Postmodernity Week 4 Lecture notes

Scream (and scream again) the avant garde is dead

• Tarantino - Mosaic- wikipedia of references, hyperlink culture
• Edvard Munch Scream and Ghost Face - same iconic visual
• Linear in structure, traditional but postmodern
• Avant Garde - hallmark of modernism as distinct from post modern
• French word for vanguard - innovative or inventive on one or more levels, pushes known boundaries
• magnificant destiny of the arts - positive power transforming, bring people from the darkness to the light
• Paris Saloon, 1861
• An unmade Bed can be art in our minds today
• William Adolphe Bougereau - decorative pretty artwork telling stories to be hang on wall
• Edouard Manet - controversial art - wasn't an existing story of what's out there, created confusion and broke tradition
• Gustave Courbet - real life depicted - avant garde
• Paul Cezanne - picture plane flatter, paint movement not about reflecting the real world it self
• Claude Monet - more of a document of the world, how light breaks world apart
• Edvard Munch - expression, depicting inner life, reflects the mood of what 'The Scream' is
• Picasso - world made of different angles, canvas a place of experimentation
• Kasmir Malevich - emptied of content, transparent, pure, objective, arriving at something final

• avant garde artist/ poet tries to immitate god
• something valid solely in it's own terms
• 'Art for Art's' sake - revolutionary, power
• Marcel Duchamp 'Fountain' - doesn't have to have craft - man-made, art not tied down to tradition
• CHOOQ - taking something iconic such as Mona Lisa postcard
• Pastiche - cultural artifact composed elements of original work - characteristic feature of post modernism
• Appropiation - direct duplication of image/ object from identified source of an artist who represents it in different context
• Andy Warhol - 'Campbell's Soup can' - mass produced can
• Jeff Koons - making a cheap - looking object lavish as a piece of art
• Irony - something different from and often opposite to literal meaning e.g Mulholland Drive - Betty typical ambious actress stereotype
• distinction of high culture and so called mass of popular culture
• Richard Prince - look like a filmic photo but taking existing images and choosing composition - reframing our interpretation
• Sherrie Levine - rephotographed Walker Evan's original 'Tennet Farmer' and Duchamps 'Fountain', gold plate toilet and representing original idea - art has become expensive
• creates doubt and uncertainty, avoids absolute meaning
• Dorothea Lange - depicts great depression
• Kathy Groove given sheen of vogue cover
• Golf GTI - singing in the Rain - appropiated, took text, visuals and bent it to suit advert

• Failure of new, imprisonment of the past
• 'pursuit of the new' - M+S - Christmas Belles
• La Mode retro - 'Nostalgia Mode' = always looking back
• Star wars has no original bone - connected to the past
• Ghost face - slasher movie that made it all a postmodernist idea
• Fourth Scream making a joke that is pastiaging 1970 and original film
• Psycho - emphasis of the murder catastrophy
• Halloween - stalked by a killer, The final girl virginal sensible - too boring to kill
• Michael Myers - no motivation, evil personified
• Friday the 13th - group of teens - serial killer killing them one by one until final girl facing off murderer
• Formula - idea = tired and over used
• Scream rewrote the rules, characters know them to start to shift and bend them
• poking fun at typical trappings
• Two screams  Modern - to break away from the past Postmodern - everything been used up so can only reframe what has already been done creatively
• self reflected circle