Postmodernism, a concept frequently employed by artists, intellectuals, and academics internationally, refers to what they identified as the dominant cultural tendencies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In contemporary usage, the prefix “post” indicates not only “after” but also “contrary to,” or even “anti.”
The three art movements most relevant to the concept of postmodernism are
architecture,
dance, and fine art (
painting,
sculpture, and
photography). Postmodern architecture emerged in the late 1950s in opposition to the austerity of modern architecture, as in the work of Le Corbusier. It heralded a return to ornamentation, expression, and allusion to previous architectural styles, as evident in the work of Michael Graves. Postmodern dance, which arose in
New York City in the early 1960s under the leadership of figures like Yvonne Rainer, attempted to dissolve the distinction between dance and ordinary movement; its nemesis was modern dance, as practiced by choreographers like Martha
Graham. Postmodernist fine art had become a consolidated movement by the late 1970s. It was expressly opposed to the aestheticism of high modernist art, as explicated by the critic Clement Greenburg, and to minimalism. Like postmodern dance, postmodernist fine art sought to dissolve rigid distinctions between art and everyday life, while, like postmodern architecture, it employed techniques of allusion, juxtaposition, and ironic distance, as exemplified by the work of Cindy Sherman. Often politicized, postmodernist fine art was frequently said to be in the service of interrogating or deconstructing the symbolic and representational practices of capitalist society.
The emphasis on the topic of representation provides a major link between postmodern artistic practice and
philosophy. Poststructuralist theorists, like Jean Baudrillard and Jean‐François Lyotard, became important touchstones for discussion of postmodernism because of their emphasis on representation. According to Baurillard, the postmodern epoch is marked by a tendency for simulation (symbols without reference) to predominate. Lyotard, on the other hand, focusing on narrative as a mode of representation, argued that the late twentieth century can be characterized by its suspicion of meta‐narratives (world‐historical narratives after the fashion of Hegel and Marx). In this, Lyotard recalled the nineteenth‐century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, in many ways philosophical postmodernism, inclining to often extreme forms of relativism, owed its major intellectual debt to Nietzsche.
The concept of postmodernism was broadly influential in the 1980s and early 1990s. Though this influence was most pronounced among literary critics and art critics, it extended to the social sciences, cultural studies, and philosophy. Because postmodernism is associated with a suspicion of meta‐narratives, intellectual tendencies such as post‐structuralism, relativism and
pragmatism have been labeled postmodernist. For this reason, some consider the American thinker Richard
Rorty to belong to the postmodern camp.
See also
Abstract Expressionism;
Capitalism;
Modernist Culture;
Post–Cold War Era.
Bibliography
Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991.
Hans Bertans , The Idea of Postmodernism: A History, 1995.
Noël Carroll , The Concept of Postmodernism from a Philosophical Point of View, in International Postmodernism, ed. Hans Bertans and Douwe Fokkema, 1997, 89–102.
Noël Carroll
