Boenisch, P. M. (2010) Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience: Reflexive Dramaturgies and Classic Texts. Contemporary Theatre Review, 20(2) 162-172.

• “bears the mark of an obsolete authorial ‘dictatorship of the dramatic text’.” (162)
• “postmodern unease about that central place of the logic of the logos, as articulated most powerfully by Derridian deconstruction, has in this context led to a contest fought over semiotic primacy within the performance text: between the assertion of continued hierarchical superiority for the written playtext and the privilege in performance for the body and visual signs that allegedly escape that logic.” (162)
• “With the term ‘dramaturgy’, I refer both to the resulting ‘texture’ of a theatre production and to the process of ‘texturing’, whether or not facilitated by a designated ‘dramaturg’. Complementing the function of ‘performing’, dramaturgy is thus understood as a core constituent of any theatre performance, located in two central operations: the (external) contextualization of a ‘text’ (whether a play, a classic text, or the stimulus for a devising process); and the (internal) mise en scene of a ‘texture’ for performing. As a result, dramaturgy most vigorously shapes and directs the spectators’ experience of a performance. A dramaturgic analysis, consequently, above all revokes the unapt separation of ‘production’ and ‘reception’ aesthetics.” (163)
• “Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal study of the Postdramatic Theatre of the 1980s and 1990s must now not be misunderstood as an argument for a ‘theatre without dramatic texts’, and thus as simply taking a side in the stated dispute” (163)
• “‘Dramatic theatre’, for Lehmann, is thus not simply identical to ‘text-based theatre’, but is instead defined as theatre that ‘clings to the presentation of a fictive and simulated text-cosmos as a dominant’,6 regardless of whether the dramaturgic texture was ‘prewritten’ or ‘devised’. Postdramatic theatre, at its very heart, challenged the earlier paradigmatic aim for synthesis, coherence, and closure.” (163)
• “dramaturgic approaches (which from an Anglo-American perspective are often reductively categorized as ‘directors’ theatre’, thus reiterating the quest for hierarchical authority)” (163)
• “such dramaturgies exploit a quintessentially postdramatic ‘rift between the discourse of the text and that of the theatre’, foregrounding presentational, self-reflexive, and experiential mises en sce`ne instead of the traditional representation of a play-text.” (164)
• “Lacan-inspired psychoanalytic cultural critique offers an apt framework to articulate reflexive dramaturgies, since Lacan himself reminded us that signs do not primarily mean something, but they mean something to someone”(164 –idea from Lacan, 1973, 144) – Lacan, J. (1973) Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse. Paris: Seuil.
• “Zizek continues to liken them to ‘the opposed sides of a Moebius strip [. . .] – although they are linked, they are two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet’. This accurately reflects the position of the dramatic text and the act of its theatrical presentation and perception in reflexive dramaturgy: ‘We do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective’. As a result, the spectators’ unifocal, singular central viewing perspective which has underpinned the logic of dramatic theatre and continues to haunt many devised performances is effectively refracted.” (164)
• “how the dialectic gap between a text and its production is navigated” (164)
• “the decisive difference
• between contemporary theatre modes should not, therefore, be identified with the decision between staging a (classic) text or devising ‘from scratch’, but rather with the respective underlying dramaturgic (and, hence, always also ideological) configuration and resulting inscribed spectatorial relation with the performance” (171)
• “Where reflexive dramaturgies highlight and exploit the parallax of fictional representation and performative presence, of appearing and event, the spectators, as a direct effect, are confronted with their own dislocation and disorientation facing the performance of the text. Their situation of spectating is thus turned from the traditional aesthetic attitude of ‘reception’ into an act of encounter” (171)
• “The parallax, however, also guarantees that spectating is not celebrated as an ultimately individual event either, which would in itself fill the dialectic gap between the text and its production through a synthesis accomplished by each individual audience member in the very moment of performance; this position, in fact, too uncannily reiterates the ideology of the alleged ‘power of the individual consumer’ propagated by the globalized market economy.” (172)

My notes:

• “must not now be misunderstood as an argument for a ‘theatre without dramatic texts'”: This is perfect for describing why Lehmann’s postdramatic theory can be applied to both texts but esp. An Oak Tree – it is still logocentric but the text is one constituent of the theatrical event
• “Anglo-American perspective are often reductively categorized as ‘directors’ theatre’, thus reiterating the quest for hierarchical authority”: Contention with dramaturgy in Anglophone theatre – dismissive term director’s theatre
• “We do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective”: This could be argued between live performance and text – both shows rely on the live interaction of spectator, actors and artwork to fully exist – something lacks in the text alone
• “globalised market economy”: Postdramatic dramaturgical approaches challenge the idea of performance as consumer product to be consumed by the individual

Bottoms, S. (2009) Authorizing the Audience: The conceptual drama of Tim Crouch. Performance Research, 14(1) 65-76.

Tim Crouch performing An Oak Tree at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, August 2005. Jon Spooner plays the second performer.

• “One review of An Oak Tree also pointed up the specifically theatrical nature of its juxtaposition of material objects and scripted dialogue: ‘Craig-Martin has spent all bravado of invention on his sparsely decorated stage set. Similar originality in the dialogue is all but missing’. Thirty-two years later, British actor-playwright Tim Crouch premiered An Oak Tree, a play directly inspired by Craig-Martin’s work.” (65)
• “Dawn’s passionate insistence on this material reality is somewhat undermined by the fact that her lines are performed by Crouch himself, standing there in the garb of the stage hypnotist character that he plays through most of the piece: the tree s/he gestures at is a piano stool, the road a bare stage floor, and the daughter a plasticseated chair that Crouch holds cradled under his arm.” (65)
• “it is the yawning gaps between signifiers and signifieds that somehow function to bring home the traumatic disorientation experienced by the Father.” (66)
• “This ‘ungluing’ and exposure of drama’s composite representational elements is clearly central to the workings of An Oak Tree, which explicitly presents a series of ‘layers’, or dramatic frames, superimposed over one another.” (66)
• “The spectators are cast as ‘characters’ in the play but simultaneously reminded of their non-coincidence with the spectators they represent – just as they remain conscious that the second actor is noncoincidental with the character s/he is asked to portray.” (66)
• “As the play progresses, the layering of ‘actual’ and ‘fictional’ people and space is further complicated by other factors. For example, the actor playing the Father is also asked to play the character of ‘the actor playing the Father’: that is, Crouch provides him/her with scripted dialogue for brief scenes in which they ‘break’ from their characters and just ‘act themselves’.” (66)
• “the Father character also steps beyond the representational frame of the pub scene, by conjuring up memory scenes – at home, or on the street – in which Crouch is cast as Dawn.” (67)
• “Crouch’s plays further trouble the already troubled distinction because their ‘ungluing’ of representational elements contributes centrally to his creation of compelling dramatic narratives, rather than functioning to undermine ‘the dramatic paradigm’.”(67)
• “Viewed in these terms, Crouch’s work offers a powerful reinvigoration of dramatic traditions rather than a step ‘beyond’ them.” (67)
• “far from veiling the material mechanisms of theatricality, Crouch makes his audience conscious of their own process of spectatorial meaning-seeking, by showing them – dramatising? – the theatrical process whereby the second actor (effectively the spectator’s surrogate) is interpolated into the play” (68)
• “As the piece progresses, the initially disorientated second actor can be seen gradually to get his or her bearings and to begin responding and performing ‘in role’. My own experience of watching the play for the first time was that the orientation process undergone by the second actor (on that occasion, Brigid Forsyth) acted as a kind of proxy for my own mental negotiation of, and mounting engagement with, both the play and the performance. One could hardly wish for a clearer refutation of Lehmann’s contention that ‘if texts and staged processes are perceived according to the model of suspenseful dramatic action, the theatrical conditions of perception, namely the aesthetic qualities of theatre as theatre, fade into the background’.” (68)

My notes:

• An Oak Tree comes out of a postdramatic dramaturgy already contained within Craig-Martin’s artwork, which preceded and influenced it
• AN OAK TREE – Material reality undermined, poststructuralist/postdramatic idea
• The second actor doesn’t know what he’s playing, he is given instructions etc. – no emotional basis to character

Everything is a Remix was a film which we watched in our week 3 seminar, when studying artistic and philosophical postmodernism. I found it a very interesting watch in applying some of the thinking around postmodernism which we did in the seminars in a contemporary setting, and thinking about how those theories might be usefully applied outside ‘high-brow’ artistic settings.

The film made me consider that postmodernism’s focus on process – which I spoke about in an earlier post – is extremely central to it: postmodernism is actually part of the process of creation of anything, as the act of creation is to copy and transform. It also drew attention to the way that in creating, we mimic others’ models of creation, copying their methods: this is what we call technique! Finally, the postmodern notion casts into doubt the idea that anything can be truly original.

References

Ferguson, K. (2015) Everything is a Remix. Available from: https://vimeo.com/139094998 [Accessed 15 November 2015].

Stephens, S. (2008) ‘Pornography’. London: Methuen.

Simon Stephens in rehearsal

• Scenes are structured around the 7 stages of man
• Simon Stephens originally have the play to Richard Eyre, then-Artistic Director of the National Theatre, who responded saying that he “couldn’t do it” because he didn’t recognise it as a play, due to its experimentation with form
• Each scene involved a transgression of some kind
• There is a common theme running throughout of being unable to interpret or intuit emotions correctly. In many scenes people are unable to distinguish between crying and laughing. There is a general lack of empathy.
• Identifies how obituaries valourise people – for instance, had Jason died in the bombing, the fact that he stubbed a cigarette out on his teacher’s face would be irrelevant, even though it was a terrible thing to do.
• The ‘characters’ of the play are only connected by the consumer items which they use, purchase or own
• The title is significant: Stephen takes it from a history of the objectification of people. Through the piece, the audience doesn’t care about the individual personality of the character-performer, but explots them. Similarly, terrorist bombers instrumentalise people by seeing them as functions of a state and a culture rather than as people.

In an earlier post I wrote some initial thoughts around postmodernism and its role in mediatised and global cultures. I want to return to those concepts in this post, and address some of the more complex philosophical concepts around the postmodern that arose in the seminar with Dr. Andrew Westerside.

I began writing previously about the way in which the postmodern aesthetic thows epistemological certainty – the sense that I know that I know what I know – into doubt, by inherently critiquing, and to some extent disproving, the certainty of parts and wholes. I drew some examples that we discussed in the seminar: that my arm is a whole in itself but also at once a part of my body, or that the individual stripes of a tricolour such as the French or German flags are wholes in themselves, but also and alternatively parts of the flag in its whole and also part of the whole of a symbolic register, for instance the symbolism of ‘red’ or ‘black’. The ideas I will write about here extend from this uncertainty about wholes and parts, and build on my earlier more basic notes on the artistic and philosophical postmodern.

“Portrait of Immanuel Kant”
author unknown
circa 18th century
medium unkown

Immanuel Kant’s ‘synthesis of the manifold’ theory is an interesting example of a postmodern philosophical outlook. His theoretical description of the synthesis of ideas as “the act of putting different representations together, and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition” (Kant, 1987, 77) supports the postmodern idea: Kant suggests that our illusion of a coherent, unified world (one of the grand narratives that underpinned the modernist outlook) is in fact only a combination of many discrete and differing representations which we combine (perhaps crudely) to create an illusion of the world as a whole. Kant’s description identifies how the construction of grand narratives which ‘explain’ the world can be theorised, and when interrogated through the postmodern and the epistemological uncertainty which characterises it, Kant’s description of the synthesis of concepts into grand narratives can be shown to be merely an illusion.

In René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, first published in 1637, the famous theory cogito ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes, 2014) – suggests that the act of thinking is the thing which confirms the ultimate existence of the self. The idea therefore that the self is rendered ‘real’ through the act of thought rather than through physical existence is expanded upon later in the text:

In the next place, I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that ” I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.

(Descartes, 2014)

“Portrait of René Descartes”
by Frans Hals
circa 1649-1700
oil on canvas

Descartes suggests that the act and process of human thought can be simultaneously a confirmation of one’s existence within the realm of the ‘real’, and also proof of epistemological doubt: that is, if I can think, I can also doubt my existence; and yet, by doubting my own existence, I also undeniably exist. To doubt the self is the definition of being. Crudely summarised: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am, therefore I doubt”. This is a key example of the postmodern philosophy, in which epistemological doubt is taken and turned back upon itself. The grand narrative of the self becomes a shattered illusion, but in being shattered confirms that the self exists.

As a rationalist, Descartes’ arguments are solely concerned with what can be achieved with the powers of reason alone. He argues that nothing mediates the self – ‘I am given to myself directly’ – and that there is no distance between self and the understanding of self, his rationalist idea being that any act of thought is in itself an act of being. Postmodern thinkers suggested otherwise: that in fact we are ‘decentred’ from ourselves, and that by thinking about ourselves, we synthesise multiple discrete concepts (much as Kant suggests) in order to conceptualise ourselves and therefore think about ourselves. The postmodern argument is that in doing so, we act as mediators in our understanding of ourselves – and are so removed from ourselves in a way which ‘decentres’ us.

Judith Butler
provided by Butler to the University of California, Berkley
circa 2012-13
digital image

Epistemological uncertainty around the illusion of the whole, complete, certain ‘self’ is extended by feminist theory. Judith Butler’s writing suggests how there is no ‘gender claw’, no gender inside us which we are born with and which we express as a result of nature, but that isntead gender is something that we each perform; which we inscribue on and for ourselves, and upon the world, and in return the world inscribes it back on us. To support the postmodern philosophy, this idea of gender as ‘performed’ and therefore subjective, flexible and variable rejects the certainty of the modernist grand narrative of gender and instils further epistemological doubt.

These theories are all useful for exploring the philosophical applications of the postmodern system of thought, as it is characterised by doubt around the state of the world as it is, appears to us and is truly; doubt of the centrality of the self; doubt of knowledge and so forth.

Works cited

Descartes, R. (2014) Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. University of Adelaide. Available from: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/descartes/rene/d44dm/complete.html [Accessed 7 November 2015].

Kant, I. (1987) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. by P. Guyer and A. Wood. 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

19th and early 20th century

• Drama historically started with the text, especially the single-author playwright configuration
• “the English theatre of the 20th century… is better than the English theatre of the 19th century” (Evans, 1948)
• The ‘bricks and mortar men’ were rich individuals who put on shows in large buildings that they owned, with a big star – and could sell the building on if the show failed
• Post-WW2: only one-third of performances were plays
• During WW2 the start time of plays was brought forward to a time directly after most finished work for the day, due to curfews being in place. This led to a shift in the social ettiquette of the theatre as you didn’t need to go home to change into ‘evening clothes’ in order to attend. This led to a change in audience composition.

After the Second World War: post-1945

• Terrance Rattigan peddled plays for the bourgeois about the middle classes and imagined his ideal theatre consumer: the dowager Aunt Edna, interested in art but in an uncomplex, unsophisticated way – representing a type of majority demographic which should be intertained but not overtly challenged
• The British theatre was insulated from the European avant garde movement (people such as Strindberg, Sartre)
• Kenneth Tynan was a famous theatre critic and provocateur of the time, as was the first person to say ‘fuck’ on television
• The Loamshire Play: “except when someone must sneeze, or be murdered, the sun invariably shines”

1950s

• George Devine, Artistic Director of the English Stage Company (1956-65) aimed to “present exciting, provocative and stimulating plays… [and] attract young people” – he was one of the first people to appreciate, synthesise and import European modes onto the British stage
• The Royal Court artistic policy gave the “right to fail”, commonly attributed to Tony Richardson. The standard of work was seen to be most important, and not everything had to be commercially successful.
• Royal Court known as “the writer’s theatre”
• 1956: Royal Court produced Look Back in Anger, a tipping point which changed the landscape of British theatre forever. Tynan said “I could not love someone who did not love Look Back in Anger” (in Ellis, 2003)
• Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop: Littlewood inherently understood Brecht and was the first person to properly stage Brecht in the UK
• The Berliner Ensemble visited London in 1956
• Waiting for Godot (1955) was written as a diversion and light relief from Beckett’s novel-writing

1960s

Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’ in production (1965)

• The theatre censor was brought down between 1965-68, a system which had prevailed since 1737. Edward Bond responded to the censorship of his play Saved “I had never been so insulted in my life. I would not have changed one full stop.” The Royal Court and Bond exploited a loophole in the censorship laws, putting on a private club performance to invited guests. Plain clothes police officers attended the showing and the Crown prosecuted Bond and the Royal Court, which saw Lawrence Olivier testify about Saved‘s worth as a work of art. The Royal Court was fined 50 guineas.
• In 1968 Bond submitted a further play which returned from the censor with one note: “His Lordship would not allow it”. This was the moment which led to a general realisation about the ludicrousness of the censorship system, and the censor was brought down.
• Michael Billington spoke of theatre as “an oppositional force”, highlighting how theatre could question government and the structures that govern our lives.
• The National Theatre was finally realised in the 1960s after having been discussed for decades.

Late 20th century: 1980-2000

Review of Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted’

• The Long March of the 1980s: the Tory government cut theatre funding, leading to the middle-class theatre consumer – who was able to spend money – was targetted again. Theatre headed towards safer commercial ground.
• “There appeared to be a disengagement and dismantlement from recognisable forms of political engagement by the new generation of young dramatists” (Graham Saunders)
• In Yer Face theatre was a critical category assigned retrospectvely to theatre of the nineties, not used by anyone working at the time; it was an outwardly assigned category, not a movement or a school
• 1990s: ‘In Yer Face’ theatre – was kicked off by Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995, Royal Court Theatre). In Yer Face was a term coined by Aleks Sierz identifying the tendency in mid-to-late-1990s theatre of an experimental aesthetic in which the audience were put through ordeals of various sorted. This form of theatre was especially associated with young writers, characterised by the ‘trashy glamour’ of sexuality, drugs and violence.
• New writing: “distinctiveness of the author’s individual voice, the contemporary flavour of their language and themes, and sometimes by the provocative nature of its content” (Sierz, 2012, 54)
• New writing becomes prevalent determinant of play development processes which were designed to turn youth, rawness and up-to-the-minute social relevance into marketable commodities”
• The mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s were distinguished by a wholesale repivoting of the British theatrical ecology upon new play development and the discovery of new, specifically young, writers.

Where are we going?

• New writing
• The verbatim play
• Site-specific theatre and performance
• Bloggers versus broadsheet critics
• Devised and postdramatic theatre becomes more central

Works cited

Ellis, S. (2003) Look Back in Anger, May 1956. The Guardian. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/may/21/theatre.samanthaellis [accessed 6 November 2015].

Evans, B. Ifor (1948) A Short History of English Drama. London: Pelican.

Sierz, A. (2012) Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s. London: Methuen. 

Eckersall, P., Grehan, H. and Scheer, E. (2014) New media dramaturgy. In: M. Romanska (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. London and New York: Routledge, 375-380.
• “New media constitutes a turn to visuality, intermediality, and dialectical moves between performance and installation arts that show these expressions embodied or visualized in live and virtual performance spaces.” (375)
• “dramaturgy bridges ideas and their compositional and embodied enactment” (375)

a smith (2011) Gentle Acts of Removal, Replacement and Reduction: Considering the Audience in Co-Directing the Work of Tim Crouch. Contemporary Theatre Review, 21(4) 410-415.

Tim Crouch and Andy Smith in rehearsal for ‘What Happens to the Hope at the End of the Evening’ (2013)

• “Our method is one of gentle interrogation. We don’t cover or smooth over but we excavate. We reveal and extract. We guide the play to production trying to keep things open, in the hope that the audience can come in and meet the work with openness too.” (410)
• “As much as is possible, we are daily audience members, and we want to make sure as much as possible that the position and the presence of the audience are not forgotten.” (412)
• “While rehearsing The Author a phrase we used a lot was ‘untethering’ the audience, untying them from their usual position, from what might feel like an anchored position, and allowing them to float freely for a while. Uncertainty, as long as it contributes to the experience, is a good thing I think.” (413)
• “Then we meet in a room somewhere and we talk. We talk about it. We ask questions: searching questions, what might be intelligent questions and stupid questions, and we try to ask them carefully. We interrogate anything that we don’t understand.” (413)
• “They themselves are often looking to place something somewhere else, something that at first glance looks as if it perhaps shouldn’t be there, but that through this interrogation might begin to resonate and we realise that it absolutely can: no stage, or an audience upon it (The Author), a performer who is standing in front of us but doesn’t know the words or the story (An Oak Tree), a play that has been transplanted into a gallery (ENGLAND).” (413)

My notes:

• “the presence of the audience are not forgotten”: Liveness in contrast to the more dramatic performer-spectator set up with barrier of fourth wall – these barriers are deconstructed
• “untethering the audience”: Audience ‘untethered’ from their usual position, subject to uncertainty
• “We ask questions: searching questions, what might be intelligent questions and stupid questions”: A dramaturgy which is ready to ask more questions than give answers

Hans-Theis Lehmann speaking in Mexico at the Department of UNAM, October 2014

• ‘postdramatic’ a more widely accepted and widespread term in Germany
• Postdramatism: a ‘theatrical vocabulary’ and ‘aesthetic logic’ to articulate politics and aetshetics of theatre as uncoupled from drama
• ‘post’ should not be considered as a chronological ‘after’ drama or as forgetting a dramatic ‘past’ – but rather as a rupture and a beyond that continues to entertain relationships with drama (Lehmann, 2006, 2)
• To call theatre postdramatic includes subjecting the traditional relationship of theatre to drama to deconstruction
• Entertains relationships to drama as it has emerged from traditions of drama (Lehmann, 2006, 2)
• Postdramatic aesthetics have operated alongside drama for a long time, but has only recently reached critical mass where it can be conceieved of as distinct
• Emergence of neo-avant-garde art forms (eg. happenings, fluxus events, performance art) gave rise to renewed attention to the materiality of the text – text is just one element of scenography and general ‘performance writing’ (Lehmann, 2006, 4)
• Theatre’s relationship to changing media constellation in the 20th century – historical shift out of textual culture and into mediatised image and sound culture (Lehmann, 2006, 4)
• Lehmann “systematically considers the new theatre aesthetics of space, time and the body, as well as the use of text” (Lehmann, 2006, 4) – phenomenological elemtns of scenography considered equivalent in value to the text
• Postmodernism is a general concept which can be widely applied: postdramatism derives and unfoldes from within a long-established discourse of theatre aesthetics, as a deconstruction of one of its major premises (Lehmann, 2006, 14)

Works cited

Lehmann, H. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge.

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-post-postmodernism

In this seminar, we discussed and critically analysed the postmodern, both in its artistic and its philosophical forms, and how postmodernity sprung from roots in modernity and the modernist movement. These notes form a record of the learning from that seminar.

In discussing artistic postmodernism, it was important to consider the influence of modernism on this subsequent form. Modernism was typified by the industrial revolution – a feeling of ‘heading towards the future’, and the idea of the ‘grand narrative’ was integral to this: the idea that there was an ultimate direction for each of us, guided by the forward march of change and a look to the future influenced by technological and industrial advancement. This modernism was seeded in the mid-to-late 19th century. Artistic modernism influenced the idea of ‘form follows function’ – for instance, in the architecturally modernist ideal that “buildings should be machines for living in”, a saying attributed to Swiss architect Le Corbusier (Open University, 2001). Modernist painters were drawn to pure form and colour, and abstractions, which were intended to achive an ultimate truth and echo a sense of grand narrative – for instance, the works of Piet Mondrian featured clean blocks of colour dissected by bold black lines, a form-based expression with clear focus on rigour and technique which attempted to capture an artistic purity inkeeping with the idea of uncomplicated grand narrative and collective direction towards an idealistic future.

Mondrian, Piet (1939-43) ‘Trafalgar Square’. Available from: http://www.piet-mondrian.org/trafalgar-square.jsp.

This sense of grand narrative and ultimate direction was fractured by the sudden jolt of realism which came in the shape of the First World War, and this fracture was the natural precursor to artistic postmodernism, which rejected the desire for forward advancement and guiding grand narratives which characterised modernism. Postmodernism did not possess the same concern with progression, but was instead an “eclectic return to possibilities thrown up by the history of art and literature” (Fry,  2009), a recapturing and reappropriation of forms declared obsolete by modernism – a deliberate artistic look to the past rather than to the future.

Postmodern art resisted the art market by producing works which focussed on process rather than a commodifiable end product. John Cage’s work 4’33 (1952) is a prime example of such postmodern work: a musical work made up of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence from the orchestra, wherein the ‘music’ of the piece is formed from the sounds of its audience. Shuffling and sniffling became the music of the piece, turning its focus upon the audience’s presence and their act of consumption of the artistic work. Cage called his work “an exploration of non-intention” (Cage, in Kostelanetz, 1993, 241). It is this focus on the process of the making, framing and consumption of artistic works which is an artistic manifestation of postmodernism.

John Cage’s 4’33 as performed in 2013 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Foster live at the Barbican. (BBC, 2013)

We also discussed postmodernism in its philosophical sense, in which postmodernism constitutes a doubt about the relationship between parts and wholes, which introduces an element of doubt into epistomelogical certainty: the idea that “how do I know that I know what I know?” The message from the seminar which had the most notable impact on my understanding was our lecturer’s (Dr Andrew Westerside) point: how can I know my arm is a part of the whole of my body, when it is a whole in itself in relation to my hand? We continued to discuss this idea in relation to national flags, for instance in the German flag, each strip could be considered a ‘whole’ in itself, part of the whole of the flag, or part of the whole of the ‘field of blackness’, ‘field of redness’ and so forth; that is, one part of the whole of another symbolic register, such as the symbolism of particular colours. We discussed the privileging of sight in the interpretation of artworks, and that our sight can also emphasise this doubt in the relationship between parts and wholes: that an item when held close to the eye is a whole, but when held away becomes a part of a wider subjective viewpoint as well as a whole in itself, destabilising the idea of the whole. This comes back to the postmodern rejection of the idea of grand narratives – that if we cannot be certain of what is a whole and what is a part, how can we possibly made statements about truth and other similar grand narratives?

I will try to return to continue some other thoughts on philosophical postmodernism in another post, as it is a particularly interesting theory and one which I believe is inherently valuable to artistic discourse. However, for now, this post is a useful record of the initial ideas and discussions around the artistic and philosophical postmodern which we began in the seminar.

Works cited

BBC (2013) 4’33” by John Cage – John Cage Live at the Barbican – BBC Four Collections. Available from: https://youtu.be/yoAbXwr3qkg [Accessed 12 October 2015].

Fry, P. (2009) The Postmodern Psyche lecture transcript. Open Yale. Available from: http://oyc.yale.edu/transcript/465/engl-300 [Accessed 12 October 2015].

Kostelanetz, R. (ed.)(1993) John Cage: Writer. New York: Limelight.

Open University (2001) Le Corbusier. Available from: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/heritage/le-corbusier [Accessed 12 October 2015].