Mark Grotjahn - Page 2

On October 31 2007 22:23 zulu_nation8 wrote:
Daigomi Hegel is a very important philosopher but not many intellectuals today believe in the kind of progression in systems of thought his dialectics describe. In continental philosophy and science everything has changed completely many times with not so much remaining from previous systems. Art History is I guess different and harder to analyze but I don't think you can really apply Hegel to a lot of postmodern art. Everything's just way too hectic. For example I feel like the last four paintings aren't really minimalist at all, the images are too small but I can just make out the extending rays or "butterflies" which makes them really light butterflies which in that context, hints that the artist probably just wanted to do a different butterfly and not make anything decidingly minimalist, that is of course assuming butterfiles themselves arent minimalist, which I don't think they can be called that in the traditional sense of the word, minimalism is a distinct period in art history like art deco, abstract expressionism, etc, it's popular because it's been around for a long time and we have "minimalist" interior design now and "minimalist" cars and it's come to mean everything simple and elemental, which it pretty much is but of course more complicated. I just looked at the butterflies again and yea I'm not gonna call it minimalist, i'll call it a sign or something, but if there ever is the description American minimalist Mark Grotjahn I'll eat my words. I think there's no way Grotjahn can be just a minimalist, he's influenced by it just as he's influenced by other periods of art. The paintings where he signs Big Nose Baby Noose are obv above just being minimalist. He actually looks a lot like Cy Twombly but I really don't know much postmodern art and Twombly is like the only othe artist I know. And yea, like it says in the OP, by signing his name that big I think it's safe to say his paintings are quite some ways above minimalism. Anyways I'm just rambling, my point is, the definition of postmodernism is = incredulity towards metanarratives, so try not to use metanarratives aka history is... this painting is art deco, etc, to analyze good postmodern art.

Very soon they created a minimal style, whose features included: rectangular and cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, industrial materials, all of which leads to immediate visual impact.

Fukuyama uses the word "higher" which is inseperable from the word you use, "progress". If you don't believe that history is taking us to an ideal then how can you use the phrase systematic growth.

Fukuyama's quote, if it is indeed an accurate representation of Hegelian hisotricism, seems to be overly positive, meaning only describing what is occuring and not trying to explain what drives the change. I won't argue about pure science but in human science the change that have occured, this time I think it's safe to say, most intellectuals believe are anything but a systematic progression, see Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault.

As for culture, I think postmodernism simply arose out of advancement in technology, in the way knowledge is spread. I'm not too fond of the idea that it is a counter-culture to other older cultures. I think viewing postmodernism through Hegelian historicism is a very anachronistic and oversimplying perspective of thinking.

Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo[1]) was originally a reaction to modernism

Post-modernism rapidly developed an ... anti-enlightenment rhetoric

The movement of Postmodernism [architecture] began with architecture, as a reactionary movement against the perceived blandness and hostility present in the Modern movement.

I agree, that I think those paintings are minimal but not minimalist.

I've never stated postmodernism is correct, I don't know what you mean by correct.

The explanation I give is the usual quote everyone uses to explain postmodernism in one sentence because it is what Lyotard says in the definitive book about postmodernism, "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowedge", in which he says in the introduction, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives." However what he says after gives a better description,
"This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimaion corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements - narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable."

Lyotard proposes "clouds of narrative language elements" instead of a grand narrative. I think Hegelian historicism would be a metanarrative, but not historicism of course. Anyways, the wikipedia page on metanarrative explains it much better than I can. I have only recently begun reading the book. But, postmodernism isn't a system based on anything.

So yes, a better way to explain what I meant earlier is to not look at postmodern art with categories.

Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge. Categorization is fundamental in language, prediction, inference, decision making and in all kinds of interaction with the environment.