|
Roger Woods
Notes on Post Modernism combining art This exhibition aims to bring together a diverse group of artists whose work encompasses the theme of desire, whether as subject matter or critique, and to present a number of strategies which have been adopted in relation to the 'modernity/post modernity' debate. 'Desire' is here taken to be particular representations of instinctual life in however displaced a form, as a movement from the interiority of the subject towards a problematic or conflictual relation to external culture and facticity. If the range of work to be shown can be described as a continuum between two poles, the first of these would be a basically psychoanalytic theory of art which asserts the primacy of the production of meaning through the integration of inner and outer life in the realm of the symbolic. The attempt to resolve the conflicts and vicissitudes of biological drives with culture is achieved through the work on material media and language. This is an essentially individualist practice, which accepts that the collective or sacral functions of art have passed, but is nonetheless engaged to some degree with the art of the past, particularly the classical European tradition and the reworking of its mythic and allegorical forms. Beyond this is the implicit sense of modern life as catastrophe, atomised and decentred, as if there is no proper consonance with human nature and desire of the symbols, values and institutions which mediate the relation of civilisation to nature. The more or less anxious attempt to find a redemptive art, to assert that imagination though personal is also universal, has been a strong tendency of much recent work and represents a resistant strategy to the 'crisis of modernity'. For the theorists of 'post-modernity', the humanist perspective implied in the above would appear to be a faint hope. The condition of 'post-modernity' is marked by a shift from commodity and production to consumption and the system of objects as signs. Consumer objects and advertising structure experience through a linguistic function referring not to use-value but to alienated desire- the objects transfer their 'meaning' to the consumer. Whereas in the humanistic account, the subject lives out the drama of instinctual life in culture and nature, here the subject disappears, or rather is positioned in a system of significations whose referent is a simulacrum of the real 'hyperreality'. Another way of describing this situation is to say that as signs lose their referents, reality becomes and image, and the condition of this process is the loss of the great meta-narratives of the past, including the sense of history, paradoxically issuing as nostalgia and pastiche. The 'death of the subject' puts into question the very individualism upon which much modernist practice is predicated, as well as the success of its oppositional strategies given the canonical status of the great modernist styles. A possible solution lies in the attempt by post-modern artists to infiltrate and anatomise the system of objects by an ironic engagement with its codes and processes, usually set in counterpoint to the concerns of modernist aesthetics. This might be said to constitute the opposite pole to the humanist approach, though in practice such sharp distinctions are difficult to make. Despite individual differences, this exhibition is intended to show artists united in the belief that the 'aesthetic' is not a faculty separate from experience as a whole, but provokes its response because it engages precisely with what most motivates us- the play of desire. Allegories of Desire: notes for an exhibition at the Small Mansions Gunnersbury curated by Roger Woods in 1990 |