Quo Vadimus?
By Tom Wachunas
“Postmodernism: The cultural condition marked by the absolute
gratification of human desires and the absolute neglect of human needs.” ― Peter K. Fallon
“Amusing and perfectly self-conscious
charlatans.” – Noam Chomsky
“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of
fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and
promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of
depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or
dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.” ― Jean Baudrillard
Leave it to the
French to come up with memorably lofty expressions of disapproval. The above
quote from social and cultural critic Jean Baudillard is a fine example – “…disposable
simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality…the random swirl of empty signals.” Such elevated language! And who could forget
the hilariously messy confrontation between English knights and French soldiers
in the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” wherein one irritated Frenchman
sneers at his enemies from high atop his castle wall, “I fart in your general
direction.” Precious. Stretch the context a bit, and that snooty epithet could
arguably describe the mindset of not only many viewers but also makers of
contemporary art.
Speaking of
Frenchmen with an attitude, there’s Marcel Duchamp and his 1917 Fountain – a porcelain urinal offered as
a work of art. I have often commented on this work as one man’s intentional
crossing into utterly new and rocky aesthetic terrain – a harbinger of Modernism’s
radical redefining of art.
Signed “R. Mutt 1917” in black, like so much
scrawling on lavatory walls, the work always suggested to me just how pissed
off, so to speak, Duchamp was at the
impotence and irrelevance of the sacrosanct idealizations touted by the
academic art world. For that matter, so
were many other upstart European artists at that time as well as during the
previous 50 or 60 years.
All of the above
is by way of setting up a breach of my self-imposed blogging protocol to tell
you something about my piece
currently on view in the Stark County Artists Exhibition at Massillon Museum.
While it’s called A Brief History of
Modern Art, in retrospect the overarching “message” of my 3D drawing would
be largely unchanged had I inserted “Postmodernism” in place of “Modern Art.”
This is because I regard Postmodernism, an open-ended, catch-all term generally
designating contemporary culture after 1970 or so, not as embracing anything
“original” (and only superficially “new”), but rather as deconstructing and/or
re-assessing the 20th century philosophies and cultural practices
(which were in turn largely reactionary in nature) that preceded it. I think of
Postmodernism as if it were the complicated, even troubled stepchild that views
parent Modernism like an ordinary found object.
So yes, my piece
is derivative, but what art isn’t these
days? (I can see right now that another post will be needed to further explain
my thoughts on originality.) I incorporated three nearly identical vacuum
cleaner undercarriages not necessarily
as a snarky code for “modern art sucks,” though I can fully appreciate how such
an association could be made, as a few folks have suggested recently. I simply
found their convoluted forms to be visually intriguing and otherwise
appropriate abstract symbols of the complex ideas embodied in
Modernism/Postmodernism.
Retracing all those intersecting and abutted shapes,
volumes and planes with graphite on the middle unit – drawing on top of the
pre-existing drawing, as it were – represents a dominant tendency in
contemporary art toward recapitulating itself into a kind of Classicism in its
own right, like sculpting in marble. Hence the faux stone effect of the unit on
the right.
These words from
around 3,000 years ago come to mind: What
has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing
new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is
something new”? It was here before our time…” (Ecclesiastes 1: 9-10)
Quo vadimus… where
does our art (my own included) go from here? I’ve no idea. But wherever it is, I’m fairly sure
it’ll be déjà vu all over again.
TOP PHOTO: Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
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