On Sampling the Pleasures of Visual Culture: Postmodernism and Art - Part 1

  Robin Marriner 

 I want to explore two issues from ideas about the postmodern that seem to me to raise problems about the practices of art education. Presently I feel more confident that there are difficulties here that need to be addressed than I do about knowing how practice should be redrawn to meet them. First, I want to briefly discuss post- structuralist accounts of meaning and their implications for our concept of the art work as ‘object of experience,’ ‘object of study,’ or ‘object of knowledge.’ Secondly, I want to discuss something which, though separate, has some connection: namely the fairly ubiquitous claim (though with differing value judgments attached), that one of the significant features of the postmodern, and therefore of our present condition, is the erosion or effacement of difference between what has formerly I been deemed high and low cultures. 

 A. Post-structuralist theories of meaning 

 A1. The relationship between post-structuralism and postmodernism is evidently contentious. Where Jameson’s characterisation of the postmodern seems in part constructed from annotating certain facets of post-structuralist thinking, for example, the notion of the ‘subject,’ and the concept of the ‘real,’1 Huyssen argues that ‘we must begin to entertain the notion that rather than offering a theory of postmodernity and developing an analysis of contemporary culture, French theory provides us primarily with an archaeology of modernity, a theory of modernity at the stage of its exhaustion.’2 Perhaps we can say that if not offering a theory of the postmodern, post-structuralism offers an epistemology which is inconsistent with, or oppositional to the epistemological commitments that underpin modernist culture, and in particular modernist art culture. To that degree it seems, that if not a theory of postmodernism it is profoundly imbricated in what we understand by it. 

 A2. What is of particular relevance here both to an understanding of postmodern art practice and its implications for art education is the manner in which post- structuralist accounts of meaning run contrary to those to which modernism has covertly, or more recently overtly, had an allegiance. 

Within philosophical aesthetics, within art criticism, within art education, our thinking has been traditionally structured by certain oppositions: oppositions for example, between the object and its context; between that which is interior to it and that, exterior; between that which is essential to its meaning and that which is only contingent. Though we have different accounts of what the relationship between the interior and the exterior might Be - in some cases that the latter doesn’t count at all (for example, formalism), in others that it is heavily determining (for example, the social history of art) - in all such accounts our thinking has already posited or assumed the intelligibility of the concept of an object that exists in separation from that which .‘surrounds’ or can be brought to it. It is the legitimacy of this assumption that in their different ways, for example, Foucault in his discussion of the ‘objects of discourse,’ and Derrida in his discussion of the ‘parergon’ put into question.3 Both in effect show how that which we take or posit as ‘exterior’ to the object is a sine qua non of the object’s visibility and intelligibility to us; that which we take as contingently related to the object is necessarily related to it and in that respect not exterior to our conception of the object at all. 

To try and make this more concrete; and at the same time underscore its difference from modernist ideas, I want to look at one example of an argument in support of the autonomy of art works. 

The concept of the totally self-sufficient and/yet meaningful art work perhaps received its most rigorous articulation in American art practice and criticism of the Sixties, here I am thinking particularly of the criticism of Michael Fried and Don Judd.

Untitled 1974 by Don Judd, Plywood 36x60x60"

 Though at the time the latter thought himself to be marking out ground in opposition to Fried’s modernist notion of ‘presentness’ through his concept of ‘literalness,’ retrospectively the consensus is that he was working within a modernist paradigm.4 In his essay ‘Specific Objects,’ Judd elaborates on and secures our understanding of the particular nature of . the work he is promoting (in essence minimalist sculpture) through distinguishing it from what it is not: its ‘literalness’ is spelt out in terms of its being non-illusionistic, non-allusionistic, non-referential, non-representational, etc.5 ‘Literal’ is also used within the text to signify that the meaning of the object is given by or consists in just what is there: the obdurate thing, its materials, the simple relation of its parts, etc. These two uses are taken as equivalent or synonymous to underpin that ‘… only what can be seen is there ... What you see is what you see.’6 At first glance, in fact at several glances, given how long these ideas have had a currency in the art world, a convincing case seems to be made for the idea of an object that is totally self-sufficient and meaningful: it is self-referential, literally ‘just what it is,’ and declares that. 

That there is a problem lurking here can be brought out if we remind ourselves that there is a perfectly legitimate way of describing what we literally see when we look at a Judd work as a plywood box of certain dimensions with a recessed edge, or say in the case of an Andre, a pile of one hundred and twenty fire bricks in a certain arrangement. This is not of course what Judd means when he says of the object that it is literal, that its meaning is given by what is literally there, for Judd is not talking about objects that are (simply) plywood boxes or piles of bricks but about objects that are art. The difficulty is that in the sense in which being made of plywood is a literal property of the object, literally visible and amenable to sight (which is what the persuasiveness of the argument hangs on), it seems to me that the artness isn’t. If we see the plywood box, or see the pile of bricks but are unable to see the art, there is nothing more to see, there is no further literal property that we have overlooked that is going to make visible its artness. In order to ‘see’ the sculpture what we need is something that is precisely not given in the literal/visible properties of the object: we need a familiarity with other objects, values and knowledges,

Equivalent VIII 1968 by Carl Andre, Fire Bricks

only in relation to which do the ‘literal’ properties take on the meaning of art. One might say it is only because these relations are put into play within Judd’s text, (e.g. we know what it is for something to be’ ‘non-illusionistic’), but are not overtly acknowledged, that the idea of an object that has no relations and is meaningful gains any credence and seems to become intelligible to us. One might go further and say that though when we perceive the object (simply) as a physical object, a plywood box, the relations of which I speak are exterior to the object and contingent, in so far as the object is perceived and experienced as a work of art those relations are absolutely necessary; without them the object which is the object of art, the aesthetic would not come into being. In so far as that is persuasive, those relations are then not contingently related and exterior to the object but interior and constitutive of it.7 

In a large nutshell I am suggesting that theories of autonomy in relation to artworks are highly problematic if we accept a post-structuralist account of meaning. Despite the differences (that in this context I have chosen to ignore) between thinkers designated as poststructuralists, they have in common a shared acceptance of two of the fundamental propositions put forward by de Saussure, namely, that a sign comes into being qua sign, i.e., means, in virtue of its relation to and difference from other signs within a system; secondly, that the relationship between the elements of a sign, between a signifier and a signified is not natural and motivated but arbitrary and conventional. Though post-structuralists differ from Saussure and structuralists in their rejection of the weight that the latter give to the system, (‘langue’) as the object of study, they all have in common the belief that meaning is relational. Theories that meaning can be inherent, immanent or present in/to the sign are cast as untenable because they have misconstrued the logical conditions under which meaning can transpire.

A3. One educational implication of this seems to me to be for what has to be included within the ‘object of study’ when we are studying art objects. If, as was claimed above the ‘work of art’ as an ‘object of experience,’ or an ‘object of criticism’ only comes into being in its relations, then those relations are not contingent but (logically) necessary to both its ontological status and its meaning. If we allow that ‘theory’ can be taken as equivalent to having epistemological commitments or allegiances, (rather than overt theorising), then it follows that theory is always at work in the ‘work’ qua ‘work of art,’ or the ‘object’ qua ‘object of criticism.’ There is no ‘work of art’ without theory being at work, and no ‘object of criticism’ without theory. (To claim the former, it should be stressed, is not equivalent to claiming or implying that all art works are overtly ‘theoretical’ or concerned with their own ontological status). It would seem to me that theory therefore has to be included in an art education that is to give an understanding of and access to how works mean. 

Another implication of the above is that if something takes on the status of ‘art work’ and signifies meaning qua art work in virtue of its relations, then those relations are productive in generating that art work in its specificity - as that kind of object meaning this, e.g., Andre’s ‘Equivalence No 8.’ We need to reflect further on now these relations come to pass. Rather than see talking about art, writing about art, and the other modes through which we approach and present art to ourselves as in some way mediating or translating or making ‘available’ an anterior formed (and in respect of meaning ‘complete’) object, we have to acknowledge the performative aspects of our activities. In the acts of speaking, writing, presenting slides, hanging work we are placing or locating that on which we act, we are generating relations through which the art object in its specificity is produced. (One might say the artist does the same.)8 This seems to me unavoidable, the problem is that rarely in any of the areas in which art is engaged or studied is it presently acknowledged. (I’m sure we all could cite innumerable talks, lectures, exhibition guides, catalogues, journal articles, etc., wherein, under the guise of an exclusive concern to present the meaning of work, certain relations are taken as already in place but not ‘spoken’: that is, a ‘placing’ of the work for the student/reader/viewer is effected by presenting to the student/reader/viewer a work that has already been ‘placed’ in relation to a body of knowledge or theory.) What in part needs consideration and further examination is the possible ways in which relations can be generated and put in place if certain kinds of experience are to become available/accessible ... but at least as importantly, that in our making of claims about the meaning of works we disclose that it is always in relation to some body of knowledge that they are being made: that that knowledge is itself declared. 

It seems to me that art education, criticism, shows/exhibitions cannot themselves guarantee that certain experiences will happen, nor can they (ever) offer a definitive meaning of works; relations can always change both across time and different audiences. A defensible characterisation of education, criticism and exhibition culture has to recognise that conditionality, that though my not having an experience or not perceiving meanings posited by a particular critical practice can come about through my lack of awareness of the relations and knowledges that the practice aspires to put in place, equally they can come about through a refusal of those relations and knowledges in favour of my commitment to others. Embracing particular experiences and meanings in relation to an art work always involves embracing far more than is overtly on offer. Though art culture too often operates like a ‘Goodfella,’ if not on pain of death, at least of social exclusion, it doesn’t make an offer that can’t be refused.

On Sampling the Pleasures of Visual Culture: Postmodernism and Art - Part 2

B. High/low culture

B. The second thing I wanted to explore briefly is the purported collapse of the boundary between high and popular or mass culture, which is seen as a characteristic of postmodernism. 

B1. For example Jameson: 

The second feature of this list of postmodernism is-the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most noticeably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most, distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Readers Digest culture, in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates.9 

Or, for example, Lyotard when contrasting the effects of ideological prescriptions for culture under Stalinism and Fascism with that of recent capitalist culture, of the latter says: 

When power is that of capital and not that, of the party, the ‘transavantgardist' or ‘postmodern’ (in Jencks’s sense) solution proves to be-the better adapted to than the anti-modem solution. Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Parisian perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games. (It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the ‘taste’ of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public wallow together in the ‘anything goes’ and the epoch is one of slackening.10 

Where eclecticism and its incumbent ‘slackening’ is seen as art lowering itself into the value realm of the popular. 

Or finally Huyssen, where something of this purported change is intimated in the book’s title After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism, and further elaborated within: 

The postmodern sensibility of our time is different from both modernism and avantgardism precisely in that it raises the question of cultural tradition and conservation in the most fundamental way as an aesthetic and political issue ...my main point about contemporary postmodernism is that it operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art, in which the second terms are no longer automatically privileged over the first.11 

B2. From an art culture perspective, the above seems to be less true than is claimed. Though there is evidence that the relationship between some art culture and popular or mass culture has perhaps undergone a change, I can think of no recent work that engages with popular culture that presents itself or declares itself as anything other than art. It is situated in galleries and other art institutions, written about principally in art journals, (and when written about elsewhere - in style or fashion magazines - is always written about as art), and is made by people who pursue/demand recognition as artists. 

 As John Roberts has remarked in relation to Young British Artists: 

The new generation of British artists (with) their privileged exposure in the Eighties to the systematic incorporation of contemporary art theory and philosophy into art education have possibly been the first to recognise ... what was needed to move art onwards generationally. It would be mistaken to identify the new art and its fuck-you attitudinising with anything as simple-minded as the ‘depoliticisation’ of art. Despite much of the new art's unqualified regard for the voluptuous pleasures of popular culture (drug references and experiences and the arcana of tabloid TV being common denominators) it does not seek to assimilate itself to popular culture in fazed admiration.12 

What is perhaps different about much art that has had a high visibility in the past fifteen or so years is that it no longer seems to locate itself either in the position of critical opposition to or critical disengagement from popular culture, (or at least not in the sense that we are used to understanding that). That is, it seems to refuse the positions most commonly conceptualized within modernism (that of the Frankfurt School or of the Greenberg model) as to art’s relation to the popular. Not surprisingly in certain circles this has been perceived as the relinquishing of art’s radical heritage, of its absorption into the market (for example, on the one side by the likes of Kuspit and Gablik, on the other Buchloh). However, it is possible to give an alternative reading which suggests that what is being rejected or challenged is certain Modernists’ conception of popular or mass culture, i.e., certain concepts of art’s ‘other.’ This would be less to challenge that much mass culture is produced for the orchestration and regulation of needs and desires supportive of capitalism but that that culture is necessarily as unproblematically consumed as the accepted narratives have said. Here the difference might be seen in the shift between say the work of Burgin and Prince [Illustrations 3 and 4] and the respective ways in which they treat, and position, us in relation to the Marlboro images that they ‘represent.’ What in part at least seems to be at issue here is the idea that the commodification of an object precludes its having critical or radical effects. Or that the condition of being radical is dependent upon the eluding of the commodity form. Much art of the past fifteen or so years (and like many other recent preoccupations this can been seen as prefigured in Warhol’s work) seems to have rejected the modernist tenet that the commodity form can be eluded — i.e., to have relinquished that as a myth about art’s status — and begun its investigations from the basis of that not being the case.

US 77 (one of 12 panels) by Victor Burgin, 40 x 60", 1977

Untitled Cowboys, 1968, by Richard Prince

More profoundly perhaps, much art can be read as either interrogating or rejecting the grounds on which the distinction between art objects and the objects of popular culture within modernism are made. From a certain perspective again this might be read as the collapse of distinctions or difference, (by those with an allegiance to modernism), but from elsewhere it can be read as an exploration or examination of where the grounds for that distinction are to be located. Koons’ and Steinbach’s work, for example - again, neither of whom would see themselves as other than artists - could be seen as addressing the social constructedness of those distinctions, as locating them not as an intrinsic, immanent quality of the object/work itself, as would be narrated within or assumed by modernist epistemology, but rather as in the relations between the objects and the discursive and institutional realms within which they are placed and circulated.13 

It is perhaps here that the two issues with which this paper started begin to interconnect. Not, as it may sound, because I want to suggest that many recent works can be read as illustrations or embodiments of post-structuralist theory, but rather because if read in relation to post-structuralist theory the works appear less as backsliding or inadequate than intelligible as rejecting or challenging modernist assumptions. In so far as postmodernism can be understood as involving an epistemological shift from modernism, to that degree can the works be designated as postmodern. (In fact there is evidence that many of the artists who became visible in the 80s e.g., Kruger, Prince, Steinbach, Salle, Sherman had a familiarity with recent theory.)

New Shelton Wet/Dry Double-decker, 1981, by Jeff Koons

Security and Serenity by Haim Steinbach

Of course, it's not just post- structuralists that have overtly theorised the issue of demarcating art and accounted for it as other than in the object. Despite their mutual recriminations, Danto, 14 and Bourdieu 15 have enough in common with each other and with what I am trying to suggest that they could have i been recruited to give some support. 

In short, I am trying to suggest that the implications of present theory around art, and the present practice of art are not that the boundaries within the culture have collapsed (though for some both the theory and the practice are perceived to have such implications, e.g., Herwitz on Danto: ‘the concept of pictorial object reduces to the concept of a mere conventional sign in the theoretical commerce of the world, to be variously interpreted at will,’ 16 or, for example Modern Painters or Giles Auty or Brian Sewell on practice), but rather in theory and in practice the grounds for making that distinction have been relocated. This seems to me to have implications for art education: 

First, we cannot assume that an understanding of and the experiencing of the pleasures of art culture can be privileged above an understanding of and the pleasures of other aspects of (visual) culture. Of the possible reactions to this perhaps the most obvious are: we should study visual culture rather than art or that we should study art but have to justify it on grounds other than its inherent superiority. If nothing else it suggests an area that requires further address. 

Secondly, despite what Herwitz says (above), the position argued here doesn’t mean that what we call interpretation can happen at will. Rather in order for something to count as an ‘interpretation’ already positions it as intelligible in relation to an established body/field of knowledge. To become a member of that ‘interpretive community,’ [Fish] one has to be an initiate to that knowledge. In effect every time we ‘read’ something we are privileging certain knowledges, which means there are also always (some group’s) values at work. I have tried to suggest that presently this is more often than not in denial in art cultural practice — what is presently covert should be made overt. 

Thirdly, we might say that, to an extent, different knowledges are put into play in approaching art works, (from within art culture) than are put into play in our approaching the works of popular culture. (This is not to suggest a rigid mutual exclusivity, or even anything as rigid as sometimes Bourdieu seems to be suggesting - popular cultural objects often draw upon and play with knowledges from art culture and vice-versa, but rather that to perceive something qua art object necessitates certain knowledges of the ‘field’). Within what I am trying to argue about the postmodern, differences are acknowledged (the distinction has not been effaced). What has been relinquished is the assumption of a hierarchy in that difference. (For example, Koons on the fetishisation of ‘newness’ in the art world and in commodity culture in the New Show). 

An argument for Art Education could be one for getting certain knowledges (i.e., those different from the better circulated knowledges necessary for an understanding of the popular) circulated in order that the meanings of art culture can be assessed and its pleasures embraced or rejected from a position of choice. As I suggested above, experiences can’t be guaranteed to happen. Though I’m no longer confident of the superiority of art culture’s pleasures over other pleasures, they are pleasures that I would not want to do without. If nothing else, art culture certainly enhances the range of pleasures available to us - given the condition under which many of us have to live our lives that seems no bad thing.  

Notes and References

 1.        Jameson, F. [1984] ‘Postmodernism: Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ New Left Review, 146, July/August.
 2.        Huyssen, A [1986] ‘Mapping the Postmodern’ in After the Great Divide. Macmillan, p. 209.
 3.        Foucault, M. [1974] The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock Publications, pp. 40-9; Derrida, J. [1987] The Truth in Painting. (Tians. Bennington and McLeod), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See particularly pp. 60-1.
 4.        See for example, Krauss, R. [1977] Passages in Modem Sculpture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and Foster, H. [1986] The Crux of Minimalism, in Individuals: a Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945-1986, Los Angeles: MOCA
 5.        Judd, D. [1965] ‘Specific Objects’ in Arts Yearbook No 8. Reprinted in Don Judd [1975] Complete Writings 1959-1975. Press of Nova Scotia College, and New York Press.
 6.        Stella, F. [1966] in ‘Questions of Stella and Judd,’ Bruce Glaser,^News, September. Reprinted in Battcock, G. [1968] Minimal Art: a critical reader. Dutton and Co. NY, p. 158.
 7.        For a more detailed and thorough examination of Derrida’s ideas and their implications for our understanding of ‘art objects’ see my, ‘Derrida and the Parergon’ in Smith, P. and Wilde, C. (eds.) [2002] A Companion to Art Theory. Oxford: Blackwells.
8.         This is not to deny artistic agency but rather to suggest that it cannot itself be understood in separation from ‘theory’: that the notion of an agency or intention that is ‘artistic’ is not intelligible in separation from particular relations.
 9.        Jameson F. [1985] ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Foster H. (ed.) Postmodern Culture. Pluto Press, p. 112.
 10.      Lyotard J-F. ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ in Lyotard J-F. [1979/84] The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press, p. 76.
 11.      Huyssen A. [1988] After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass culture and Postmodernism. Macmillan, p. 217.
 12.      Roberts J. [1996] ‘Mad for it. Philistinism, the Everyday, and New British Art,’ Third Text, 35, summer (my emphasis).
 13.      For more substantial support see my, ‘Signs of the Times: Sculpture as Non-Specific Objects: the work of Koons and SteinbachArt Monthly. No 138. July/Aug 1990.
 14.      Danto, A. [1981] The Transfiguration of the Common Place. Harvard University Press.
 15.      Bourdieu, R [1993] The Field of Cultural Production. Polity Press. In relation to Danto, see especially ‘The Historical Genesis of the Pure Aesthetic.’
 16.      Herwitz, D. [1993] Making Theory Constructing Art. University of Chicago, p. 203.