Photographer: Stuart Bentley, after Helmut Newton
Lacanian psychoanalyst and poststructuralist literary critic Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality or "the shaping of meaning of a text through other texts". For Kristeva intertextuality conceptually married Ferdinand de Saussure semiotics with Bakhtin's heteroglossia or the multiple meanings in each text.Since then intertextuality has assumed a host of other meanings and it is not only a well established literary device, which pre-existed Kristeva's formulation, but also a critic's tool in his/her theoretical armoury. And of course it is not only applicable to literature. Any art work is participant in a network of dialogues, allusions, citations and parodies, whether it be a piece of music, a dance, a painting, a sculpture, a photograph and so on.
One of the greatest contributions of postmodernism at its best has been the irreverent attitude of art makers - I use the term purposefully, as the artist, especially Artist with a capital A is a modernist construct heavily critiqued by the postmodern - and the elevation of the pastiche to artistic status. Postmodern intertextuality has often been taken to such an extreme as to subvert notions of plagiarism and copyright, also firmly embedded in modernist thinking.
Here I can't help thinking of the wonderful Yvonne Rainer who re-choreographed The Rite of Spring in 2007 gently poking fun at herself and being extremely irreverent in her attitude to 'sacred monsters' such as Stravinski and Nijinski, using bits of the original musical score but also the soundtrack of the 2003 BBC film on Nijinski, with voices of people in the audience shouting when all hell broke loose on the night of The Rite premiere.The web of references and allusions in this piece by Rainer is rich and not necessarily evident on first viewing.
Not all postmodern pastiches succeed in maintaining a satirical strand which is what constitutes the strength of pastiche as a device. Frederic Jameson has been particularly critical of the blandness of much postmodern work, which in his view decontextualises parody, robbing it of its effectiveness. This has been countered by Linda Hutcheon's emphasis on "postmodernism's willingness to question all ideological positions, all claims to ultimate truth".
An interesting development was in the 1980s the so called 'appropriation art', where the actual appropriation (or citation) was an artistic theme. Photographer Sherrie Levine for example quoted photographer Walker Evans by photographing his work in her own photographs. Appropriation was not necessarily a new idea - Picasso too used appropriation as a commentary and the Dadaists came definitely very close to it with their idea of the 'ready-made' - but ideas of power, gender and consumerism were more clearly articulated, to stay with the example, in Sherrie Levine's work than in earlier attempts and that was the strength of appropriation as such.
We are somewhat past postmodernism, at this point in time, and are in the process of reassessing it. The context has changed and somehow postmodernism no longer seems to be a sufficiently valid framework to understand today's world and its artistic production. But certain things have come to stay and the notion of a more political pastiche is to be welcomed.
Photographer: Terri Lee-Shields
Where am I going with all this? I have been thinking about my own work as a model and what I would like to develop in collaboration with photographers. I have also been thinking about my own writing and where I would like to take it. My dance work too is in the making, even though at the moment it is the therapeutic aspect which I am developing. It is that time of the year, when the season stimulates stock taking. I am mulling over a few ideas, that's all. If anyone has a suggestion to make I am all ears.
(All photos modelled by Alex B)
Studying post-modernism was a big part of my early university career.
ReplyDeleteThrough those studies, I concluded that post-modernism as a movement was... immobile.
Dead-ish.
What made me conclude that? I was repulsed by it. I was repulsed by all of it. I didn't want it, I didn't like it. I thought it was cheap. I thought it was meaningless.
And of course, post-modernists would say "I want you to be repulsed. I want you to find it cheap. There is no meaning."
Which repulses me all the more.
(My level of repulsion is, of course, the measure by which all things are judged)
Intertextuality (which, satisfyingly, the internal dictionary of my web browser does not recognize) was one particular annoyance, because in order to understand text a) you had to read text b), c), and d) which in turn required you to read e,) f), g), x) y, z) and the bible.
I'm all for reading and learning, but this is pretty masturbatory, says me. It makes art, writing, dance an in-joke instead of informative (in an academic AND creative sense).
Today's creative and academic media should be presented concisely, in plain language such that laypeople can understand it and build on it. They shouldn't spend hours trying to decrypt it using codexes. If your purpose isn't to be understood - if you have no purpose at all, then you are a moron blowing hot air.
The way I see it, my switch from Lyotard to Leibniz was well worth it...
(Not to mention that I had to sit through a year of 3 hour lectures consisting of one professor on an eternal tangent, bragging about her mastery of tabla, and another obsessed with the post-colonial aspects of the gamelan orchestra - a connection he never fully articulated).
I can see where you are coming from. The poco-pomo people got on my nerves too, especially their convoluted prose. But there are things I would definitely salvage and irreverence, pastiche, parody and intertextuality - which was already there, think of the Bible - are among them. What's today's framework. Altermodernism is one of them. I never know how to answer my students when they ask.
ReplyDeleteGive it a few years and you too will be able to feel less visceral about postmodernism.