Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition”

1. The Field: Knowledge in Computerised Societies

2. The Problem: Legitimation

3. The Method: Language Games

4. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Modern Alternative

5. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective

Structuralism

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916)

"individual units of any have meaning only by virtue of their relations to one another" (i.e., structure)

• as long as structure remains intact, individual units are replaceable

• content is separate from form

• the "signifier": C-A-T (the word) , and the "signified": the word’s meaning, i.e., cat, the actual animal

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966)

• Underlying various myths are constant, universal structures to which all myths can be reduced

• The relationships of these "universal structures" are inherent in the human mind; these structures are not rooted in the individual but express a collective consciousness

Therefore, "Meaning was neither a private experience nor a divinely ordained occurrence: it was the product of certain shared systems of signification... Reality was not reflected by language but produced by..."

[from Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp.107-108.]

Post-Structuralism

Philosopher Jacques Derrida

• Meaning is not inherent in nor particular to specific signs(i.e., a signifier does not always imply a constant, unchanging signified)

• Signs must be repeatable and reproducible--this is not possible because context always changes

• The problem of representation: meaning is an illusion

Deconstruction

critical examination of a text that exposes the inherent contradictions within it, e.g., male-female, exposing its meaning as an illusion

Critic Roland Barthes

Movement from “work” to “text” (structuralist to post-structuralist, modernist to postmodernist): from a closed entity with definite meaning to an open reading with infinite possibilities of meaning but no singular, essential one

A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1989)

A crisis of representation

Representation:“the system of interlinked ideas, symbols, and beliefs bywhich a culture ... seeks to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetoric, ritual, and assumptions through whichsociety coerces, persuades, and coheres.”

Jacob Bercovitch in Frederick Crews, “Whose American Renaissance,” New York Times Book Review, 1988.

“What is consumed is the object not in its materiality, but in its difference--i.e., the object as sign.”Baudrillard, quoted in Singerman

“The exhibition focuses on the central artistic issue or “crisis” of our time: the meaning of art in a media- and consumer-influenced era, and the meaning of representation within this art.”Richard KoshalekDirector, MOCA (Los Angeles)1989

“...the important thing to me is that my works appeal to the feelings of individuals, not the art audience’s notion of art. I really don’t make my works for the glory of art or my own glory, but for the glory of the feeling self.”Julian Schnabel,in an interview with Donald Kuspit (1987)

“I don’t know what propaganda means anymore... we are talking about America and you have to think what that word, ‘propaganda’ means. Is Peter Jennings propaganda? I mean, how do words and pictures work? How do they influence people?”

Barbara Kruger

“It’s not like I’m method acting or anything. I don’t feel that I am that person. I may be thinking a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her. There’s this distance. The image in the mirror becomes her--the image the camera gets on film. And the one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.”

Cindy Sherman

AK: How do you explore photography's ability to be both truthful and false?

LS: I'm not interested in the truthful part, that's why I don't take my camera out on the street. When I first started shooting black-and-white dollhouse interiors in the mid-'70s, the camera's ability to document yet lie was decidedly the more radical path. I remember seeing Gordon Matta-Clark's snapshots of the interiors of the houses he'd sliced apart. I loved the feeling I got from them. I wanted to mimic that rawness and sense of nowhere. I actually thought my pictures could replicate that emotional veracity, though what and where they were could remain ambiguous. I used to love the story--before it was made into a movie--of the little girls who convinced people that fairies were real by showing them doctored photographs.

“A network of issues has surfaced that connects the artists represented in this exhibition, including: the role of originality and authorship in the production of meaning; the impact of the mass media on the individual; the investigation of truth, reality, and fiction in representation; the position of art in the art market; and the artist as a self-conscious producer of commodities.”

Ann GoldsteinAssistant Curator

“If rape or arson, poison or the knife, has wove not pleasing patterns in the stuff of this drab canvas we accept as life--it is because we are not so bold enough.”

Charles Baudelaire

“More ‘Human’ than Human is our motto.”