Modern Postmodern

Modernism

1. THEORY: Formalism (purity, content dissolved, subject matter, content to be avoided) 2. Expressionism

3. Primitivism (equating child art innocent expression with the purposes of art)

4. Discovery of child art

5. Abstraction, Formalism

6. The function? Pure aesthetic experience, therapeutic, freedom from bourgeoisie middle class values, art for art’s sake.

7.  Trivialization and disdain  of popular culture.

8. True art transcends ordinary life, beyond kitsch.

9. Creativity, Originality is important.

10. Individuality, lone artistic genius, the Big Story.

11. Self referential, non-narrative.

12. the idea of Progress, there is universal truth, in art a march toward purity.

Postmodernism

1. Social and cultural issues are paramount:  art critique is also cultural critique

2. Time/space flux: Progress? Is time linear?

3. Reflects strong ethical positions, like environmentalism or feminism

4. Form? Pastiche, collage, eclecticism

5. Concern for otherness: women as other, other groups,  power, knowledge, control (like feminism). =Pluralism: many viewpoints possible, Multiculturalism

6. Appropriation, Simulations, Copying,  including popular art

7. Multiple readings possible; contradictions, irony, metaphor ambiguity, double coding.

8. Escape the confines of the museum

9. Collapsing boundaries between high and low art, embrace kitsch.

10. Originality is impossible, art is a “text”, a collection of citations, references, and correspondences.

11. Use of narratives, celebration of small stories.

12. Confronting the “gaze”.  The male gaze and the female gaze.

13. Re-contextualizing images and signifiers, putting the familiar into new and unexpected relationships. 

14. Layering.

15. Mixing codes, signs, conventions, signifiers.

16. Hybridization, mixing of culture.

17. Mixing media.

18. Working collaboratively

19. Deconstruction: Deconstruction refers to an approach that focuses on usually –not-noticed aspects of languages, images, ideas, and practices that orient, shape and enable perception and conception. A goal of deconstruction is to sponsor new possibilities for thinking and acting.  Thus, deconstruction isn’t really about taking things apart; it’s about bringing forward what is excluded, concealed implied or otherwise unsaid or unsayable.