The October Century

Historein 5, 2005

This course surveys European and American art after 1945. Through the course we will examine the rise and decline of modernist abstraction and the introduction of new ideas and new media into artistic practice. Artists after World War II begin to open up the concept of the work of art to include ephemeral and site-specific performances, events, and installations, and we will chart these developments historically in order to locate genealogical sources for the work of artists in the contemporary moment.

The State of Art Criticism, 2008

Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation (vol. 31, numbers 1-2)

If communication, reportage, description, and judgment are key elements of the receptive role played by art-critical publications, it’s important to acknowledge on specific occasions such journals also have a productive mediatory function, too. They don’t merely disseminate as if passively a pre-given situation, but may actively construct that situation, define its infrastructure and parameters, and do so whilst under the guise of reportage. In these cases art criticism becomes a dialectic of reception and production, both constituted by and constituting its objects of study. This paper analyses the early years of the influential art journal October according to the thematic indicated above. Beginning in 1976, October established itself as arguably the foremost art-critical voice of a burgeoning postmodernism. Significant essays published between 1976-1981 on the index, the expanded field of sculpture, allegory, and photography served as trajectories leading to a deeper understanding of postmodernism and an emergent generation of artists sceptical of their late-modernist inheritance. However, this paper contends that October didn’t merely report and analyse then-recent cultural developments, but actively contributed and constituted those developments through a dialogical relationship between critics and artists. Therefore suggesting that any critical-historical reappraisal of postmodernism would be incomplete without apprehending October’s collaboration with artists in moving beyond late-modernism, this paper aims to demonstrate that much of our contemporary sense of what comprises postmodernism for the visual arts is fundamentally rooted in the intellectual positions advanced by October during 1976-1981. It shall, then, succinctly explicate key arguments vis-à-vis postmodernism established within the journal’s pages, thereby presenting the capability of the art press to intermingle the reception and production of emergent cultural hegemonies.

2020

We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With this call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing the change from the modern to the postmodern selfconception of man, which has been described by philosophy since the 1950s to today. This special issue thus demonstrates how architects, designers and artists have reacted to the new socio-politically relevant concepts of postmodernism with a new kind of flatness, diversity and ambiguity in contrast to the identitarian concepts of modernism. What is striking is that the new designs were hardly understood and the reactions to them were characterized by a certain blurriness and uncertainty, which ultimately culminated in the winged term “anything goes.” Yet even today, adherence to this negatively evaluated dictum actually hides the critical aspects of postmodern philosophy and the arts’ reactions to it, which recognized the limitation of individuality through socio-political paternalism and found an answer first in the rejection, then in the diversification of the individual. It was not until the 1990s that the critical and ethically relevant aspects that challenged active engagement with social constraints began to gain importance in the arts. Against the background of the ambivalent history of postmodernism in the visual arts, the uncertainty in dealing with their designs was already evident in the very prominent exhibition on contemporary architecture at the MoMA in New York in 1988, which was organized by Philip Johnson. It could not really explain what was actually meant by “Deconstructivist Architecture,” as Simone Kraft makes clear. It is Arianna Fantuzzi who shows the neuralgic point of the transition from modernism to postmodernism by comparing self-portraits of artists from the 1990s. With the variety of possible roles that each person can adopt, the designs of postmodernism are thus characterized by the withdrawal of a unique identity. This phenomenon can also be described as Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen does in his historical overview, stating that after an affirmative opportunistic attitude toward sign systems in the 1980s, the arts only took on critical traits in the 1990s. In other words, as soon as the challenge was taken up to find its own, more critical path against paternalistic social standards, the situation changed. In line with this critical approach, Anna Kristensson argues that designers have a duty to choose an open and fair course toward the users, not to manipulate them in the interest of sales, and customers must face the reality of aesthetics and not be misled by supposedly clear advertising. It is Iris Laner, in her examination of postmodern theory and the work of Jeff Wall, who shows how alternative perspectives on our world are tested – permeable to the viewer, not only through the aesthetic, but also through epistemological and ethical gravity. Finally, I expressed myself in a similar way. The possibility of deconstructing our conventional understanding of reality, as postmodern theory made clear and as the artist Karin Kneffel shows, opens the possibility of freeing us from social pre-determinations. The magazine’s editor-in-chief also wrote an essay on the changing world of the arts and Jeff Koons. To conclude, this special issue on postmodernism clearly shows that in the long run, postmodernism Illustrates a completely new view of the world and our being in it. We can no longer hide behind predetermined standardizations. Thus, with the term “anything goes,” postmodernism opens a path of liberation from supposedly individual, but socially normed standards. In a new way, we are all called upon to consider not only our own share in shaping reality, but also that of the stakeholders, and to assume responsibility. Martina Sauer Senior Editor

Published in 1998 in the journal Criticism, a review of Paul Crowther's The Language of 20th Century Art: A Conceptual History

The conceptualised period of 'Modernism' and its impression within the Art-world, is understood to be typified by the rejection of tradition (English and Quin 2009). This concept of 'stepping outside' of traditional style, pre-established artistic movements, and previous techniques – consequently contributed to the development of this period, as acknowledged by artists, historians, and scholars alike. 'Modernism', as considered in contemporary-discussion, owes in great part to its artistic-predecessors and 'traditional masters'. This essay will provide and in-depth analysis of six European artistic-works created between 1860 and 1935; the period in which Modernism, and various movements and sub-movements (that will be discussed), originated.

modernism/modernity, Vol. 22, No. 2

Outlines a new, two-stage history of modernism, linked to a transition between 'heavy' and 'light' phases of modernity.