GSWS2873 - Postmodernism

The establishment of postmodern art as a chronological development is built into the very term postmodern, but unfortunately chronology gets everything about postmodernism wrong. It is not born after modernism but is rather coterminous with it and a product of the same forces. Nor does it succeed modern art, but rather in some fundamental ways instead critiques it, for the postmodern is more concerned with what infects art from outside its frame-including history, society, gender, racial and sexual politics, etc.-- than anything that develops within it. This course is thus concerned with the heyday of postmodern art from roughly the 1950 through the 1980s, although we begin in the early 20th century with the work of Marcel Duchamp. We will look at artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker, and pay particular attention to art about AIDS. Roughly evenly divided between art and theory, the course presumes no prior knowledge of either. Still, as Jacques Derrida explained, binaries such as modernism and postmodernism remain extremely useful to power, because they uphold the status quo, circumscribing the field of contestation to either one pole or the other, and thus eliminating other possibilities. This course is concerned with these other possibilities.