POSTMODERNISM IN ART: AN

INTRODUCTION

Artist as Celebrity: Brit Art and self-branding

Tim Noble and Sue WebsterDirty White Trash [With Gulls] 1998Six months' worth of the artists' rubbish

Sarah Lucas (1990) Sod You Gits

Jake and Dinos Chapman (1995) Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, Desublimated, Libidinal Model

“Artists have ... refused to entrust their work to the abstract ideals of 1980s critical practice and the immanent critique of artistic form, turning instead to the existentially more ‘secure’ ground of their own enjoyment as cultural consumers.”

“What this art has achieved is a level of distribution and recognition outside the professional art audience that even critical postmodernism could only dream of... [while also being] a recognition of the fundamental ‘ordinariness of culture.” (Roberts 1998, p76,p.77)

Pleasure and democracy ?

Martin Maloney (1997) Sony Levi

Glen Brown (1994) Ornamental Despair...

Richard Billingham (1995) Liz Shaking Fist at Ray

Pleasure and ‘pluerile’ ?“For established artists to say that memories of the film Grease are as important to them as the Falklands’ War might still be stunningly arrogant, but making work about one’s investment in ‘trivia’ now amounts to little more than a one-dimensional gesture ... Artists are no longer answerable to criticism: there is no longer a critical economy in London to speak of, and artists are above all part of a scene economy.” (Garnett 1998, p. 19)

“I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at me and say ‘Fuck off’. But after a while you can get away with things.” Damien Hirst 1990, quoted in (Stallabrass 1999, p.31)

Hirst’s greatest creation

of his career so far has

been a walking talking

installation that goes by

the name Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst (2007) Spot Painting“Hirst said that he only painted five spot paintings himself (there are about 300) because, ‘I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it.’ He described his efforts as ’shite.’ ‘They’re shite compared to … the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She’s brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.’” Stephen Foster, Blog.

How was Brit Art been made to seem coherent and valuable?

Grand-Narrative (or myth)OpportunistsRebels

InstitutionsBuyersExhibitions and GalleriesTurner Prize

Freeze...

Opportunists

In 1988... an art show was staged in

London's Docklands that has entered

modern art history as a cataclysmic

happening on a par with the Cabaret

Voltaire and the Salon des Refusés (the

exhibition held in 1863 for works that had

been rejected from the official Paris Salon,

including Manet's Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe).

Matt Collishaw (1988/93) Bullet Hole

Rebels

Marcus Harvey (1993) My Arse is Yours

Jake and Dinos Chapman (1995) Ubermensch

Sixty Minutes, Noise: by art's bad girl

A live television debate turned into a piece

of performance art when artist Tracey Emin

turned up drunk and disorderly after

attending the Turner Prize awards dinner

"The horror! The horror!", cried the dying Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Those words were on the lips of outraged traditionalist art lovers yesterday as the Royal Academy opened the doors on Apocalypse, the exhibition that tries to go one step further than its last shocker, Sensation.

Buyers

“...a great piece of art can transcend various ephemeral, cultural situations. To give you a clearer idea... I’m not at all interested in issue-based art ... I’m interested in art which has a certain degree of universality and is able to transcend certain cultural and generational differences.”

Jay Jopling

BuyersCharles Saatchi

Exhibitions – Young British Artists

Despite triggering widespread condemnation - the Hindley portrait was vandalised and

some academy members resigned - the exhibition of 110 works by young British

artists, loaned by collector and advertising chief Charles Saatchi, proved a big crowd-

puller.

Sensation (1997) Held at the Royal Academy of Arts

Tate Modern (2000)

Turner Prize

Tracy Emin (1999) My Bed

Just Banal?

Damien Hirst (1991) The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Damien Hirst (1996) This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home

Damien Hirst (1998) In Love, Out of Love [recreation of ‘In and out of love’, 1991]

Damien Hirst (1999)The Last Supper (Beans and Chips)

Gavin Turk

Pop (1993)

Borough of KensigntonGavin TurkScultpure

Worked Here1989-1991

Marc Quinn (1991) Self

(2001)DNA portrait of Sir John Edward Sulston

Anya Gallacio

Preserve Beauty (1991-2003)

Democratic or just ‘pluerile’?

“...we shouldn’t treat the widespread adoption of the pornographic, vulgar and profane in the new art as the coat-tailing of media sensationalism, but a refusal on the part of the artists to feel shame about engaging in the everyday through the abject. [...]With the popular enculturalisation of art... It is inevitable that a distance should open up between the new art and the theoretical strenuousness of the ‘80s... The theory, so to speak, has been given sensual form.” (Roberts 1996)

Democratic or just ‘pluerile’?

“What [the] broader audience is probably consuming... Is the spectacle itself, and the popularist element in culture. How many more informaed speculations the [yBa] has created is also questionable, considering the paucity of rigorous analysis of the phenomnon.” (Garnett)

“[The] difficulty in tying down high art lite [i.e. yBa, Brit Art] is not a product of the postmodern condition... Or of deconstruction in any essential sense, but rather of a specific situation in which art simultaneously addresses diverse audiences, facing outwards to the general audience and inwards to the in-crowd.” (Stallabrass 1999, p.65)

References

To be added...