Postmodernism - A Very Short Introduction

Carl Andre’s rectangular pile of bricks, Equivalent VIII (1966), annoyed lots of people when shown at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1976. It is a typically postmodernist object. Now re-enshrined in the Tate Modern, it doesn’t resemble much in the canon of modernist sculpture. It is not formally complex or expressive, or particularly engaging to look at, indeed it can soon be boring. It is easy to repeat. Lacking any features to sustain interest in itself (except perhaps to Pythagorean number mystics) it inspires us to ask questions about its context rather than its content: ‘What is the point of this?’, or ‘Why is this displayed in a museum?’ Some theory about the work has to be brought in to fill the vacuum of interest, and this is also fairly typical. It might inspire the question ‘Is it really art, or just a heap of bricks pretending to be art?’ But this is not a question that makes much sense in the postmodernist era, in which it seems to be generally accepted that it is the institution of the gallery, rather than anything else, which has made it, de facto, a ‘work of art’. The visual arts just are what museum curators show us, from Picasso to slicedup cows, and it is up to us to keep up with the ideas surrounding these works. List of illustrations viii 1 The rise of postmodernism 1 2 New ways of seeing the world 13 3 Politics and identity 44 4 The culture of postmodernism 62 5 The ‘postmodern condition’ 110 References 129 Further reading 133 Index 135 حق تکثیر: انتشار در حریم عمومی اینترنت.