In the "loose association of thinkers" known as poststructuralists, which theorists challenged the Modernist notion of originality and artistic genius? How does Cindy Sherman's work become part of this challenge to one of the tenets of Modern art? Due Monday, October 15th
Much of Modernist theory dwells upon the novelty of an artist’s work and his originality in form and concept. However, in the Postmodernist age, artists challenge this idea in a variety of ways. While Modernists established art as a “high” form of culture separate from “lower culture,” Postmodernists disbanded this wall. They understood the interconnectedness of society and art, allowing for cultural icons and images to infiltrate their works. Pop Artists like Andy Warhol often used mass-produced images, which many considered unoriginal works, as a source of his artistic inspiration. In this way of fusing art and society, Critical Theorists praised arts’ ability to critique culture. These theorists felt social commentary through visual works was a way of benefiting society and resisting totalitarianism. Further, while Modernist artists were praised for separating themselves from the “lives” of their works and creating “Art for Art’s Sake,” Postmodernists attempted to inject their own sense of self and development into their works. This may be a concept connected to post structuralism, which rejected the idea that one is trapped within invisible social boundaries. Rather, art allowed one to escape aesthetically from their social conditions, and preserve their story for future generations.
ReplyDeleteCindy Sherman’s work certainly falls under the umbrella of Postmodernism. Sherman infuses social critique and self-development in all of her works. Her portraits tell the story of the subject and transmit an emotional reaction to the viewer, regardless of the fact that guised Sherman is the subject of every photograph. The characters within her works are often social stereotypes, allowing for commentary to occur. Despite the fact that she is the subject of each picture, Sherman does not name her works to allow the viewer to interject his or her own views on the social issue. In regards to originality, Sherman’s medium is digital photography— a technology that can be mass-produced and leaves no original print. Overall, Sherman’s works are fine examples of Postmodernism in contemporary society.
Poststructuralism argues heavily against the cult of originality and the elevation of the artist that the Modernist movement propagated. Philosopher Julia Kristeva is a supporter of the theory that “every text is an intertextual mosaic of quotations drawn from other texts” (Barrett 167). This theory dethrones the artist as genius as it shifts the “attribution of meaning…from the author to the reader, who puts together a network of relations from other texts” (167). Poststructuralist art asks questions of the viewer about the meaning of a work, therefore elevating both viewer and meaning above the artist. While many questions are raised regarding the meaning, Poststructuralist art also accounts for multiple answers and, unlike Modernism, does not believe in one universal truth. In this way Poststructuralist art works to deeply ingrain itself in everyday life by making art accessible and its meanings applicable.
ReplyDeleteCindy Sherman’s works of photography fit into this Poststructuralist theory by undermining the theory of “the artist as genius.” In direct opposition to this idea, Sherman’s works shroud the true identity of the artist. Sherman appears in every one of her works but is hidden beneath layers of costume, makeup, and digital manipulation. Her appearance is altered to such a degree that the real Cindy Sherman has the ability to go about unnoticed in everyday life. Her works provide her with an anonymity that would be unheard of in a Modernist realm. Sherman also subverts the cult of originality by appropriating personas and stereotypes to personify in her works. Sherman mentioned in the Art21 video a vague sense of recognition that the viewer experiences when viewing her works and that is entirely due to her borrowing from a wealth of pop culture references in order to create her works. Cindy Sherman defies the cult of originality as well as the idea of “artist as genius” in her photographs and in doing so, presents herself as a postmodern artist.
Structuralists reject any ultimate, foundational grounds beneath meaning. They believe they can find eternal global truths behind all “texts”; poststructuralists believe that we are limited by our own area of inquiry and cannot and should not attempt an explanation of everything.
ReplyDeleteI agree with David that Postmodernists abandoned a wall of established art. That they, “Understand the inconnectedness of society and art, allowing for cultural icons and images to infiltrate their work.” David said, “These theorists felt social commentary through visual works was a way of benefiting society and resisting totalitarianism.” These artists took themselves into their work, allowing their own sense of artistic development.
Barrett said, “One of the mist influential themes relevant to all life and to art provided by Nietzsche is a distinction he arrived at while investigating Greek tragedy: the Apollonian and the Dionysian.”
Nietzsche advocated actively seeing and interpreting, embraced ambiguity and engaged in hidden depths of a work of art. “The essence of aesthetic doing and seeing for Nietzsche is willful transfiguration and transformation toward perfection.”
Foucault was especially known for linking power, knowledge and body.
Derrida said, “A concept is interrelated with binary oppositions is what he calls the false notions of “the metaphysics of presence”- the myth that things have meaning before we put language to them.”
I agree with Derrida account of meaning and familiarity style to structuralism.
Cindy Sherman’s work is about finding something that anyone can relate to without knowing about contemporary art. Her issue was not in the quality, rather, the idea. She made her images seem seductive from a distance. She made them colorful, juicy and disarming. She had achieved to make something you were looking at appear completely the opposite, thus attaining the sublime. Sherman said, “I don’t want to have to explain myself… I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about stuff.” Her work seems very intuitive, yet I get the impression she doesn’t know where it came from.
Sherman feels that she is an artist because of her visual assertions, like femininity, is a construct rather than something innate or natural, and these pictorial assertions parallel Poststructuralist and Postmodern theory, which make similar claims. Sherman’s work is already “pre-coded” and there need be any negations with its harmony.
Peter
As Peter mentioned, the theories of Friedrich Nietzche are essential to Poststructuralism, especially the distinction he made between the Apollonian and the Dionysian when studying Greek tragedy. As Barrett explained, the Apollonian "represents order, clearly marked borders, and static beauty" while the Dionsyian "embraces ambiguity, content beneath the visible surface, and messy complexity" that requires more than a glance (pg 162). Modernists are aligned with the Apollonian in that they believe the aesthetic experience is apart from life's complexity and can result in a single, defined truth. Alternately, poststructuralists take from the Dionsyian and strongly resist universal truths, which allows for ambiguity and complex meanings beneath the formal qualities of art.
ReplyDeleteBecause Modernism is based upon ideals of the Enlightenment and rejects the influence of everyday life on the aesthetic experience, Modernists strongly believe in the individual originality of the work. Poststructuralists, in rejecting defined borders and answers, believe no art is original and is shaped by existing works. The works of Cindy Sherman exemplify this Poststructuralist thought. In her earliest works, she was hugely inspired by films, so she created photographs that looked like they were mass-produced stills of movie scenes. Her current works continue this concept in that they depict people who do not actually exist but portray a certain type of person who could potentially exist. These "fake" personas are transformations of herself and are influenced by connections to the real world. Glancing at a photograph can reveal one interpretation, but if the viewer looks beneath the surface, he or she can see an array of connections and create a million different responses to the composition.
Post-structuralism challenge the Modernist notion of originality and artistic genius by its resistance to the idea that there is one single Truth and that like language, art is a matter of “reading them in light of other texts, people, obsessions, and bits of information, or what have you, and then seeing what happens.” There is no absolute truth because “realities are relative and dependent on the parties involved and their interests”. For Poststructuralists, artist are not the ultimate authority, and the viewer plays a role in interpreting the art and developing meaning, based on their own experience and knowledge of other works. Originality is lost since artist use themes, process, etc. that has been done before.
ReplyDeleteCindy Sherman is an example of a postmodern artist. Sherman’s self-portraits “capture her dressed in the role of another person but are not really about her or any other real person.” There is no single Truth to Sherman’s work but rather invites the viewer to use their own experiences and culture to draw meaning from her work. Sherman also uses postmodern processes like appropriation, collage, bricollage, and pastiche in her works that challenges the notion of originality. Sherman uses appropriation and pastiche to create art that “anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art” and to critique culture and society. I also agree with David’s point that Sherman’s medium of digital photography also challenges modernism since it lacks an “original print” and can be reproduced over and over. Sherman challenges many of modernisms tenets and yet creates easily accessible and captivating works.
John Morss explains the separation of post-structuralist and structuralists the best: “Post-structuralism is a movement that engulfs rather than supplants or defeats Structuralism (150).” He goes on to use an analogy that if the structuralism is like the starts- the truths that we know- then post-structuralism is the space orbiter that shows everything from a perspective we would have never saw before—the rejection of holistic truths--.
ReplyDeleteCindy Sherman’s work does separate away from modern art because of the intrinsic nature of a subtraction of self in her work. Clareese points out that Sherman is a model or somehow in many of her works, but is covered and hidden by layers and layers of costuming and manipulation. For Sherman, it’s not about the ‘self’, it’s about the characters that she shows. She takes away the truth of herself, the ego, to show and lift up the ideas of different people, even if they come from imagination.
Cindy Sherman is known for producing what could be considered "self-portraits" of herself, in different guises for each series. Though her work is predominantly photographed, she considers herself more of a performing artist than a photographer. This is due largely in part to the dramatic changes she makes to her physique in order to capture the image she desires to portray, as well as the various roles she assumes in the process of creating her artwork. Sherman's style of artwork is very unique, especially in the way she is able to manipulate herself in such intriguing ways in order to generate a reaction from the audience. Reactions varied according to how the viewer connected to the persona of the series, but one critic described a particular series of her work to "contradict the glamour of Hollywood they evoked." (pg. 185) In this situation, Sherman had created a series depicting Hollywood stereotypes (plastic surgery, etc). Some viewers see this work as humorous and appreciate her interpretation of this particular group of people. On the other hand, a woman viewing this artwork who fits this stereotype may take offense to the exaggerations given in order to best represent this group of women while emphasizing their distinctive qualities. For this reason, the interpretation of the artwork is entirely up to the viewer, classifying Sherman as a poststructural artist.
ReplyDeletePost modernism is considered an “umbrella topic” to which many disciplines fall underneath. It’s primary concern is making aesthetics more central to the mainstream issues of life. Similarly to poststructuralist, there is a lack of clarity. As previously mentioned, Nietzsche had some interesting ideas on post modernists and poststructuralists. He believed in the Apollonian and Dionysian. The Apollonian was concerned with order, and clearly marked borders and used static beauty, whereas the Dionysian was about the collapse of borders, including frenzy and excess. He embraces ambiguity as well. I agree with Nicole that Modernists tend to represent the Apollonian and poststructuralists draw from Dionysian.
ReplyDeletePoststructuralists pose questions about meaning, and resists any one singular answer. They resist “universal truths” and recognize that we cannot explain everything. Poststructuralist art asks questions of the viewer to engage them in the image. Since they did not want clarity, they allowed multiple answers to these questions asked of the viewer. They do not want clarity, and embrace diversity and pluralism. Poststructuralists challenged and collapsed the boundaries that were important to modernists.
Whereas postmodernists thought that beauty was not part of the equation, modernists believed that beauty “transcends the natural world”. While modernists focused on originality of thought and expression, postmodernists believed in appropriation of images, meaning they would borrow things from previous images, etc.
Theorists such as Jean-Francois Lyotard believed that postmodern art was meant to disorient the viewer, blur the boundaries of discourse, and challenge the normative by the singularity of a work of art. He believes in “the sublime” but counters the established rules and breaks them with consensus.
Sherman’s work fits right in with this postmodern/ poststructuralist regime. Although in her earlier works, she worked with film stills now she chooses to take portraits of “stereotypes”, mostly gender. She takes on a persona and poses in several of her portraits. Some are so realistic, they look painterly. There is no single truth in Sherman’s work, more left open to the interpretation of the viewer, which is a postmodern feat. In addition, when working and constructing her characters, she has no preconceived notion of what the character should be, and along the same lines does not title her work, to leave some ambiguity. This goes back to the interaction of the work and the viewer and the questions asked of the viewer.
-Abie
Poststructuralism is an "approach to study that freely mixes many disciplines...and rejects any ultimate, foundational grounds beneath meaning" (164). It is part of the larger umbrella of postmodernism, and is characterized for stressing "difference" in art and viewing everything in life as a "work in process"--never whole, never finished. Famous poststructural theorists include Jacques Lacan, Michael Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida, who challenged the modernist notion of originality and artistic genius. Derrida was the most influential philosopher of the crew because he founded "deconstructionism," a theory which challenged to "deconstruct" the gender, racial, economic, and cultural biases that infect our histories, and has greatly influenced modern day artists like Cindy Sherman.
ReplyDelete"One of the most successful and influential artists of our time," Cindy Sherman has been greatly influenced by Derrida's theory. Classified under the "Feminist" umbrella, Shermans work is a mixture of photography and performance artwork that attempts to deconstruct the gender and social biases that infect American society. By recreating her identity (dressing up in costume and satirically mocking people in different social settings) Sherman becomes “a fictional creature composed of fictions” and points out that “femininity is a construct rather than something innate” (185-188). Her work fits nicely into the poststructuralist umbrella because of this, its deconstructive qualities, and the medium through which it is portrayed.
As others have stated, Post Structuralism broke away from modernism by stripping away "any ultimate, foundational grounds beneath meaning," and disbanding the cult of originality and artistic genius. Post Structuralists valued asking questions and believed that there were no universal truths in life. While modernists valued originality, the post structuralists believed that originality was unachievable because everything in life is re-appropriated from something else. As Julia Kristeva stated, “every text is an intertextual mosaic of quotations drawn from other texts." Post structuralists believe this idea can be applied to every aspect of life. While modernists stripped away deeper meanings and content from their art, post structuralists strived to create open ended works which each new viewer brings new meaning to through their own interpretations.
ReplyDeleteCindy Sherman's photographs portray different feminine stereotypes that can be found throughout American society. By using the medium of digital photography, she is eliminating the modernist idea of originality due to the reproductive nature of the medium. By playing into the ambiguity of the different stereotypes she depicts, Sherman is inviting the viewer to interpret her works for themselves rather than being coached into one specific meaning. Any viewer can take their own life experiences and reflect them onto her works with an unlimited number of different interpretations as a result.