Rob and Jon, Thank you for your responses. It’s hard work! I’ve taken a little while to get back. Every time I feel that I am getting somewhere, something else turns up to make me reconsider. I am responding here because I have exceeded the 400 word limit for a comment. I haven’t really got a clue, but if this is nonsense, I have enjoyed making it! Curiously, after my ‘last post’, I returned to ‘The Return of the Real’ to find a reference to op art and its shortcomings! I am reminded of something that I used to say to modern art bashers along the lines that it’s no use looking at Picasso (or whatever it was that had upset them) and objecting to the fact that it was not Constable. But I sometimes feel that what I am doing is similar, in that my modernist (?) eye insists upon looking with the wrong criteria.
The language of postmodernism has the high ground, but there are hordes on the lower slopes enjoying the landscape. Rather like politics, the tide comes and goes left and right, and some of us are always either drowning or stranded. I have had a few days recently when I have felt that I was doing something that has some value. I would like it to be good also, but I am beginning to separate out what I do from the wider context, or alternately see where it fits. I feel my ego creeping in at times. Like Jon, I feel occasionally threatened by the works of others; they might reveal the silliness of my ambitions. My engagement with all this stuff is as much a matter of personality as of objectivity and understanding. When what you do is done in a context of vulnerability, a confusion of feelings arise, envy, insecurity, anger, disappointment (and also surprise and pleasure).
The postmodern critique of contemporary capitalism seems to make the point that people have become commodities. Modernism failed because its cul-de-sac thinking did not anticipate universal commodification. The Citroen ad sums it up; ownership of this object completes your identity as a commodity. Implicitly, loss of self is loss of anxiety. Gestation of postmodern critical theory takes place within the practise of artists. Articulated theory is born through public engagement with the objects. (deconstruction? – In one sense this is the way it has always been?) Given such a project, literal subject-matter and formal structures are necessarily not ‘modernist’ unless ‘ironically’ so.
In my search for some answers, I came across www.jca-online.com which has some excellent interviews. The two that I have read and which have relevance here, are with Haim Steinbach, and Bill Viola.
But just occasionally it is possible to be carried away with the place, the moment, and the paint. Lovely!
