Brain Drain Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Gertrude Stein’

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HARK:
Postmodernism?= Modernism flipped ass over tea cup. That which?was of?dominant importance in the 40′s and 50′s is now secondary, giving all those original underdog qualities renewed appreciation upfront and center.

I?like the?way Jameson refers?to Gerty’s-got-her-groove-on?Stein. In her manifesto,?Composition Explained, she’s all about,

“The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends on how everybody is doing it.”

Jameson?agrees, and in fact borrows this idea which was written in 1926. Ooooh, the irony. In art, we still?create representations of the same things we used to. The focus just shifts as we use new lenses to look at the same old, same old.

BEHOLD:
Modernism?is?like a Dadaist collage in that?previous art is deconstructed and resynthesized into new art. Dadaism took art?from the hands of masters and brought it to the people.?As an original idea (in it’s day), this?is parody.

What differs?in?postmodernism is that art is?no longer?out to change the world so much as to?”respect the vernacular of the American city fabric”?(1968). This is pistiche, mimicing styles which are already dead. All the while, we look back with nostalgia to what has come before and try to recreate it with new tools.

TAKING IT FOR A SPIN:
So, to me, this sounds like the closed structure of Derrida, where one thing supplements another to make a whole new piece of art. The possibilities are as infinite?as the combinations of coupling, yet the pieces to work with are limited. According to Jameson, we have reached a dead end in finding “the new” and must begin to reconstitue and recycle the old in new ways. Yes?