Monday, December 30, 2013

Postmodernism Light US-Version



Now the piece from yesterday - for our readers from USA - same model as before but in another shape! Special welcome to our wievers from USA. They are three times so many as swedish visitors this week! This is also an assignment (half of 3A task) in my course Digital Photography and Image Theory.

Picture of Thommy Sjöberg

Postmodernism Light 

 Are you real asked Robert Heinecker in 1966 in an acclaimed essay on a series of double- exposed images from glossy american magazines.
 Here he is represented with a work from an installation in 2011 by Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York.
The picture could conceivably be part of any fashion magazine at any time if you do not look closely at it. Here are typical postmodernist traits possibly with more humor and warmth, male gaze perhaps, than at the Moderna in Stockholm with current Cindy Sherman.
 If we look closely at the long-legged model, one can discern a gun in her right hand, down around her left ankle winds an exotic reptile from the mysterious bag as a costume jewelery around the ankle and the blouse is more than undone. Violence, sex and creeping scary threat in response to the polished surface of the chic and wealthy gallery environment.
Typical postmodern move (reason) said Andy Grundberg in his essay The Crisis of the Real from 2003.
Is postmodernism a sum of all modernism but was reused in a new ironic, critical or ideological context, he asks?
Andy Grundberg argues that postmodernism in photography reflects our time (since 1970) and its conditions, and is completely different from postmodernism in architecture (structuralism there), dance, music and literature.
By rows of artists, Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Lucas Samura , William Wegman , David Haxton , Robert Cumming and David Hockney in the 1970s used the photograph as a medium was the photographer changed to an artist, an example of postmodernism, something similar was true even for Cindy Sherman who went from photography to art photo.
Andy Grundberg look at Cindy Sherman art as a separation between style and meaning, image and text, object and intention and her Untitled Filmstills are a series of masks from film noir, film- world imagery, television, fashion, photography and advertising that corresponds to the 1950s poststructuralist portraits.
In conclusion, Andy Grundberg sees postmodernism more as a question of how one perceives the world than a matter of style. What postmodernist art teaches us is that things have been consumed. That we are at the end of an era and we are all prisoners in what we see. An endless hall of mirrors as a place where we all are images of Cindy Sherman's world.
© Thommy Sjöberg

3 comments:

Pierre said...

Very good! I think you have highlighted the main points in both texts;
Andy Grundbergs analysis of the postmodern art being feedback loops of itself
(and thus decaying)...

Lars-Erik said...

Not only great but actually interesting answers.
Thanks a lot!

Sara said...

Well written!