Selected Presentations

Prepared for the panel:
The Regional Artist: The Virtues and Perils of Being a Regional Artist.

Numerous observers agree that we are currently experiencing a major shift in many of our major cultural paradigms and practices, a shift equal and perhaps greater than that associated with the Renaissance. While there may be no return to past circumstances, implicit changes are often greeted by passionate resistances and confusions. Stanley Aronowitz, the social critic, recently observed, “Modernism is dominant but dead, its corpse adorns the walls of museums.”

Postmodernism is not a specific style but a pervasive condition, it is not merely a new intellectual perspective, but rather an expression of the dramatic changes in the character of social life and the human experiences these changes have occasioned. And unlike the changes associated with the Renaissance, we, the living may be among the first cohort to experience a major paradigm shift that understand the concept of such a shift.

Much of new critical thinking, post-structuralist and deconstructionist, emerged in opposition to the modernist conceptions which dominated the first half of the present century. While such postmodern perspectives have been considered by some segments of the art world, by and large they have either been resisted, distorted, or coopted by appropriating their language and theory for modernist purposes.

Few would argue that with the possible exception of musicology, art history is the most conservative of the disciplines constituting the humanities. The visual arts are tied to the cultural industry of late capitalism, the art world is institutionalized. The leading figures of the art world, such as museum directors, curators, art writers, and dealers tend to either have been trained or were trained by those who were educated in the mind-set of the 1950s. Most of them and their proteges continue to teach and apply the modernist orthodoxy in their work, few are prepared to re-think their commitments or open themselves to the unique circumstances of our profoundly changed social worlds.

Fortunately, the pressures and discontents of change, so much a part of the postmodern experience, are not easily contained. Across the arts, impressions of discontent and exhausted forms are present in abundance. I would like to take this opportunity to explore some of the implications postmodernity presents to those persons working in the visual arts in the various regions of our country.

Central to the modernist system for the production and dissemination of cultural values was the pivotal relation of center and periphery. The very technologies of modernism, which were inherently concentrating, the rail way, the telegraph wire, and the centers of mass production, created central metropolitan areas which facilitated the cultural dominance of a few cultural centers, such as Paris, London, and New York. At or approximate to these sites were to be found the museums, prestigious academic institutions, major critical publications, and the residences of the system’s authorized critical voices. It was – and in many ways still is – a system where all work had to be processed for
approval at the center or remained quarantined to its immediate locales.

Among the most distinctive and most encouraging tendencies of an emergent postmodernity is a radical revision of this center-periphery relationship. In a world of increasing disjunctures, fragmentation, and proliferating choices, where, for example, there suddenly appears to be as many versions of psychotherapy as there are varieties of religions. Consensual meanings begin to dissolve, they are stripped of their unquestionable authority. Singular orthodoxies begin to give way with a public calling into question of what once were viewed as unquestionable authority. For example, many have questioned the mandate of such dominant institutions as the Museum of Modern Art.

Robert Storr, current head curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA. recently described himself as a “circuit rider” traveling widely, particularly in Latin America and Europe. Storr, a white male, is part of a small, vested interest group who continue to believe that, by virtue of position, training, and talent, one can speak for the total human experience as one selects the works of a few artists out of these diverse and complex cultures to grace MOMA’s halls and walls. He genuinely believes that he
represents a multicultural perspective, as well as one that encompasses many different forms. Starr also seems to think of postmodernism as merely a fad of the 1980s and the art of the moment as just more modernism that is only marginally different from what has gone before. In effect, the language and issues of postmodernity are coopted in a studied and massive denial of the very possibility of the end of modernism. Consistent with a growing awareness of a cultural watershed, but more honest in
response was the director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross’ recent observation, in The New York Times, where he notes that the modern museum may be “just another road-kill on the electronic highway.”

It is not that the fabled center will not hold, the center has been dispersed. A New York City address is no more advantageous an E-mail address than any other location within the global network. This may be expressive of what is most central to the postmodern experience: its insistence on diversity, flexibility, and multiple connections that are pluralistically non-dogmatic. It exists as an opportunity for all regions to speak to all other regions, to form networks that link all in the art world, and adjacent worlds, to all others without alienating them from their immediate environments. A communication complex that has the capacity to reflect the thoroughly pluralized character of postmodernity.

For the first time we have the opportunity to explore provisional and mobile centers that give voice to immediate creative expressions that counter the market driven impulse to select and protect, through excessive valorization, a few narrowly schooled, acceptable commodities. We might say that the
center will be everywhere and those sites previously seen as the centers seem to increasingly take on an isolating provincialism of their own.

The pervasive impact of satellite transmissions of information and images, along with near global access to technologies of reception are altering our sense of time, space, and place. From the Landsat photographs from outer-space to the viewing of global wars and skirmishes like video games to the micro-penetration of the deepest interiors of the human organism in living color, time and space collapse into urgent perceptions.

The modernist perspective which constituted an ahistorical, seemingly timeless and universal view, one epitomized by the “international style” of architecture has shifted to a more human, less abstract, historically and geographically specific perspective. Where modernism attempted the illusion of a transcendence beyond all difference, postmodernism embraces, celebrates and grows more vigorous because of difference. We are changing from a society that merely experiences history, to one that is the constantly changing product of an on-going, dynamic process.

As long as the information highway remains open to everyone, it is possible that we could have a more informed citizenship than ever before, a citizenship that challenges hierarchies based upon privileged knowledge and privileged access to decision making. However, we have previously been deceived by new promises of expanding opportunities for a truly open-society. The expansion of free education promised greater possibilities for social equality. Instead new inequalities were created by culturally biased test strategies and tracking that only confirmed traditional bigotries. Similarly, unless we are constantly vigilant and inclusive, we can once again find ourselves manipulated into accepting exclusive models of truth and beauty. New technologies could create a monstrous homogenization of cultural production, a homogenization greater than any era preceding us.

Hopefully, this possibility can be limited as we come to recognize and experience the fact that there are very few borders or boundaries across time and space that can’t be traversed and penetrated, allowing for incorporation and reciprocal interrogations. A multiplicity of voices, disciplines, genres, and historical perspectives can swallow the self-sustaining dinosaur of the inherited centers.

Recent immigration to North America from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean occurs at a time of economic stagnation and cultural despair. Today’s immigrants are not reacting in the same way earlier non-European immigrants did in seeking rapid assimilation into the current American version of Greco-Roman Western cultural values. It is harder and harder to evoke reverence for these ideals when most of its appeals seem highly Xenophobic. The site where immigrant values are clashing
with occidental values is a place of prospective energies. I agree with those cultural critics who believe that most energy and creativity will remain at the margins, not just geographical
margins, but the margins of race, class, gender, sexual preference and physical abilities for the foreseeable future.

Another implication of dispersion and diversity in the culture hopefully could mean an end or diminishing of the McDonaldization of art institutions and, instead of every regional museum being a retail outlet or display room for the same New York certified names, Stella, Judd, Marsden, etc., we
might see a large variety of artists speaking in many dialects from all over the world as well as from the immediate region – all with the capability of being plugged into new global systems. Art and artists in continuing heterologues.

For some the lack of a dominant style at the end of the century is depressing, but for others, the freedom to collage across time and space, to create new meta-generic styles is very exciting. Today, almost any artist almost anywhere can interface mimetically or ironically with mainstream art, popular culture, or both. The arts of the mass media, from comic books to Madison Avenue advertisements to Hollywood films have become key informants to artists. There. are no longer the coercive and inhibiting boundaries between high and low cultures. It is not that all artists use the collage form, but that the public is making a collage out of the art available. Postmodernism is not a style, but the liberation from style and, as never before, an incredible license for artists to be themselves and to find their
own publics.

We, who have lived most of our lives during the latter part of the present century, have witnessed and experienced more change than any preceding generation. The cumulative effect is that change and its attending stresses have become normalized. We change houses, studios, cities, jobs. and relationships as never before. Even that which does not change or actively resists change must come to change in meaning and significance as the context changes. Change permeates all aspects of our lives and dominates our shifting landscapes.

What has been slowest to change is the very ways in which we think about change. Most of our inherited attitudes regarding change – change as a slow, linear, progressive, evolutionary process has shifted to one of everyday multilayered and multi-dimensional complexity. Without fully realizing it, we have come
to live with qualities of change that would have been disordering, if not catastrophic, for earlier generations – as well as some part of contemporary populations. Most, however, have learned to live with permanent change, many expecting and desiring it.

Traditionally, courses in the history of art taught many of us that various avant garde movements emerge one from the other in a slow, linear, cognitively progressive way. Now, we begin to wonder at all that was submerged and excluded by this narrow and narrowing process. If any single concept dominates discourse about postmodernism, with the possible exception of the concept of discourse itself, it is the concept of pluralism or heightened individuation. Not merely a pluralism of ideas and fashions, but
underlying these, a pluralism of human experience beyond any previously contemplated.

Shared, almost identical experiences give rise to many different outcomes, while identical outcomes can be recognized as the product of a diversity of origins. The phenomena of pluralism empowers individual differences and creates more viable choices which, in turn, makes evident the oppression of universal standards. It is important to acknowledge a vital pluralism of meanings that derive from the diversity of perspectives.

A proliferation of choices exist, not just in our superficial choices of shopping malls and cable TV stations, but in our internal dialogues, provoking more self-reflexivity and self-scrutiny. Indeed, the trauma of the complexity of living in a highly pluralistic world throws us back on to ourselves to make choices. This empowered self in its very self-preoccupation must of necessity become a self with an enlarged capacity for empathy, an empathic capacity that detects, deciphers, and transposes the mysteries of the other, including the other of the self. With the extraordinary heightening of individuation, there are many more roles for artists and many different forms to choose from.

We might learn from science that truth is not static, but transitory and contingent. Both truth and beauty properly become objects of suspicion when we learn to ask, Which truth? Whose beauty? Serving what purposes? Perhaps we can learn to tolerate differences without constituting excluding opposition. A world without singular conclusions, but one constituted by the existing plurality of articulated perspectives.

In her eulogy to Alexandre Hogue, who died last summer in his beloved Oklahoma, art critic, Suzie Kalil said, “the canvas is not a product, but a symptom of a creative social and psychological state of mind. A painting represents the many different states of being in relation to the reality of living. Alexandre understood early on that almost everything that is valuable about painting derives from the drag it imposes on our consciousness.”

To some, postmodern analysis seems to place the critic rather than the artist at center stage and one of the battle cries of resistance is a claim that postmodernism requires the death of the author/artist, giving rise to a diminishing of individual freedom of expression. To the contrary, I believe that there is more freedom, autonomy, and choice outside the modernist ideal of individualism which insists upon its hierarchies, its heroes, and its hell. Basically, modernism has responded to the increasing heterogeneity of the world by moving to higher and emptier levels of abstraction. It ultimately moved to the sublime position of asserting that its values spoke to and represented all of humanity while erasing the specific individual utterances that postmodernism seeks to celebrate.

Most of us have had, at best, limited opportunities to directly experience the new inclusivity that postmodernism promises. It would be naive to expect that the thoroughly entrenched, self-nominated elite who gained life-long tenure in our official institutions will easily expand the narrow aesthetic vocabulary that confirms them by their confirmation of it. Jacque Derrida challenges the modernist judgement as transcendent aesthetic truth when he asks: Who is speaking for whom? From what location are .they speaking? Who is silenced? By whom?

Art is humanity’s continuing effort at discovering itself. As the varieties of human experience increase, so does the number of distinct and valuable voices pressing to be heard. The institutions of modernism will no longer serve – if they ever did. Postmodernism does not offer new art – the illusion of modernism — but encourages a search for new ways of acknowledging and sharing the many things we are becoming.