Post by Paul IlechkoPost by *Anarcissie*You wrote, "Postmodernism is not a category of writing. It is clearly a
philosophical stance, and has had impacts across a wide spectrum of art
forms, including architecture." I took "philosophical stance" to mean
the sort of thing philosophers produce, or which people produce for
themselves by acting as philosophers, that is, abstract ideas about
how we do or ought to think. To illustrate, in evaluating a proposed
act, a nihilist does whatever she feels like, a religious person does
what she believes the gods want her to do, and a philosopher
constructs a set of ideas about the situation and usually attempts
to arrive at a logical conclusion.
Such a general concept of the philosophical (which is what I was also
assuming) clearly doesn't require philosophical writings ...
Post by *Anarcissie*Since people usually reason
using a kind of internal verbal conversation (although not always)
and they usually communicate their conclusions verbally (although
not always) I think of philosophy as a kind of text production.
... so this statement makes no sense.
Post by *Anarcissie*As for the arts, I think Warhol is a good example of the postmodern.
In contrast to the abstract expressionists: he depicted or imitated
familiar objects, and instead of producing a great deal of verbiage
about what his work meant, he said, "There is nothing behind it. It
is just what you see."
I think you misunderstand Warhol's work. He was very much a late
modernist, IMO. His films show that more clearly than his paintings,
perhaps.
There is an ur-understanding of Warhol's work, so
that some of our understandings are correct and
others aren't? Where is it, and where did it come
from?
Post by Paul IlechkoPost by *Anarcissie*But was this break (at least in marketing
technique) the result of philosophy? Was Warhol's radical
artistic performance the result of philosophical ideas? It does not
seem so to me. In politics, he was a liberal Democrat, which is
to say middle of the road in New York City, and he was a church-
going Roman Catholic, which was also pretty middle of the road
for the time and place.
I fail to see the relevance of any of this.
I was trying to show that Andy Warhol showed no evidence
of having unusual philosophical thoughts to correspond with
his unusual artistic accomplishments.
Post by Paul IlechkoPost by *Anarcissie*His artistic values seem to have come
from his audience -- he started out as a commercial artist and
was acutely aware of what people wanted, what would sell. The
people who were buying art had had enough of Picasso, Pollock,
Rothko, Newman and the painted word.
I suppose you might say that there was a sort of libertarian or
anarchistic current running through the 1960s which affected
Warhol, so that he sensed it was time to break with the
dominant tradition of abstract expressionism and the verbiage
that had grown up around it. But is that current, that rejection
of the established order, a "philosophical stance"? Isn't that
like saying agnosticism is a religion?
Do you really think that Warhol's work was a break with the modernist
tradition? Don't you see a connection from De Koonig through Johns to
Warhol ? Or even directly from Matisse to Warhol? Don't you think that
producing art in any form requires a philosophical stance? Why didn't he
paint puppies on black velvet, or watercolors of sunsets?
Warhol didn't paint puppies on black velvet because he was
trying to make money, be a successful artist, and schmooze
with celebrities, and there was already a great supply of puppies
on black velvet. He had to come up with a new product, but not
so new as to not be recognized as Art. Since he came from the
pop world of advertising the answer was obvious: replace the
conundrums of abstract expressionism with recognizable
objects from the advertising world, and replace the awful
verbiage which had accreted around the art of Modernism with
the vacuity of advertising. But still, paint on canvases so
people know it's Art. He confided himself childlike to the
genius of his times.
If any thought whatever is a "philosophical stance" then, yes,
producing art in any form requires a philosophical stance; you
have to decide that producing art is a more rewarding way to
pass the time than watching television or jumping off a bridge.
If we define "philosophical stance" more narrowly, however, as
having something to do with philosophy, like, say, having an
opinion or two about epistemology or political theory, then I
don't see the necessary connection.
I am pretty sure Matisse and De Koonig would not have made
the Brillo boxes. Maybe Johns would have, if he had thought
of it, but I regard him as pretty postmodern. If you go to the
Warhol museum in Pittsburgh you can look at his early work
which indeed imitates the Modernists, and then you come
across the painting with which Warhol destroyed Modernism
(at least for himself).
It's about three feet across and two feet high, mostly dark
blue with a wide black stripe running across the middle. Oh,
hard-edge, you think, how odd; not something he seemed
to be interested in at all. Then you see some lettering below
the stripe. It reads
"CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING."