| Last year, I reviewed an exhibition at the Jack Tilton Gallery which included work by Jenny Perlin. She showed an explicit example of what could be considered postmodern art in her piece entitled, Sight Reading. In it, three professional musicians sight-read a composition by Schumann. Every time they made a mistake the screen would go black for a few seconds, then they would resume playing from where they left off. What started out as a structured musical composition played together, became more and more out of sync, until the composition sounded like a cacophony of notes. |  |
What is After After Modern? – Chris Twomey
The following is an excerpt from a presentation done on April 28, 2006, for Artist Talk on Art, by Chris Twomey, artist, writer and moderator of the panel.
The Post-Modern Age is a time of incessant choosing. It’s an era when no orthodoxy can be adopted without self-consciousness and irony, because all traditions seem to have some validity. This is partly a consequence of what is called the information explosion, the advent of organized knowledge, world communication and cybernetics.
—"What is Post-Modernism?" Charles Jencks, 1986
Last year, I reviewed an exhibition at the Jack Tilton Gallery which included work by Jenny Perlin. She showed an explicit example of what could be considered postmodern art in her piece entitled, Sight Reading. In it, three professional musicians sight-read a composition by Schumann. Every time they made a mistake the screen would go black for a few seconds, then they would resume playing from where they left off. What started out as a structured musical composition played together, became more and more out of sync, until the composition sounded like a cacophony of notes. The mistakes turned the organized information into a kind of chaos.
This piece elegantly reflects the information overload of our times. By breaking down Schumann’s composition or the classical tradition and what was regarded as high art, it is debunked. The piece also ironically suggests that our efforts to read the information are futile and our mistakes result in chaos.
In November 2005, there was a shift in tone. In PERFORMA 05, a city-wide performance art extravaganza, artists participated in performances in a way not seen since the 70s. I reviewed “Seven Easy Pieces,” Marina Abravomic’s seven days of performance art at the Guggenheim Museum where she performed her own work, as well as re-enacted the work of Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and other seminal performance pieces from the 70s, adding her own time element twist. It was similar to what was being heard in music, where riffs from older musicians were being re-sampled and updated by newer artists.
This artist and others seemed to be turning to the past and creating new work, but without skepticism. Maybe this shift was coming from a combination of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. To cope with our uncertainty about the future, some artists were turning to the past to ground themselves.
Given the turnout for Performa 05, perhaps there was a need for human contact where the “be here now” aspect of performance art was more satisfying than the alienation of irony.
There were more collaborations, more blogging, ephemeral net art, more handicraft with the emphasis on the handmade, more installations which were more about sharing the experience, than the object. Maybe artists were suspending their disbelief; needing to connect to something. There was a new attitude emerging, something… Post-Postmodern?
The following work contains threads of this Post-Postmodern theme, loosely calling the artists making it “the renovators.” This is artwork I have reviewed or seen in the last year, including my own, created by artists who are in the process of rebuilding by offering up another way to look at our world. Some are mining history to understand the present; others are using the figure as a source of security and truth that we can rely on. Some simply show an uncompromising commitment without too much skepticism. Maybe there is still some ironic fun or self-consciousness lingering, but all of them have content that offers possibilities for the future, no matter how slim, which is what makes them post-post.
Merging history with fiction is Orlan. She is famous for her facial surgeries which are bitter commentaries on the Western notion of “beauty.” In “Refiguration/Self-hybridization: The Pre-Columbian Series” (1998), she depicts herself as an ancient goddess, carved in stone. She remakes her female identity as sacred and mighty, using history to support her and by doing so, offers a new societal expectation and paradigm. Although there is a suggestion of self-awareness, the underlying intention is iconic rather than ironic.
Evaporations (2005) is a performance piece by Tamara Wyndham. In it, she writes out a poem of loss and grieving in water, which evaporates into the air. Performed in CA and in NY, this ritual acts out the brief time we are here on the earth and becomes a meditation for how we choose to spend our time here. Her full-body figure paintings use menstrual blood, so that the body’s temporal nature is captured and documented. It is the ephemeral and the physical that merge, without irony. The more unstable we become as a society, the more I believe we will see this kind of ritualized art.
“The Madonna Series” (2006), my work, continues the exploration of our self-identity through genetics. In this two-year old project I borrow the iconography of the Renaissance and replace religion, which was also their scientific worldview, with ancestry genetics. Each of the contemporary working mothers who are depicted as Madonna and child in the paintings, are in a different mutation group as seen by the mutation numbers. As we traveled in tribes during evolution, our tribe evolved unique mutations, which we can now trace. Each group branches off another, so in some way, we are all related. Through DNA we have a kind of immortality that links the past, present and future. Many artists are using discoveries in genomics as a theme. My work stresses connection, rather than disconnection; a post-post concept.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) a non-profit collective founded and directed by Mathew Coolidge, is represented in this year’s Whitney Biennial. This group collects images and data for land that has been abandoned, is working or is waiting to be used. One example is this photograph of a scale model of the Mississippi River made for dam building tests. This group reframes the original intention of the use of US lands through their extensive online archive, database and their museum. This highlights the consequences of our human labor, the importance of this natural resource and our myriad uses of it. They even give personal tours of some of these locations. Through their re-interpretation, our awareness of this land use, reframed as art and something that we value, invites political and societal involvement.
James Siena’s work is included because of his complete commitment to the idea of simplicity generating complexity through the steady labor of his hand. He uses systems to determine his step-by-step moves, but incorporates his mistakes into the system rebuilding the piece with the mistakes to make something more human and resonant.
You can see it in the dips and bends of his structure Coffered Divided Sagging Grid (with glitch) (2005). This piece even has the word “glitch” in the title. This work leads the way out of postmodern confusion into a kind of inspired confidence.
Table for Two (2006) is a collaboration by Leonora Chan from England and Helga Steppan from Sweden. Here they offer a meal that blurs 2D with 3D reality. A projection from above creates some of the table setting and shows the arm gesticulations of two people conversing over a meal. The glasses are real, the table is solid, but other elements are not. Reality may be in question, the arms may be phantom limbs, but at least these artists present the tenuous efforts of two people, maybe from two different worldviews, at the table attempting to communicate.
In S.L.Transpod NY (2006), Rodney Swanstrom builds a survival pod to help cope with geographic dislocation. In this pod, one is lulled into meditation by the roads, plane rides and imagery travel, which he projects. As a “given” of our globetrotting reality, he is interested in the gaps between the places we leave and the places where we want to go, creating this neutral space for reflection. He has two pod chairs in his space, suggesting that we can share this ride.
There has also been a shift in the marketing of fine art, where art fairs around the world require traveling and personal networking by the galleries. Is this a new aspect of Post-Postmodern and what role, if any, does it play? Do inexpensive digital prints and websites as calling cards suggest a more grass roots kind of art dissemination to millions, with globalization being easily accommodated? How does that impact the art work, the collector, the commerce and is there something new in the air? I invite you to draw your own conclusions.
