Here's why:
-It was done after 1970 and by definition, everything done after 1970 is PostModern.
-It's subject is a reaction to and a deconstruction of traditional portrait painting. Where traditional portraiture celebrates the beauty and dignity of its subjects, Close paints average looking or even homely subjects, portrays them at awkward angles and emphasizes his subject's flaws, discomfiting us with all the things we generally ignore when we look at other people. His later work continues this by breaking up the faces even more. This is part of a PostModern impulse we didn't discuss last night--the tendency to reject traditional notions of beauty and, indeed, celebrate what we are used to thinking of as ugly.
Close's work is not PostModern just because it is obviously a painting. In fact, it's approach to painting is quite traditional, the classic-window-looking-in-on-a-figure, just like The Mona Lisa.
The people whose MO was the reduction of painting to brushstrokes on canvas were the Abstract Expressionists, who were most definitely NOT PostModernists.
Anyhow, I thought this Wikipedia article on PostModern Art was informative. A lot of stuff about architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_art
This changes everything!
ReplyDeleteFascinating points, Terry... and more than enough to convince me to change the lecture points for next year. Pollack and Mondrian don't belong where I put them. A lot to think about.
Its funny you should say you were wrong, Terry, because you convinced me pretty well with your counter to my statement. The idea that a painting be about its "paintingness" goes back quite far indeed...Its been a while since my art history classes.
ReplyDeletePerhaps what makes Chuck Close Postmodern is that we can think about his work in classical terms, modernist terms, minimalist terms, whatever you like. Perhaps this is all I can really say about postmodernism, since ideology is out the window, we are free to make of it what we want and bring in whichever historical context makes sense at the moment.
Now this means, as postmodern designers, we have all options open to us, we can work in whatever context fits our needs. There are few rules that are set in stone, so we can choose to follow or break those rules at will.
Hey Terry,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting these comments, after class I did the same thing and went back and checked my sources as well. The art history book I held onto from my undergraduate work in Architecture states taht Close is a Postmodernist painter, mainly because through this painting he shares the Postmodern belief that all people and everything within our environment has equal artistic value... it states a few other points as well...It's all very interesting and I think this is what fascinates me about Art in general... that it's very subjective and can mean different things depending on your overall perspective. Also, this book is a few years old- so it could be updated, etc a this point in time.... See you Tuesday... Phil S