I have been continuing to try and integrate my use of text and writing (as refelctive critique) into my work. At the same time, my research, as I become close to the start of my MA, has brought me to the confusing world of postmodern theory!
Postmodernism describes the deconstruction of language and signs, where text becomes an object of play. The meaning and dissemination of language becomes pluralistic, opening up unlimited metaphors and narratives for the reader (Foucault and Barthes “the death of the author“). In a postmodern gesture, one that has its essential connotations of irony, I took the word “postmodernism” into sculptural (and literal) signage. It is rhetorical play, a sign of a sign. Though “the apparently literal is also really metaphorical” (Christopher Butler) within postmodernism and so here those old grand-narratives of religion and death (of modernism?) deliminate from the work’s formal aesthetic, that is, of “the cross“. I may reinforce this concept with the use of a wooden in-scripted sign and would like to take the work into the gallery context where these historical narratives intensify.
The depiction of “nailing modernism to the post” would be the dream of many postmodernistic / deconstructive theologians. So does this form of work make me a postmodern artist? If the artist contains a “self-conscious reflexivity, whose symptom was a recourse to metalanguages” (Christopher Butler) then I certainly am practicing under the guise of a postmodernist philosophy. In some way I already accept Jean-Francois Lyotard’s description of the end of meta-narratives and their dictation upon art and culture within contemporary social bonds. For me “to be at peace with one’s situation that is not based on disguised absolutism” (Thomas McEvilley) can be a positive place to be.
To take postmodernism theory to its extremes we are left with a severely fragmented art, pervaded with doubt. Scepticism is a useful methodology that has fitted well into the artists tool-kit but surely it is time to use this tool to guide the future of culture, than continually tear down the past. Maybe the work discussed really wants to lay postmodernism to rest.
