 10:56:25 -0500
From: Barry Smylie <barrysmylie-AT-iname.com>
Subject: Re: a puddle of Irony


> On this list, the use of this term has created a sort of mantra, that
> through repetitiion is beginning to lose any meaning it may have had.
> Often, the word postmodern is used to designate the lack of a cohesive
> cultural standard...that in itself is not a bad thing, but the idea is
> sometimes used to justify the reinvention of past artistic tendencies
> (out of nostalgia), which tends to be oppositional to the concept of
> avant-garde.

There is a definite shift of outlook (paradigm shift) between modern and
postmodern.  A return to past values was not done out of sense of nostalgia
but out of desperation.  There was a tendency (perhaps a rule) in the
modern (avant) to concentrate upon "originality".  The cult of originality
leads us toward minimalism because the practitioners of an original art are
limited to an attempt to create that which has never existed before without
referring to past practices:  Therefore the body of knowledge decreases
instead of increasing.

Moderns unlearn past practice and revolt against former schools.

Taken to the extreme... the modern avant (the official art) began to also
revolt against new  practice (calling it "nostalgic" and therefore "old",
ergo "bad") and become bogged down in a dogma and embattled on two fronts.

To alleviate the logical quagmire a shift in stance was necessary.

In sort; the modern old (avant) guard represent an analytical approach to
art (segmenting to define).  The postmodern (new vanguard) are attempting a
synthesis of the modern (and pre-modern) techniques, technologies with the
new (noosphere).  The split in theory actually occurs in the analysis of
cubism... modern history follows the analytical path and the dextral artist
(dependent upon fashion and market) follows the synthetic course.  Analysis
requires new ideas and the cult of youth and of the new and within
relentlessly new mediums.  Synthesis requires an aesthetic conjunction of
contrasting elements within a traditional form like painting or printmaking
or sculpture and an application of traditional aesthetics in any new medium
like the internet and html graphics.

Modernism = creation through destruction
Postmodernism = creation through maintenance

The modern ideology in architecture can be summed up in another fashion...
form follows function and the elimination of the artist in the engineering
process (art is too expensive and frilly)

The postmodern approach to the minimizating tendencies of functionality...
decoration serves as a form of function

Postmodern is Avant.

Get this... if an automobile was not 'nostalgic' and each new generation of
vehicles was required to be essentially different from the previous
model... eventually the machine would simply be a lump of (abstract) metal
in the drive and after that only an idea of a lump of metal until even the
memory of an automobile would be lost.

Art is dead... Easle painting is dead... Conceptualism is dead...

Long live art!




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