[noumenal]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

well what habermas would argue is that the project of modernity remains unfinished and its discontents jumped off too early into postmodernism so to speak.

In music (I don't know a lot about other things), WW2 was a big force in this "jumping off." I think a good point can be made. Modernism was trucking along just fine (Stravinsky and neo-classicism I see as just another part, not some sort of problem). After WW2, Boulez, Stockhausen and that crowd jumped off the end, severing all ties to tradition. You want to talk about music that nobody listens to? Check out the total serialism of the 50's. So Post-Modernism in music reared its head in the 60's as a response. In my view, people jumped off modernism because modernism broke all ties with tradition and severed its own trajectory. WW2 was a big reason.

There are composers who are trying to pick up where Bartok, Stravinsky, Berg, and so on left off before WW2 and it could happen, but I don't think that social conditions would allow for anything substantial.

It's no coincidence that pop music became serious in the 60's and I'm thinking of the Beatles.

By the way, I'm not knocking Boulez, Stravinsky, and those guys. They saw the error in their ways and started making awesome music that really inspired new music of all kinds. Handed off the baton in a way.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

Artists that add their name to their respective artistic canons throughout history have always borrowed from the past and gained inclusion into the canon by paying the appropriate homage to the past that the current time demands and by also adding some novel element that progresses the art forward.

Exactly. Which is why the idea of postmodernism is not only lazy but ultimately historically incorrect.

I've already mentioned key modernist figures such as Joyce as demonstrating key postmodernist principles in their work, but we could go at least as far back as Shakespeare and Da Vinci for evidence of artistic 'plunder'.

Perhaps the only true avant-garde is that of the early soviet union, in its bid to construct a culture completely seperate from (and in opposition to) that of the Western canon. But even here, with someone like Eisenstein and his appropriation of traditions such as vaudeville, the circus, etc, things are far from straight forward.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by noumenal

It's no coincidence that pop music became serious in the 60's and I'm thinking of the Beatles.

Bands like The Beatles have more to do with institutional shifts in Britain's education system, than they do with anything that might directly be seen as a result of either modernism or postmodernism.

[noumenal]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I've already mentioned key modernist figures such as Joyce as demonstrating key postmodernist principles in their work, but we could go at least as far back as Shakespeare and Da Vinci for evidence of artistic 'plunder'.

I hate this too about Joyce. Exact analogs exist in music: Stravinsky and Bartok. I bristle when I hear people talk about Stravinsky as a post-modernist. Schoenberg himself re-worked old music, he just did it a little more under the radar.

[noumenal]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Bands like The Beatles have more to do with institutional shifts in Britain's education system, than they do with anything that might directly be seen as a result of either modernism or postmodernism.

No, I didn't mean to imply a direct relationship, only that post-modernism in music and the Beatles can be seen as effects of similar larger causes. What do you mean exactly about Britain's education system?

[Cardinal Rob]

I have a large amount of new found respect for you, demonrail.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by noumenal

What do you mean exactly about Britain's education system?

The post-War years saw a massive drive towards extending further education to the working classes. The most interesting development to come out of this was the establishment of the Arts School (which the likes of John Lennon, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, David Bowie, Brian Eno and so many others all went to). These seemed to exist outside of the conventional university system, acting more as a space to freely develop ideas. Pop Art was conceived here (a good few years before the likes of Warhol ever thought about it) and is now thought to be the key factor behind a number of the more open-minded strands that are found within popular culture in Britain during the 1960s.

Originally Posted by demonrail666

The post-War years saw a massive drive towards extending further education to the working classes. The most interesting development to come out of this was the establishment of the Arts School (which the likes of John Lennon, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, David Bowie, Brian Eno and so many others all went to). These seemed to exist outside of the conventional university system, acting more as a space to freely develop ideas. Pop Art was conceived here (a good few years before the likes of Warhol ever thought about it) and is now thought to be the key factor behind a number of the more open-minded strands that are found within popular culture in Britain during the 1960s.

Spot on.

[noumenal]

That's interesting. I've read about the Arts School in connection with Lennon. I think it's a good example of a very specific factor. One among many though, in the larger picture.

[atari 2600]

Artists that add their name to their respective artistic canons throughout history have always borrowed from the past and gained inclusion into the canon by paying the appropriate homage to that the current time demands, and by also adding some novel element that progresses the art forward.

----


I added to this post:



case in point: Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh, as we know, is the A-number one king daddy in today's art market. His works fetch the highest prices. He's widely recognized as a visionary genius. And he is.
But, with Van Gogh, or with any artist, one can deconstruct the work with a critical eye and see the influences/. For Van Gogh, it was the work of Millet. And he copies Millet in his early work in his very crude way. He finally flowers later on after coming into contact with his contemporaries: Gauguin, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. which he also apes in his own way.
Moreover, his meager collection of Japanese wood-block prints were an instrumental inspiration to his art. Van Gogh's work helped to bring over to the Western world an Eastern conception of negative space and pictorial composition.
I've just enumerated many ways in which Van Gogh isn't original, yet he's regarded as a visionary genius.
And I do think he is a visionary genius, but I'm just trying to make a point here.

I surely do hope that I have made it abundantly clear what "postmodernism" is truly about. As the speed of information and technology has progressed, we have simply sucked the mystery (and hence the symbolic meaning) out of everything.

[noumenal]

I do find it distressing that this board always tends towards art crit and philosophy. It's a music board. What about post-modernism in music? It's a different animal from PoMo in art.

[noumenal]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

Artists that add their name to their respective artistic canons throughout history have always borrowed from the past and gained inclusion into the canon by paying the appropriate homage to the past that the current time demands and by also adding some novel element that progresses the art forward.

This, I agree with very much.

[atari 2600]

It's a severe run-on hehe..."the past"
"the past"
"and"
\"and"

forgive me, I'm having a very miserable day actually. Some shit went down today.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

Van Gogh, as we know, is the A-number one king daddy in today's art market. His works fetch the highest prices. He's widely recognized as a visionary genius. And he is.

What's more interesting about the rise in stature within today's art market of someone like Van Gogh is the way in which he symbolises a fetish for some romantic kind of artist-as-visionary figure.

Van Gogh satisfies our apparant need to see the artist as some kind of an outsider. We like to think of him as being somehow 'different' from us. Van Gogh's mental illness thus places him alongside Beethoven's deafness, Monet's partial blindness, etc, etc. It's sad that art is valued primarily for its 'outsiderness' (something I know Atari (at least) is aware of, having mentioned Colin Wilson's book, The Outsider, on another thread).

This isn't to say that I think Van Gogh is a bad atrist, so much as that I believe the elevation of his stature in recent years is a direct result of some underlying popular discontent with a kind of postmodern consensus regarding the death of the artist.

I'm far more optimistic about the fact that the most collectable living artist at the moment is Gerhard Richter (known on here mostly for the candle painting on Daydream Nation). Here is an artist who embraces appropriation but who still manages to maintain a level of individuality in his work that neither undermines its sense of borrowing from others without calling into jeopady the 'intregrity' of the artist. Furthermore, to my knowledge, Gerhard Richter is neither deaf, blind nor depressed!

[atari 2600]

(that's_ )
All true, and the word "fetish" is utilized to great effect...an excellent elucidation to peel back another layer of the Van Gogh onion, so to speak.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by noumenal

I do find it distressing that this board always tends towards art crit and philosophy. It's a music board. What about post-modernism in music? It's a different animal from PoMo in art.

I get your point but, hey, I'm just glad this thread has got this far with everyone adding intelligent posts, no one feeling the need to argue and, best of all, not a single mention of Kurt Cobain!

[cryptowonderdruginvogue]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

It's a severe run-on hehe..."the past"
"the past"
"and"
\"and"

forgive me, I'm having a very miserable day actually. Some shit went down today.

hope it all works out, atari

[demonrail666]

Although I haven't heard much Throbbing Gristle, what I have listened to of theirs suggests that they might be a difficult band to properly categorise. Obviously they can't be considered a part of the classical avant-garde (1920s-30s) but nor do they fit easily into any kind of notion of the postmodern (except maybe with the 20 Jazz Funk Greats album).

There is a certain 'anti-art' quality about them which would lend itself to comparisons with Dada, but that seems slightly reductive too. The whole 'industrial' thing does at timeds appear to be a sort of retrospective looking back at things the Futurists and the Constructivists were doing.

It might then be argued that Throbbing Gristle were one of the only genuinely avant-garde bands of their period, but problems in validating such a claim only echoes similar problems in defining what the avant-garde is/was in the first place. For all that though, they're definitely an interesting case for debate.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by Nefeli

staying in the underground must not fit the profile.

So would you say there's a difference between the underground and the avant-garde?

[king_buzzo]

It's....Something.