Lecture slides for MA Contemporary Art Theory and for MFA students at Edinburgh College of Art. http://www.eca.ac.uk/pdf/getCourse.php?id=88

1. What was Critical Postmodernism?

2. Bret Easton Ellis ‘Victor’ - The Rules of Attraction (1987)

3. The art that put theory to the fore […] was fostered in the academy It was not cheery stuff… JULIAN STALLABRAS High Art Lite , 1999, p86.

4. “… the professional critique of representation pursued by the likes of Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly and Hans Haacke, began to appear to this generation as censorious. Such moral strenuousness and the intellectualisation of pleasure looked bathetic, gruesome even, the work of bodies at war with themselves [...]” JOHN ROBERTS, “Mad For It!”, Everything , Issue 18, Spring 1996.

6. Douglas Crimp Hal Foster Rosalind Krauss Craig Owens

7. Barbara Kruger

8. Ryan Gander Loose Associations (2004)

10. CHARLES JENCKS The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, being demolished during the summer of 1976.

15. Photographs by Louise Lawler

16. Louise Lawler Allan McCollum, Brice Marden, New Jersey, 1983 Louise Lawler Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York City, 1984

17. Sherrie Levine After Walker Evans (1981)

23. Allan McCollum , Plaster Surrogates, 1982-83. Installation at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, 1983.

24. Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy)

27. Bill Woodrow

28. “ With every spasm Byrne jettisons an illusion of contact, communion, expressiveness. […] Byrne insists that his visible persona isn’t natural. It’s unnatural.” Carter Ratcliff, David Byrne and the Modern Self: How Do I work This? Artforum 1985.

29. Unlike many critics, Byrne inhabits the space of postmodernism , and offers audiences ways into that space which, whilst not being confortable, are nonetheless viable and immediately pleasurable .” Dick Hebdige, “Learning to live on the Road to Nowhere” in Hiding in the Light