Anthony Howell: Without postmodernism’s new take on history, Alison Marchant’s ‘archival art’ might never have surfaced, including her exhibition celebrating the cross-dressing (and very postmodern) Hannah Cullwick and the fetish photography of her eccentric husband Arthur Munby (who were an 1860’s couple similar in a way to Goude and Jones).
Keith Johnson: Did the exhibition reach any new conclusions about postmodernism? Hundreds. Essentially, that it was truly the fin-de-siecle style of our twentieth century, encapsulating the ancient (historical) and new (vanguard), high style and kitsch, the electronic age, rock’n’roll, plastic vs age-old craftsmanship – the true visual cacophony of our world today.
Glenn Adamson: My argument is that as the central movement (or phenomenon) in art and design history, postmodernism had indeed run its course by the late 1980s. By this time, exhaustion had settled in around the term – which had perhaps suffered from overuse – and there was also a good deal of anger about corporate applications of the style and ideas associated with it, e.g. the AT&T Building.
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media. To make a C with a cedilla, for example, involved a lot more effort and thought than holding down the Option key on your Mac. A comma-shaped steel appendage had to be lashed with string to the bottom of the C punch to produce a new matrix.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
“Bruges-La-Morte,” a tale of obsessive love, is a Symbolist novel, perhaps the Symbolist novel. The movement (officially promulgated by Jean Moréas in his “Manifeste du symbolisme” of 1886) is best understood as a vague composite of moods and formal preoccupations that pervaded the music and art of that era, no less than its poetry and prose.
The Urban Forest draws inspiration from the appreciation of nature and the artificial in oriental philosophy and reconnects urbanity to the natural realm.
Popular culture was always local, and changed imperceptibly from one village or valley to the next. High culture, on the other hand, always had a certain universality to it, and thus the dissemination of high cultural products via electronic media is not a threat to the very nature of that culture. But such electronic dissemination has all but destroyed popular culture…
By DAVE TROTT [CampaignLive.com] – I come from, according to The Guinness Book of Records, the largest council estate in Europe. A massive working class section of east London, bordering on Essex. East London itself is around 2 million people. Everyone judges themselves according to their context. And, in our context, we thought we were […]
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
[Announcement from The Gershwin Hotel and Suzanne Tremblay] – “3 Carsons out of Texas” – L.M.Kit Carson, film pioneer; Rev Goat Carson, Grammy-winning lyricist; and Neke Carson, a multimedia artist – are the subjects of a special month-long event at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan, 20 October to 20 November 2011. The event is ‘A […]
Monday, 26 September 2011
Surrounded by the women of the Polaroids and other personal treasures, Mollino wanted to sail away in a boat-shaped bed: “I am preparing, like the Chinese of rank who in life adorns his own mausoleum, a corridor of my house to be a twilight avenue where the photographs and many other mementos of life shall follow in sequence: all beautiful, or almost”, he wrote in 1973, the year in which he died of a heart attack.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
By JUSTIN McGUIRK [The Guardian] – With its deceptive surfaces and furniture that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, postmodernism is not just the backdrop to but a metaphor for unbridled capitalism, where a plump balance sheet conceals all manner of sins and where marble-effect formica hides chipboard. But was postmodernism really so bad? Already […]
Thursday, 8 September 2011
By CLAYTON LORD [Arts Journal Blogs] – This research, one of the most comprehensive surveys of social media use in arts organizations ever conducted, is fascinating in that it provides a valuable snapshot of how the arts and cultural center is using social media to engage artsgoing audiences across the country… Top-level findings from the […]
In this age of rampant secularisation, the making of truly effective religious works of art has become increasingly rare, and it comes as scant surprise that most of the best work dates from the first half of the 20th century.
Inspired by the poetry of the likes of Verlaine and Baudelaire, composers from Berlioz to Saint-Saens created these musical settings, attempting to “translate,” in a way, the lyric into a musical format that created a form greater than the two elements.
Ezra Pound: ‘Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary applications. What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed for another vorticist art. But let me go on then with my own branch of vorticism, about which I can probably speak with greater clarity. All poetic language is the languge of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.’
Postmodernism and history.
Anthony Howell: Without postmodernism’s new take on history, Alison Marchant’s ‘archival art’ might never have surfaced, including her exhibition celebrating the cross-dressing (and very postmodern) Hannah Cullwick and the fetish photography of her eccentric husband Arthur Munby (who were an 1860’s couple similar in a way to Goude and Jones).