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.