United States

In some media, what is meant by postmodern is clear and easy enough to point to: it is the rejection of the utopian aspects of modernism, and particularly of the attempt to express that utopianism in ideal or absolute form—the kind experienced in Bauhaus architecture or in Minimalist painting. Postmodernism is an attempt to muddy lines drawn falsely clear. In American architecture, for instance, the meaning of postmodern is reasonably plain. Beginning with the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Peter Eisenman, postmodern architects deliberately rejected the pure forms and “truth to materials” of the modern architect and put in their place irony, ornament, historical reference, and deliberate paradox. Some American postmodern architecture has been ornamental and cheerfully cosmetic, as in the later work of Philip Johnson and the mid-1980s work of Michael Graves. Some has been demanding and deliberately challenging even to conventional ideas of spatial lucidity, as in Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. But one can see the difference just by looking.

In painting and sculpture, on the other hand, it is often harder to know where exactly to draw the line—and why the line is drawn. In the paintings of the American artist David Salle or the photographs of Cindy Sherman, for instance, one sees apparently postmodern elements of pastiche, borrowed imagery, and deliberately “impure” collage. But all of these devices are also components of modernism and part of the heritage of Surrealism, though the formal devices of a Rauschenberg or Johns were used in a different emotional key. The true common element among the postmodern perhaps lies in a note of extreme pessimism and melancholy about the possibility of escaping from borrowed imagery into “authentic” experience. It is this emotional tone that gives postmodernism its peculiar register and, one might almost say, its authenticity.

In literature, the postmodern is, once again, hard to separate from the modern, since many of its keynotes—for instance, a love of complicated artifice and obviously literary devices, along with the mixing of realistic and frankly fantastic or magical devices—are at least as old as James Joyce’s founding modernist fictions. But certainly the expansion of possible sources, the liberation from the narrowly white male view of the world, and a broadening of testimony given and testimony taken are part of what postmodern literature has in common with other kinds of postmodern culture. It has been part of the postmodern transformation in American fiction as well to place authors previously marginalized as genre writers at the centre of attention. The African American crime writer Chester Himes, for example, has been given serious critical attention, while the strange visionary science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was ushered, in 2007, from his long exile in paperback into the Library of America.

What is at stake in the debates over modern and postmodern is finally the American idea of the individual. Where modernism in the United States placed its emphasis on the autonomous individual, the heroic artist, postmodernism places its emphasis on the “de-centred” subject, the artist as a prisoner, rueful or miserable, of culture. Art is seen as a social event rather than as communication between persons. If in modernism an individual artist made something that in turn created a community of observers, in the postmodern epoch the opposite is true: the social circumstance, the chain of connections that make seeming opposites unite, key off the artist and make him what he is. In the work of the artist Jeff Koons, for instance—who makes nothing but has things, from kitsch figurines to giant puppies composed of flowers, made for him—this postmodern rejection of the handmade or authentic is given a weirdly comic tone, at once eccentric and humorous. It is the impurities of culture, rather than the purity of the artist’s vision, that haunts contemporary art.

Nonetheless, if the push and charge that had been so unlooked-for in American art since the 1940s seemed diminished, the turn of the 21st century was a rich time for second and even third acts. Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Murray, and Chuck Close were all American artists who continued to produce arresting, original work—most often balanced on that fine knife edge between the blankly literal and the disturbingly metaphoric—without worrying overmuch about theoretical fashions or fashionable theory.