1. Representation
‘Representations, it was argued,
instead of coming after reality,
in an imitation of it, now precede
and construct reality. Our “real”
emotions imitate those we see on
film and read about in pulp
romances; our “real” desires are
structured for us by advertising
images; the “real” of our politics is
prefabricated by television news
and Hollywood scenarios of
leadership; our “real” selves are
congeries and repetition of all these
images, strung together by
narratives not of our own making.”
Art since 1900 -
modernism, antimodernism
postmodernism
Pg. 47
2.
3. The Society of the Spectacle (196) Guy Debord
• In his seminal text, Debord describes a society where a
fundamental, catastrophic shift has occurred from material
concreteness and use value to exchange value and the world of
appearances.
• For Debord “the whole of life of those societies in which modern
conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has
become mere representation” (thesis 1)
• All relationships are mediated by image, with people defined by
their status as frozen passive observers of what the spectacle
has to offer. The power of the spectacle in western culture rests
in its command of an illusory unity of social life grounded in
mere appearance.
4. “At some point following World War Two a
new kind of society began to emerge
(variously described as post industrial
society, multinational capitalism, consumer
society, media society and so forth). New
types of consumption; planned
obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm
of fashion and styling changes; the
penetration of advertising, television and
media generally to a hitherto unparalleled
degree throughout society; the
replacement of the old tension between
city and country, center and province, by
the suburb and by universal
standardization; the growth of the great
networks of superhighways and the arrival
automobile culture – these are some of the
features which would mark a radical break
with that older prewar society”
5. ‘When I was concentrating on this kind of cultural analysis
in the 1950’s I was sometimes told by good Marxist friends
that it was a diversion from the central economic struggle.
Now every trade union and political leader cries 'The media,
the media'.
Raymond Williams
6. “Advertisements are selling
us something else besides
consumer goods: in providing
us with a structure in which
we, and those goods, are
interchangeable, they are
selling us ourselves.”
Judith Williamson
Decoding Advertisements
8. Judy Chicago “the Dinner Party” 1976
Alice Neel The Pregnant Woman
1971 oil on canvas 40 x 60 in.
9. “a group of women art professionals waging a war of words and images
against the sexism and racism of the art world”
Lucy Lippard “The Pink Glass Swan pg. 255
10. “At that time feminism had become a dirty word. Our idea was to make it
sexy, to make it funny” -
Guerrilla Girls in Suzi Gablik “Conversations before the end of time” pg. 211
13. • “avant gardists tended to regard paint and brushes as forms of kryptonite”.
14. •Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of
mechanical reproduction” ( 1936)
•In the essay Benjamin argued that the ‘aura’ of the original
artwork is lost as a result of the impact of photography's
ability to infinitely reproduce images. Far from being
something to mourn, artists could exploit this opening,
producing art works which could be potentially infinitely
reproduced and disseminated. This was an excellent option
in terms of producing a more democratic form of art capable
of reaching a far larger mass of people, as well as potentially
greatly increasing the political and social impact of such art.
•For women artists this undercutting of many of the cherished
central ideas of western (male) art - originality and
authenticity, was especially attractive as it avoided the
baggage of being unfavorable compared to, and dismissed in
relation to the ‘geniuses’ of the canon.
•Photography's centrality and history within the very mediums
of mass entertainment also of course made it an excellent,
potentially invisible carrier of counter cultural sentiment. It
could be seamlessly injected into the very spaces of culture it
wished to critique.
16. • “Richard Prince focused on the
conventions of advertising and
fashion images for what they
reveal about subjective
modelling. At stake in this
patterning of images, Prince
implies, is the patterning of
identities, of identities as
images, which are now shaped
by media representations far
more than any other cultural,
form.”
• The Simulacra Image in “Art since 1900”
18. • “It is precisely at the legislative
frontier between what can be
represented and what cannot
that the postmodernist
operations being staged - not
in order to transcend
representation, but in order to
expose that system of power
that authorizes certain
representations while
blocking, prohibiting or
invalidating others.“
• Craig Owens
19. •“Who speaks?Who is silent?
Who is seen? Who is absent? On
both an emotional and an
economic level images and text
have the power to make us rich or
poor. “
•Barbara Kruger
20.
21.
22.
23. • The American writer Hal
Foster described this work
as representing a shift from
the artist being a producer
of objects to a manipulator
of signs, with the viewer an
active reader of messages
rather than a passive
contemplator of the
aesthetic.
24.
25. “The use of the
pronoun really cuts
through the grease on a
certain level. It’s a very
economic and forthright
invitation to a spectator
to enter the discursive
and pictorial space of
that object.”
Barbara Kruger
Quote in Brandon Taylor
Art Today. Pg. 99
26. “is fundamentally predicated upon a
sense of its own moral security and
rightness, as against the inequality
and oppression it attributes to the
dominant culture… There is a
disquieting sense in which such
work remains unconcerned by its
own status within the enriched
product range of contemporary
culture. The culture it addresses
carries on – and carries on
generating materials susceptible to
radical criticism. The problem arises
when that which is marginal with
respect to social values generally,
accedes to a kind of power of its
own in its own relatively restricted
institutional compass”.
Paul Wood
Modernism in Dispute
27.
28. “When I was in school I was getting
disgusted with the attitude of art being
so religious or sacred, so I wanted to
make something that people could
relate to without having to read a book
about it first. So that anybody off the
street could appreciate it, even if they
couldn’t fully understand it; they could
still get something out of it. That’s the
reason why I wanted to imitate
something out of the culture, and also
make fun of the culture as I was doing
it:”
Cindy Sherman
Quoted in State of the Art edited by Sandy Nairne
29.
30.
31.
32.
33. “this false search for the real her is exactly what the work is about ..the
attempt to find the real Cindy Sherman is so unfulfillable, just as it is for
anyone, but what is so interesting is the obsessive drive to find that
identity.”
Judith Williamson
34. The centred subject - the modern man
The sovereign self - the subject is defined as an ‘inner space’. This
inner space contains the consciousness, a repository of feelings,
memories and needs. It is the I or ego. It is bounded, masterful and
independent. It has a core essence which in art, finds exterior
expression and manifestation in artworks. It is cohesive.
This sovereign self is the source of all action. It is perceived as free
as it decides its own goals. It engages in an ongoing process of self
reflection, monitoring its own thoughts in an ongoing internal
monologue.
This subject is self sufficient and distinct form everything outside of
itself, including its own body. To be a subject is to be capable of
making rational, objective decisions regarding the self - being able
to make your situation or your body. This process leads to self
fulfillment .
35. • The decentred disputes the
Postmodernism widely self
notion of the bounded, sovereign self.
• In the work of various seminal
postmodern writers such as Michel
Foucault,Jacques Derrida, Jacques
Lacan and Roland Barthes, these
ideas of an essential, ‘eternal’ bounded
self are undermined and critiqued.
• In such work the self is seen as fluid
and dependent for its sense of self on
its context.
• It has limited powers of autonomous
choice
• It has multiple centres with diverse
perspectives - there is on one real me.
We inhabit instead a series of masks -
identity is ‘performed’ -it is a
masquerade.
• The self and our identity is constructed
36. “Slavoj Zizek has argued that
deconstructive criticism has often
misunderstood an Hegelian notion
of identity as being impossible;
deconstruction always leads to a
deferral of identity. For Zizek it is
this very impossibility of a closed
subjectivity that is the very name of
identity itself. He would describe a
realisation of the contingency of self
in time and space as
consciousness, that is something
that can never be grasped and that
is continually slipping away.”
Paula Smithard
“Grabbing the Phallus by the Balls”
Everything magazine
37. “Early feminist readings of
Sherman’s photos drew
enthusiastic attention to ways in
which they revealed woman as
cultural construct, a pawn of
media inventiveness; even today
Sherman is held up as a pioneer
investigator into the feminine
masque. Yet the artist herself
has consistently resisted that
interpretation.”
Brandon Taylor
Art of Today
Pg. 95
38. “Ironically, in overlooking the question of
female pleasure, critical texts that privilege
feminist appropriation art for its refusal of
the desiring male gaze have maintained
the boundaries of masculine critical and
viewing authority even as they have
worked to celebrate practices that critique
it”
Amelia Jones
39. “Whatever happened to the old
1970’s idea of the revolutionary
power of women’s laughter?
Who would want a revolution
that didn’t allow for dancing in
the first place? And what could
make the over swollen dick of
culture shrivel faster than
women’s well timed laughter?”
Aimme Rankin
40. “The point is that we are within
the culture of postmodernism to
the point where its facile
repudiation is as impossible as
any equally facile celebration of
it is complacent and corrupt.
Ideological judgement on
postmodernism today
necessarily implies, one would
think, a judgement on ourselves
as well as on the artefacts in
question.”
Fredric jameson
‘The Politics of theory:Ideological
Positions
In the Postmodernism Debate’,
New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984), p.
63
41.
42.
43. Cindy Sherman
• Staged, glossy, seductive photographic images of herself in a
variety of stereotypical, mass media representations of woman.
Sherman is always at pains to point out that her photographs
are not self portraits.
• For many writers, especially feminist critics, her work reveals
how femininity is a masquerade - how femininity is performed,
with women drawing on a range of available cultural produced
representations of femininity.
• In a more abstract sense her work ties in with postmodernist
critiques of modernist notions of the self. In postmodern theory
the self is conceived of, not as a unitary, bounded, autonomous
entity but as fluid and dependent on context. In postmodern
theory our selves are always in a process of being made and
made over .
• Sherman’s work is often humorous, playful, with the artist
displaying a palatable enjoyment and pleasure in the process of
‘trying on someone else's cloths’. There is a lack of moral
righteousness in the work, rather a paradoxical pleasure is
expressed.
46. •“As we view images and witness
their mutability it becomes
apparent that truth is a construct,
and that identity is fragmented
across many truths’. An
understanding of this frees up the
individual from the constant search
for the fixity of the ideal self and
allows an enjoyment of the self as
process and becoming.”
•Jo Spence
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56. “Class and education…as a working class artist I feel I have an obligation to
offer something back to my own group; to help other women and men to seek
and find the resources they need for an art education which suits their
particular class/ethnic/racial/sexual needs (something I never located within
higher education). My work within education has always been class identified
and linked to a political consciousness, but it was not until the late 1980’s that
the question of my class unconsciousness became relevant .I then moved
rapidly away from social or socialist realism and began to develop the concept
of the psychic realism with Rosy Martin, taking techniques from psychotherapy
and merging them with photography into a Theatre of the self. Such work
remains grounded in humorous, ironic, and paradoxical cultural forms with
which I grew up as a working class child, playing with puns and contradictions
as it represents subjectivity in process. Here I am beginning to unravel the
knots of the psychic, social, economic and ideological processes which have
constructed the ‘me’ who struggles in and out o consciousness. A large
component of this work has begun to devolve around shame, to make visible
my apparent shifting between classes, masquerading as someone else, my self
silencing and my intermittently repressed rage which often manifested itself as
sarcasm…”
Jo Spence “Class Confusion and Cultural Solidarity” printed Fan
magazine in 1991.
