POSTMODERNISM IN ART: AN

INTRODUCTION

The White Cube: Institutions, Validation and Elitism

Richard Dawkins (2006), in The Root of All Evil. Channel 4

Secular spaces?

National Gallery of Scotland (2000-9)Opened in 1859.

White Cube

Museum of Modern Art Building [centre] (2004). Designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone in 1939.

“The Museum interior was turned into antiseptic, laboratory-like spaces – enclosed, isolated, artificially illuminated and apparently neutral environments in which viewers could study works of art displayed as so many isolated specimens” (Wallach 1992 [1991], p. 282)

Eye and Spectator

(1999 [1973])

Eye and Spectator

Tate Liverpool (2006)

Iowa Museum of Art (2006)

Interior of the National Gallery of Scotland, c.1867-77, Anonymous

“Clearly, the more ‘aesthetic’ the installations - the fewer objects and the emptier the surrounding walls – the more sacralised the Museum space [...]

“... In the liminal space of the museum, everything – and sometimes anything – may become art, including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges, which, when isolated on a wall and looked at through the aestheticizing lens of museum space, can appear, if only for a mistaken moment, every bit at interesting as some of the intended-as-art works...” (Duncan 1998 [1995], p.484, p.485)

Pierre Bourdieu

(1979)

Habitus (Socialised Subjectivity)

Disposition

Education

PlaceEthnicity

Class

Field

MoMa and Modernism

Alfred Barr (1936)

Capital

Cultural Capital Economic Capital Social Capital

Brian Sewell

Elitism“The popular aesthetic (of the working class) is based on an aesthetic ‘in itself’ rather than ‘for itself’. It allows for a naive stance; the passions, feeling and emotions that ordinary people invest in life. Pure taste, on the other hand, is the opposite: it suspends naive involvement because it provides no place for the necessities of life themselves.” (Grenfell and Hardy 2007, p.42)

“...what Bourdieu is arguing is that many art critics discuss the formal properties of painting in an ‘ahistorical’ manner in order to establish ‘the exclusive validity of an internal reading’ – in other words, reading and deciphering the developments of artistic forms in a manner which occults the social conditions which produced them.” (p.48)

Robert Rauschenberg (1964) Axle

Daniel Buren. Left: New York, John Weber Gallery (1972) and Right: Dusseldorf (1972) Konrad Fischer Gallery

Hans HaackeShapoloski et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971)

Postmodern Spaces

Musée d’Orsay. Opened as an art gallery in 1981. (Main structure completed in 1900)

Postmodern Spaces

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Pompidou Centre, built in 1977.

Postmodern Spaces

Daniel Libeskind (2001) Jewish Museum [Denmark and Berlin]

Queen Idia Mask (16th century)Museum of Metropolitan Art

“History has it that sometime February 1897, the then British empire out of a coercive step which it termed “Punitive measure” invaded the old Benin Empire (ancient Benin Kingdom), now located in Nigeria, and deposed Oba Ovomramwen to Calabar in the present Cross River state of Nigeria, slainning many of his traditional chiefs and killing innocents in the city. The British imperialist then raided the private cultural centre of the Kingdom by stealing and exiling more than 3000 artefacts belonging to the Kingdom.” (Ajibulu )

References Ajibulu, E (2009) Artefacts: British Museum should

return Queen Idia Mask at moderngarna.com, http://www.modernghana.com/news/216977/1/artefacts-british-museum-should-return-queen-idia-.html [accessed 04/06/09]

Duncan, C (1998 [1995]) The Art Museum as Ritual, in Preziozi, D (ed) The Art of Art History. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pp 473- 485.

Grenfell, M and Cheryl Hardy (2007) Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts. Oxford, Berg.

O’Doherty, B (1999 [1976]) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. California, California University Press.