1: A CATALOGUE OF PESSIMISM
What we might term the Post-Modernist crisis is really a compound of several problems that have arisen in art and its criticism. Firstly, the products of modernism are said to have failed us. This lament carries most weight with regard to the formalist rationalism of high-modernist architecture where several of the projects of Le Corbusier and his followers virtually "self destructed" after only about six years' use. The chief of these was the massive Pruitigoe development in Missouri, which proved to be such a social disaster that it had to be totally demolished. In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1978), Charles Jencks characterises post-modernism as a solution to modernism in terms of a kind of cultural pragmatism. But this pragmatism is pessimistic, to the extent that it abandons the idealism and utopianlsm of high modernism.
Another post-modern strategy is mannerism. But the attitude behind this is similarly pessimistic because in admitting that (as after the Renaissance) we cannot surpass High Modernism in inventiveness we accept that we are fated to a new era of endless stylistic repetition. This is the impression created by Bonita-Oiiva and his "Transavantgarde" and even more so by the post-modern history painting evident in the 1986 Sydney Biennale.
Then there is our rather pessimistic everyday experience of the post-modern world. Human beings seem to have become redundant to the extent that ideas can now be transposed into electronic impulses and act without the mediation of any consciousness whatsoever. Moreover, the effects of mass media reproduction on the stability of signs has become something that Is constantly obvious rather than merely hypothetical. Baudrillard's (1981) account of the reification of media Images through... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline