CROSS CULTURAL FANTASIES
James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity”. Space, Site, Intervention: Situation Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 23-37
In his essay, James Meyer refers to what he calls the “cross-cultural fantasy of the other”(35). A supposition based on a not so solid foundation, forming mental images of other places.
Guidebooks can help create these fantasies as they direct visitors or tourists to places of interest. They are a compilation of information in printed form and tourists find them invaluable. As they guide of strangers or visitors through a district giving them a description of the places or scenery of interest they tend to point out certain things and not others. In other words, guidebooks can give a somewhat biased view.
One of the initiators of what was to become tourism was Thomas West in his guide to the lakes for landscape lovers of landscape studies. This and books like it helped change the British mind and enabled it to view the landscape for visual pleasure. With the guidebook and Claude glass in hand the British of the 18th century ventured into the countryside. With the Claude glass one could view the land as scenery and compose the landscape. Throughout his essay Park refers to the landscape as theatre and us as the audience. In his essay the Claude glass is used as a metaphor to turn nature into scenery.
The idea of an illusion of a foreign place is highlighted by artist Jan Muller. In the exhibition, “ Inter-pellations” Muller looks at European -American cultural relations by using guidebooks to direct visitors around fashionable areas of SOHO in New York. They position the tourist within the space and swiftly guide them through upmarket restaurants, fancy boutiques, and swanky art galleries quenching a thirst for the fresh and new. A few years earlier Muller explored this idea in reverse with a work titled bookcase which explored the American thirst for European history.
The landscape in New Zealand was to become a commodity. “... its’ landscape had been constantly, the most beautiful scenery in the world”1. Colonial immigrants had a mental picture of New Zealand thanks to idealised images presented by writers and artists. This image was a cross-cultural fantasy
1. Geoff Park “Theatre Country”, Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and whenua, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp.113-127.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
THE POST MODERN CONDITION
Jean-Francis Lyotard, “Answering the Question; What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durand. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984, pp. 71-82.
What is postmodernism? Surely postmodernism is part of the modern and a work can only become postmodern if it is first modern.
‘Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the “lack of reality”, and the invention of other realities’(77). New rules have to be made to replace those that have been broken. This is what Lyotard refers to as a Grand narrative or Meta narrative.
Modernism lessened illusionism in painting and created new objects and ways of seeing them. Take Picassos Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painted in 1907. It shows a refusal to comply with historical methods of representation. Perspective has been abandoned as can be seen in the face of the figure on the bottom right which is seen from two views. That and the face above it are influenced by African masks, shattering the illusion of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘primitive’.
In the post modern condition the grand narrative has lost its credibility as culture takes on a flatness. The level of inquiry becomes cynical, what use is this? Parallel knowledge’s, takes over, in what Lyotard refers to as a ‘paralogy’.
Knowledge – science, technology and the arts, has undergone a change of status in the modern era. Lyotard pointed the figure at science. Science has become a knowledge commodity, involved with language. We believe in the truth of science. Science has freed the people. But, how, he argues do we know what’s true?
Therefore science based enlighted rationalism, reason truth and falsehood gave way to postmodern scepticism. This was to happen alongside capitalism, prosperity and widespread development in the visual arts. In the postmodern condition within science you cannot find truth. Humanity and beliefs of faith are questioned by postmodernism.
Postmodernist art embraces all manner of styles, asking questions about essence. Robert Rauschenberg began to explore this as he bought the real world into painting in his combines.”Rauschenberg paved the way for new possibilities, creating a space between painting and sculpture and between performance and object. In the wake of this artistic breakthrough, pop art, Happenings, performance art, and installation emerged.”1. These movements deconstruct and calls meaning into question.
Lyotard is in fact a modernist at heart. To state the end of the Meta narrative is a Meta narrative in itself. He goes on to concede that within the modern is the postmodern. “Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its ends but in the nascent state, and this state is constant”(79).
1. Jeremy Strick, ‘Robert Rauschenberg, combines’, ed. Jane Hyun, Germany: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,2005.
Jean-Francis Lyotard, “Answering the Question; What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durand. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984, pp. 71-82.
What is postmodernism? Surely postmodernism is part of the modern and a work can only become postmodern if it is first modern.
‘Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the “lack of reality”, and the invention of other realities’(77). New rules have to be made to replace those that have been broken. This is what Lyotard refers to as a Grand narrative or Meta narrative.
Modernism lessened illusionism in painting and created new objects and ways of seeing them. Take Picassos Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painted in 1907. It shows a refusal to comply with historical methods of representation. Perspective has been abandoned as can be seen in the face of the figure on the bottom right which is seen from two views. That and the face above it are influenced by African masks, shattering the illusion of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘primitive’.
In the post modern condition the grand narrative has lost its credibility as culture takes on a flatness. The level of inquiry becomes cynical, what use is this? Parallel knowledge’s, takes over, in what Lyotard refers to as a ‘paralogy’.
Knowledge – science, technology and the arts, has undergone a change of status in the modern era. Lyotard pointed the figure at science. Science has become a knowledge commodity, involved with language. We believe in the truth of science. Science has freed the people. But, how, he argues do we know what’s true?
Therefore science based enlighted rationalism, reason truth and falsehood gave way to postmodern scepticism. This was to happen alongside capitalism, prosperity and widespread development in the visual arts. In the postmodern condition within science you cannot find truth. Humanity and beliefs of faith are questioned by postmodernism.
Postmodernist art embraces all manner of styles, asking questions about essence. Robert Rauschenberg began to explore this as he bought the real world into painting in his combines.”Rauschenberg paved the way for new possibilities, creating a space between painting and sculpture and between performance and object. In the wake of this artistic breakthrough, pop art, Happenings, performance art, and installation emerged.”1. These movements deconstruct and calls meaning into question.
Lyotard is in fact a modernist at heart. To state the end of the Meta narrative is a Meta narrative in itself. He goes on to concede that within the modern is the postmodern. “Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its ends but in the nascent state, and this state is constant”(79).
1. Jeremy Strick, ‘Robert Rauschenberg, combines’, ed. Jane Hyun, Germany: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,2005.
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