Question:
Postmodernism definition?
can someone please give me an easy-to-understand definition of the art term Postmodernism
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
I'll give it a try.
One of the problems in trying to define it, though, is that it is not really so much an artistic "movement" as it is a set of elements common to several works emerging throughout the 20th century. I think of PM as being a lot like having 300 channels to choose from, but not settling on any one of them, just endlessly flipping from one to the next. If you look at such surfing as a single story being told in its words and images, that's a lot like PM... it's kind of the ADHD of Art.
Post-modernism in part is a reaction to modernism, the early 20th century movement that looked hopefully toward such things as the Industrial Revolution as compatible with Art. The artists of it felt themselves to be part of a new world, one which they felt would be a positive place where Art would be a part of life.
PM then, is a less hopeful look at science, society, and its relationship with Art. In many ways, it has its roots in things like Dadaism (an Anti-Art movement) and the hopelessness that many artists felt following the horrors of WWI. This "modern art" that was so highly touted had been unable to help humankind, so they wondered what point there was to it.
So, what are the common bits to works that are often called PostModern?
Well, PM uses things like "quotation" -- a kind of "sampling" like one finds in music. Basically, it describes the use of a familiar image in an unfamiliar or different context. The point is to reconsider the image from a new point of view... for instance, Duchamp's painting "L.H.O.O.Q." which features the Mona Lisa with a beard and mustache; it's as if he's asking us to look at our fundamental assumption that this is a beautiful woman, mysterious in some way, whereas the title (if pronounced in French) reduces her in a very common way (as a comment on less visible parts of her anatomy).
A more recent example is a piece I saw at an exhibit several years ago titled "Cubist Rainbow." As a background, it showed Picasso's landmark "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (one of the first Cubist works) with a rainbow painted over their heads and a few plastic rainbow trout attached to the canvas. It "quoted" Picasso's work for its own purposes... and made me burst out in laughter that drew a cough from a museum guiard.
Despite the way that many PM works "quote" traditional works (particularly in Architecture), the post-Modernists are generally viewed as feeling a disconnection from history... almost as if to make a clean break from the past, they have to turn it into a sort of joke (such as the Duchamp example, above). One example of this is Jay McInnerney's novel "Bright Lights, Big City" which is narrated in the almost never done "second person" style. "You" become the center of the novel; "you" are the central character. By breaking with the standard first person or third person narration, it breaks into a new territory.
PM works are also accepting of and espousing several different world views and opposed concepts of reality, rather than espousing only one "true" one. Bret Easton Ellis' novel "The Outsiders" confounds readers with no discernible plot and each chapter being about or told by a different character, with few of the chapters even relating to any of the others. Each of the characters has a personal view, rather than finding a "universal" world of the novel as a whole.
It also points to another common concept: fragmentation. PM works seem to put forth the idea that the world is too much for any one person to comprehend -- even the artist -- and so only parts of it can be seen. Sometimes, as in the paintings of Rothko, it becomes a color; in the plays of Samuel Beckett, it becomes only a pair of lips telling a story over and over -- all the while denying any connection with the story (the play "Not I").
Even Andy Warhol's repeated images (like those of Marilyn Monroe) are a sort of fragmentation -- each being a different color seems to emphasize a different "look" at this iconic image.
Like I said, it's hard to define... and critics and artists described as being Post-modernists would disagree over its elements. I hope my examples have helped a little.