What, if anything, does postmodernism mean to you?

I think of Waiting for Godot and uncontrollably shudder.

It doesn’t reflect how I see the world or my life.

Whenever I think of postmodernism, I think of things that don’t make sense.

@smack Love Waiting for Godot! lol

I don’t know much about it, I’m afraid. We spent little time on it in Art History class.

I know it’s not just art, but when I think of postmodern art, I think of a red square on a piece of paper and somehow it’s more deep and valuable than some of the much more talented art out there.

I would like to know more about it, actually. Especially since I do seem to like a lot of postmodern literature.

I think of how our beloved @pathfinder writes. Is where he?

I’m a post-postmodernist: I think it’s bullshit.

Everything old is new again.

It is what they call art that nobody likes and nobody understands..

It means irony.

It’s funny because how can something be post-modern? Har, har.

It means heightened self-consciousness; a consciousness of one’s own self-consciousness.

It’s one of those terms that doesn’t really make much sense (the term, not the art) and that no one really understands or uses properly because it’s kind of uninterpretable in the first place.

It means voyeurism. It’s like watching yourself watch television on the television.

I think we’re exiting pomo life right about now, but to call it quote bullshit is a little too dismissive for me. But then I wasn’t really alive for much of it.

@Ron_C

That’s what they call good art.

@absalom oh…somehow I found myself in the arts catagory, today. One guy ask people what they thought of his poem. What do I know about art. If I can look at it or read it without being bored, it must be good. Art appreciation is very simple for me.

I DON’T KNOW BUT I WILL DO SOMETHING ANYWAY.
I think that’s about it.

It means I’m clairvoyant seeing past the modern and into the postmodern.

If you self define it, it’s pretty silly, because the definition would change day by day. But postmodernism refers to a movement in the arts and humanities that was a reaction to another movement called modernism, and that came as a reaction to modernism. As such it has a meaning that is reasinably well understoiid. The dictionary says:

“Post-modernism is a late twentieth century approach in art, architecture, and literature which typically mixes styles, ideas, and references to modern society, often in an ironic way.”

@ETpro thanks for the defination. I didn’t look it up because I have a prejudice against art that doesn’t look like something. I want a picture of a tree, for instance, that looks like you could reach out and touch it. To me, irony belongs in prose. Art should be attractive or evocative. The one thing that you can say is that art is individual and when you have people standing around explaining it, it becomes a riddle.

Frankly, I like pictures of chubby naked ladies. If you want to get fancy you can put wings on them.

@Ron_C Kodak did a lot to kill representational art. Why spend three months making a photorealistic representation of a tree when you could spend 3 seconds making a photorealistic photo of it? You can even have the photo printed on canvas complete with fake brush strokes if you wish.

I find art like that from M. C. Escher and Salvador Dali fascinating in that it is clear they knew how to draw and paint, but they also knew how to take you beyond what a camera can show you about the world we live in.

I like this explanation (ERIC Digest, Hlynka and Yeaman, 1992): “An acknowledgment that—because there is a plurality of perspectives and ways of knowing—there are also multiple truths.” The modernists believed that all symbols (verbal, visual, structural) could be defined by universal truths. Look at the typeface Futura. The Os are perfectly round because an O has to be an O. It has to be legible, functional, and it will mean the same thing to all people everywhere. The post-structuralists and the post modernists said that was a load of crap. There are multiple meanings and multiple truths, each of us defining what truth is through the lens of our individual situations. It is prevalent today in mashup culture and Web 2.0 technologies. There are no new ideas, only unique contexts and applications of those ideas. So, for me, as a designer and an educator, everything has post modern connections.

I think of literature, and I think of self-reflexivity.

I think of something ripe for a hoax.

Then again, this doesn’t look too good either.

@ETpro I’m not familiar with M. C. Escher but have seen Dali’s works which seem like they would make nice Tee shirt or comic book designs but not something I would buy or display. They give me a feeling of vertigo with objects melting across the canvas.

I have a painting of a really nice winter scene of an old locomotive pulling into a train depot during a winter snow storm. You really couldn’t reproduce something like that with a camera. Lighting would look artificial and since it is a low ambient light scene any attempts would be blurred with lost detail. Besides I don’t think they had ISO400 in the mid-1800’s

@Ron_C Point taken on paintings of things that can’t be captured in a photo. You would certainly enjoy Escher’s art. It’s as odd a world as Dali’s but much more accessible. You have to let your mind wander to follow what Dali was saying. Escher just takes the ordinary, and bends it into something that can’t exist in the real world, yet seemingly does on his canvas (or pen-and-ink).

@ETpro You are right Escher’s stuff is amazing, I never saw anything like it. The way he deals with perspective a the detail that is sometime hidden in the pictures. Really great!

Thank you very much. It he considered post-modern?

@Ron_C If I had to put it into a genre, I’d say post-modern. But Escher is a genre of his own. There are imitators and people still pushing the envelope he defined, but he was a unique belnd of art and mathematical thought. He took a two demensional representation and carried you into a forth dimension through it, rendering simple architecture like stairways and halls into a world within a mobius strip where you meet yourself walking out of the door you enter.

@ETpro thanks, I’ll be looking at a lot of his pictures. I have tried, in a very amature way to put dimensions like that on some layout sketches for our intallation crews. He draws like I see it in my head.

to me it represents a philosophical standpoint that I hold dear to myself – it means that all absolutes can be deconstructed and should be deconstructed.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir What happens when that absolute you articulated gets deconstructed. :-P

@ETpro I don’t get mad.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Ha! You shouldn’t. as the very act reconfirms your rule. What a strange loop.

@ETpro exactly.