The Brooklyn Rail

Postmodernism wasn’t an artistic movement, style, or logic. It was a marketing campaign. To paraphrase the philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, “we have never been postmodern.” We have, however, been modern; and to our peril, we still are.

The political, economic, and cultural markers of modernity are:

1. A consolidated and bureaucratized nation-state, either democratic or authoritarian. Politics is communicated by enterprises (usually profit driven) in dialogue with party leaders and functionaries. In recent decades, media empires have grown gigantic through consolidation, monopoly, and control of patents and copyrights.

2. Liberal (or competitive) capitalism, which arose in late eighteenth-century Europe and North America, followed a century later by monopoly capitalism, and then by monopoly-finance capital. The last is a hybrid system in which a relative handful of giant corporations control major industries. Many also profit by arbitrage (the buying and selling of financial instruments including currency), and rent (profit from real estate, patents, franchises, insurance, and intellectual property). Monopoly-finance capitalism is now hegemonic, even in parts of the world where bureaucratic and technological modernization has barely advanced. The poorest, most badly governed rural corners of Mississippi and Bangladesh are subject to actions taken by global financial actors. The cost of energy, housing, communication, entertainment, transportation, food, and healthcare are all subject to monopoly control and the futures market.

3. A system of social relations governed by rules of the capitalist marketplace. During modernization, the state, education, civil society, business, entertainment, and even the family become increasingly oriented toward consumption and competition—the logic of the free market. In its most recent stage, the state is no longer a mediating force between capital and labor, easing the impact of the one upon the other. Instead, it enforces market principles in all domains, ensuring ongoing, corporate profitability. This neoliberal system, already implicit in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), but explicitly theorized by Ludwig von Mises and others in the 1920s, became predominant in practice by the later 1970s, and even more so in recent years. It’s expected to receive a further boost in the US from the restored Donald Trump regime. State support for families, healthcare, environmental protection, education, and the arts is likely to be cut or made subject to market forces. Trump’s three main enemies are the bureaucratic “deep” state (including agencies that provide social services, health, and education), the non-white working class, and immigrants; they are all seen (rightly or wrongly) as potential obstacles to neoliberal control.

4. The distinct art and culture of modernism, which arose in response to the conditions of modernity described above. Modernism was urban rather than rural, innovative rather than tradition-bound, entrepreneurial or individualist rather than collaborative. It was supported by the state, large businesses, civil society, and wealthy individuals—and frequently offered them homage or services in return. (Think of the liaisons between major twentieth-century artists and influential collectors and curators, or between modern architects and governments or corporations.) Modernism in the visual arts could be traditional (representational) or non-traditional (abstract), so long as it addressed class conflict, industrial production and social reproduction, the relationship between city and country, or modern consumption and entertainment. Pablo Picasso, comfortable in both realist and non-representational modes, was modernism’s great avatar.

Just as modern politics has its dissidents, so does modern art. The avant-garde—a distinct subset of modernism—regularly challenged the established ideological order. Despite this, it was tolerated and sometimes even supported by capitalist states and bourgeois society. The avant-garde doesn’t generally pose threats to hegemonic forces; it tests and validates them. Today, major museums and galleries draw vast throngs of spectators to see and admire older artworks that were once considered critical, dissident or even revolutionary, or new work by artists who claim to be so.

Can there be postmodernism without post-modernity?

The claim by philosophers, critics, and historians, tentatively in the 1950s and more insistently in the 1970s and after, that art, architecture, and the other arts had entered a “postmodern” phase always seemed to me dubious. The modern nation-state and capitalism have not been superseded; indeed, their authority and ideology, as suggested above, have penetrated every corner of the planet, invading even our consciousness. Cell phones are owned by more than seven billion people; the internet is used by five and a half billion; Facebook has more than three billion users and Google about the same. Neoliberalism isn’t a new productive order, simply an expansion of the old.

In other words, the world gets more modern every day. Can capitalism’s culture enter a post-modern phase without an attendant transformation at the level of productive life? Has postmodern art achieved the autonomy—independence from the material conditions of its existence—that successive generations of artists and art critics dreamed of? Before dismissing the idea, let’s give the devil his due.

The birth of supposed postmodern art and architecture

According to many art critics, historians, and philosophers, there arose in the fifties and sixties a distinct mode of art making that rejected modern and avant-garde modes of negation and resistance. The artists revealing this tendency were Americans (North and South) and Europeans (including British) associated with assemblage, Pop, and what the German painter Gerhard Richter called Capitalist Realism. In England, for example, there emerged in 1952 the Independent Group, an irreverent offshoot of the Institute of Contemporary Arts established six years before. It included the painters and designers Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson and James Stirling, and the critic Lawrence Alloway. They shared a contempt for what they considered the terminal reticence of some postwar English painting and sculpture, and a desire to put their skills at the disposal of a newly burgeoning industrial culture and its mass audience. To them, the abstract reliefs and paintings of Ben Nicholson and William Scott, or the biomorphic sculptures of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore were hopelessly elitist and disconnected from modern life. They instead admired radio, TV, American fashion magazines, and paperback books, or as Alloway summarized in 1958, “Kim Novak, Galaxy Science Fiction, Mickey Spillane.”

New media, styles, and fashions, according to Alloway, provided consumers with useful models of social assimilation and public behavior, and dependable channels of popular expression and cultural exchange. “The new role for the fine arts,” he concluded, “is to be one of the possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes the mass arts.” Richard Hamilton produced the icon for the group when he composed Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). This small, densely packed collage contains references to gay and straight porn magazines (the beefsteak male model and the buxom nude), automobiles (a Ford ornament), comic strips (Young Romance), old movies (The Jazz Singer), household appliances (vacuums), processed food (canned ham), and more.

Hamilton’s attitude toward his material is revealed by his perspicuous statement in 1961: “Affirmation propounded as an avant-garde aesthetic is rare….Pop-Fine-Art is a profession of approbation of mass culture, therefore also anti-artistic. It is positive Dada, creative where Dada was destructive.” The new art should be: “Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.” A few years later, Andy Warhol told the critic Gene Swenson: “I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody….[Pop Art] is liking things.” James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, and the other US Pop artists were for the most part, equally affirmative.

In Germany, artistic and critical engagement with mass culture—which appeared in the work of Sigmar Polke, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and others—was more intellectual, mediated by a left-wing, Frankfurt-School-inspired critique of mass culture as “mass deception” or, in the words of the critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as “the consciousness industry.” Polke’s early paintings, such as Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (1963) and Girlfriends (1965/66), may be compared with those of the American Roy Lichtenstein, but with less camp humor. Polke employed the half-tone dots used in photomechanical reproduction—greatly magnified—to highlight the fictive and often exploitative character of newspaper and magazine illustration. His was an ironic Pop art, charged with both whimsy and foreboding.

Vostell, like the US artist Robert Rauschenberg, assembled ill-matched patterns, discarded machines, organic materials, street detritus, toys, kitchen utensils, and printed matter—for example in Hours of Fun (1962/68)—to recreate the raucousness of newspaper headlines, urban billboards, and graffiti. Many of his assemblages, such as Treblinka (1958)—installed in Wuppertal in 1963 as part of his retrospective called Black Room—have a clear political charge. They expose the failure of prosperous Germans during the period of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder to adequately reckon with their Nazi pasts. His We Were a Kind of Museum Piece (1964) was a silkscreen painting and collage composed of a newspaper account of the Auschwitz trial of twenty-two former concentration-camp guards underway in Frankfurt, and photos of political rallies, street protests, and Jack Ruby’s televised murder of John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. This vast picture, like his subsequent Aktionen:Happenings und Demonstrationen seit 1965 (1970)—carnivalesque performances related to American happenings and the international Fluxus movement—were efforts to place spectators in the role of creators and participants, and to erase the boundary between aesthetic and political action, a paradigmatic modernist strategy.

None of this, it now seems clear, was detached either from the forces of modernization or previous modern art. Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism strongly influenced the forms and subjects of the artworks mentioned above. Hamilton worked for a while as Marcel Duchamp’s collaborator and informal publicist; assemblage and Pop artists deployed found objects, collage, and montage like the historic modernists of the 1910s and ’20s, including Picasso, Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, and John Heartfield. And while the American and European Pop artists were mostly “positive” rather than “destructive,” they drew from a deep well of affirmative art. From Édouard Manet to Willem de Kooning, artists have embraced mass or popular culture to attract and energize spectators. And contrarily, avant-garde art was mined by the culture industry to access hitherto untapped realms of desire. Mass culture and modernism are thus two sides of the same coin—art under the aegis of monopoly and monopoly-finance capitalism.

The marketing of postmodernism

By the 1980s, postmodern art in the US was identified with the “appropriation” artists, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Jeff Koons, among others. They were deploying motifs from previous art and current mass culture, sometimes with little transformation, to signal the inauthenticity of everything. Melding Pop and conceptual art, they produced art that was accessible, but also validated by contemporary continental theory, especially structuralism (Roland Barthes), deconstruction (Jacques Derrida), and psychoanalysis (Julia Kristeva). The art was thus both low- and highbrow, perfect for marketing by galleries and museums, and validation by art magazines and the university seminar. But the implicit posture of the art and its publicists—that there is no space outside capitalist culture—is politically conformist. Neither critique nor approbation, it recalls nothing so much as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum “there is no alternative,” by which she meant that a free-market economy, budgetary austerity, and global capitalism constitute a second nature. TINA became the unacknowledged neoliberal slogan of the age, even in the putatively radical spaces of Soho and the East Village.

What was true for the fine arts was true for architecture. The first murmuring that there might be a “language of postmodernism” in architecture, to cite the title of Charles Jencks’s influential 1977 book, was the career of the Smithsons (Peter and Alison) in England. Members of the Independent Group, mentioned earlier, they rejected what they considered the excessive refinement and abstraction of modernism (associated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier) in favor of a New Brutalism in architecture based upon process, deformation, and movement. In 1956, they designed a House of the Future for an exhibition sponsored by the Daily Mail; it was fitted with furnishings made of plastic. The way of life it endorsed was unapologetically consumer oriented, with gadgets, gimmicks, and promotional come-ons.

A decade later in the US, Robert Venturi published a little book called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. It was, as he wrote, a “gentle manifesto” that argued against what he saw as orthodox modernism’s preference for large scale planning, formal or theoretical purity, and reductivism, and in favor of variety, ambiguity, hybridity, and functional complexity. “More is not less,” he wrote in parody of Mies’s famous dictum. “Even the house,” he added, “simple in scope, is complex in purpose if the ambiguities of contemporary experience are expressed.” Six years later, he and the architects Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour published Learning from Las Vegas which proposed that the impurity of modern Main Street, including the Las Vegas Strip, was preferable to the rigor, purism, and utopianism of the modern movement. Architecture should not be about proscription, but adaptation to what already exists—architecturally, socially, and politically.

The parallel with Pop art is immediately evident, and indeed, both architects and artists embraced mass and consumer culture: its energy, vitality, vulgarity, and waste. Soon this architecture was given a name, “postmodernism.” Jencks and dozens of other subsequent critics and historians made careers out of the appellation. Architects as diverse as Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Philip Johnson, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi, Cesar Pelli, and Rem Koolhaas were fitted within the postmodern portmanteau and achieved star status. The label bestowed coherence and prestige upon a diverse and commercially compliant set of architects who largely jettisoned the commitment to social and environmental responsibility that motivated many of their predecessors.

In the two decades following the neoliberal heyday of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as the stock market soared and the working classes crashed, a few hundred postmodernists achieved money and fame. These included artists of the “Pictures Generation” referenced above (Sherman, Prince, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons, and others) and the graffiti-based artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. The first of these, Basquiat, was launched by Warhol and the fashion industry, and showcased in prestigious art magazines and international galleries. He attracted a raft of wealthy admirers in Europe and the US, eager to establish trophy collections. Basquiat got to enjoy little of his celebrity; he died at age twenty-seven of a heroin overdose.

Now an academic subject, postmodernism filled graduate seminar rooms and motivated young critics eager for a piece of the pie. It even propelled the rise of real estate values in lower Manhattan, especially SoHo and the East Village. I was an art critic for Arts Magazine at the time (1977 to 1982) and was mostly unimpressed by the graffiti inspired or mixed media artists I got to know. In my review of a Mike Kelley exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1982, I described his work as “pre-artistic.” I was, however, impressed and disturbed by the rapid transformation of SoHo and the East Village from squalid to fashionable.

Postmodernism greased the rise of global mega-galleries, such as Gagosian, and later Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, David Zwirner, and Pace, which catered solely to the highest levels of the luxury trade. Recently, so-called “high street” galleries, such as Halcyon, Clarendon Fine Art, and Opera have joined the ranks of the world’s most profitable by catering to more middlebrow taste. They nevertheless represent only a minor share of the global art market which, including auction houses as well as small and middling galleries and dealers, is valued at approximately $65 billion.

Was Postmodernism really a thing?

The neoliberalism of the 1970s and ’80s was a reactionary response to the redistributionism of the postwar era. Diminished profits and increased working-class prerogatives drove the global capitalist class to seek retribution and greater returns. Unions were smashed, social services were diminished, taxes on the rich were cut, and public resources were privatized. But that was really nothing new: class conflict—even pitched battles—between capital and labor are the very hallmark of modernization. They were manifest in previous decades by strikes and militarized strike breakers, and by revolution and repression. To be sure, the art and architecture of the age of neoliberalism—the past fifty years or so—differs from that of the previous fifty, and the fifty before that, but that’s no surprise. Modern art is nothing if not innovative. “Il faut être de son temps,” said the caricaturist, Honoré Daumier; “Make it new,” wrote the poet Ezra Pound in 1934; by 1959, the critic Harold Rosenberg could write oxymoronically about The Tradition of the New.

In the last decade or so, the term “postmodernism” seems to have been surrendered back to the seminar rooms from which it partly emerged. No longer an episteme or “cultural logic” as Fredric Jameson called it, it now appears only to have been a tendency in art and architecture from the 1970s to early ’90s, with possible precursors dating back to the 1950s, as argued here. If that’s the case, then the question is what succeeded postmodernism? I don’t visit the galleries, art fairs, and Kunsthalle often enough, or keep up with the contemporary art magazines to begin to answer the question. But I can say that the disruptions, violence, antagonisms, and uncertainties of modernization continue apace, and that the need for an engaged, informed, critical, and broadly-based avant-garde is more necessary than ever.