The Postmodern Arts

Nineteen forty-five marked a historical moment in the figurative arts, with new trends related to changes in the cultural climate caused in large part by the war. This book presents an in-depth overview of the arts from the postwar period in Europe and the United States to today, from analysis of the pictorial languages of the leading masters of the second half of the 20th century, including the avant-gardes of the 1950s, to consideration of the trends that have inaugurated the third millennium, breaking the traditional borders between painting and sculpture. In the immediate postwar period, a situation strongly marked by the tragedies of war, Europe and the United States entered a period in art marked by upheavals and the creations of highly original personalities. The international art scene came to be populated by generations of anti-conventional underground artists who explored new territories in artistic communication. These artists pushed past the social realism and abstract art of preceding decades to adopt daring new expressive languages that swept over the traditional borders between painting and sculpture. From postwar existential tension came Art informel along with abstract expressionism, leading to the definitive break with tradition. There are then Lucio Fontana's poetics, Mark Rothko's use of color, Andy Warhol's serial images and pop art, leading to the most recent developments in the postmodern avant-gardes. Contemporary art has become the site of cultural exchanges during our time, with global materials and contexts. External space has itself become part of art, leading to such extremes as Land Art. Postmodern Art, with more than 400 color images, explores the currents, themes, and names that are part of the artistic heritage of today, from Art Informel to New Dada to body and video art. Its sixteen chapters present painters, sculptors, photographers, and architects with their most important works, many of them results of the close identification between art and life.

Sandler discusses the major and minor artists and their works; movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles; and the social and cultural context of the period. He covers post-modernist art theory, the art market, and consumer society. American and European art and artists are included.

The Postmodern Arts provides essential material and invaluable guidance for students of modern literature and culture.

Postmodernism in the visual arts is not just another 'ism.' It emerged in the 1960s as a transformation of artistic creativity inspired by Duchamp's idea that the artwork does not have to be physically made by its creator. Products of mass culture and technology can be used just as well as traditional media. This idea became influential because of a widespread naturalization of technology - where technology becomes something lived in as well as used. Postmodern art embodies this attitude. To explain why, Paul Crowther investigates topics such as eclecticism, the sublime, deconstruction in art and philosophy, and Paolozzi's Wittgenstein-inspired works.

This volume is an introduction to the intellectual movement known as Postmodernism and its impact on the visual arts. In clear, jargon-free language, Eleanor Heartney situates Postmodernism historically, showing how it developed both in reaction to and as a result of some of the fundamental beliefs underlying Modernism, especially its positivist, universalizing aspects. She then analyzes paradigmatic Postmodern works of art by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons and Robert Mapplethorpe. Postmodernism provides a concise and articulate overview of the Postmodern phenomenon. Eleanor Heartney is a contributing editor for Art in America, New Art Examiner, and Art Press. In 1991, she was the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. Heartney is a board member of the American section of the AICA. She is also the author of Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge, 1997). She lives in New York.

This volume presents a series of papers concerned with the interrelations between the postmodern and the present state of art and design education. Spanning a range of thematic concerns, the book reflects upon existing practice and articulates revolutionary prospects potentially viable through a shift in educative thinking. Many of the essays pinpoint the stagnancy of teaching methods today and discuss the reductive parameters enforced by the current curriculum. The radical tone that echoes through the entire series of papers is unmistakable. Throughout the book, postmodern theory informs the polemical debate concerning new directions in educative practice. Contributors shed new light on a postmodern view of art in education with emphasis upon difference, plurality and independence of mind. Ultimately, the paper provides a detailed insight into the various concepts that shape and drive the contemporary art world and expands the debate regarding the impression of postmodern thinking in art education.

Silvio Gaggi's survey of the vast terrain of twentieth century arts and ideas is unique not only for its scope but also for the clarity and cohesiveness it brings to wide-ranging, seemingly disparate works. By identifying underlying epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical issues. Gaggi draws connections among such modern and postmodern masterpieces as Pirandello's and Brecht's theater, Fowles's and Barth's fiction, Warhol's paintings, Godard's and Bergman's films, and Derrida's literary theory. Modern/Postmodern begins with a discussion of the profound skepticism—about traditional beliefs and about our ability to know the self—that lies at the heart of both modernism and postmodernism. Gaggi identifies the modernist response to this doubt as the rejection of mimesis in favor of a purely formalistic or expressionistic art. The postmodern response, on the other hand, is above all to create art that is self-referential (concerned with art itself, the history of art, or its processes). Drawing from the work of Piranadello and Brecht, paradigms that can be applies to many different art works, Gaggi emphasizes how these works from diverse media relate to one another and what their relationships are to the contemporary artistic and philosophical climate. He concentrates on the works themselves, but examines theory as a parallel manifestation of the same obsessions that inform recent literature and art. Gaggi asks, finally, if self-referential art can also be politically and ethically engaged with the reality outside it. He concludes that the postmodern obsession with language, narrativity, and artifice is not necessarily a decadent indulgence but is, at its best, an honest inquiry into the problems, questions, and paradoxes of language. Modern/Postmodern is a lively approach to postmodern art that will interest all students and scholars of contemporary art and literature.