The Post Lecture Wednesday, 3/28

What is postmodern art?

When did this post thing

happen?

• Just like there are

many answers to the

question “When did

we become

modern?” there are

many answers to the

question “When did

we become

postmodern?”

When did this post thing

happen?

• Answer #1: Modernity

and its associated values

were discredited by World

War II, and postmodern

theatre begins with the

postwar plays of the

Existentialists and the

Absurdists—Camus,

Jean-Paul Sartre,

Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter.

When did this post thing

happen?

• Answer #2: Modernity gives way to postmodernity in the 1960s and „70s, when television fundamentally alters how people perceive the world and allows the values of market capitalism to permeate every aspect of our lives. In this version, theatre becomes postmodern when commercial theatre absorbs all of the “revolutionary” innovations of the modernist avant-garde and commodifies them.

When did this post thing

happen?

• Answer #3: The themes and forms that we associate with “postmodernism” are nearly as old as modernism itself. Postmodern drama is not “what drama became after the end of modernism” but drama that casts the same critical gaze on modernism that modernism itself cast on 19th-Century values. In this model, the first postmodernists included Oscar Wilde and Alfred Jarry.

The Post-Chart

Modern Postmodern

Culture divided into “high” and

“low”/ “Inside” and “outside.”

A “marketplace” in which all

forms of cultural expression are

equal.

Purity and Identity Mixture and Difference

Prophecy Irony

Art as original creation Art as rearrangement or

recoding of familiar materials

The Revolutionary Says:

“Religion and tradition are

tyrannical illusions—but reason

will save us!”

The Revolutionary Says:

“Reason itself is a tyrannical

illusion—but pluralism might

save us.”

The Critic Asks: “Should art

imitate life?”

The Critic Asks: “Are art and

life actually different things?”

What makes postmodern

theater postmodern?

• Pop culture is placed on equal footing with “highbrow” art. The trashy, campy, and kitschy aspects of culture are major source materials.

• Texts and performers defy high-brow expectations regarding what “good theatre” and “good acting” look like.

• Plays awkwardly fuse together multiple forms and styles instead of being clean and unified.

• More often than in Modernism, performance texts are created collectively or through other alternative composition processes.

• Major thematic interests include simulation and simulacra; uncertainty and relativism;

They say, "you mean it's just sounds?" thinking that for

something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love

sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be

anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be

psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a

bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another

sound. I just want it to be a sound.

--John Cage, experimental composer and performer

Beckett as a Postmodern

Playwright

Well, that passed the time.

It would have passed

in any case.

Thompson as a

Postmodern Playwright

“You don‟t even know who I lookin like!”

The Postmodern and the

Postcolonial

Postdrama

• “Postdramatic” = a term, currently popular in continental Europe, used to describe theater that shifts the focus of theatre away from drama (that is, stories told mainly through dialogue and focused on conflicts between characters) and toward other components of theatrical experience.