Looking at Shoes
Caffyn Kelley
2005 Jameson (1991)
compares examples of modernist and postmodernist art to identify
features specific to each period. He begins with Van Gogh’s painting
of peasant shoes, which he describes as “one of the canonical works of
high modernism in visual art” (6).
This 1887 painting
refers to the premodern world of suffering, impoverished peasants
labouring with the soil. Van Gogh is able to transform the bleak world
of peasant objects into an explosion of colour and meaning. Jameson
quotes Heidegger, who writes of these shoes, “In them there vibrates
the silent call of earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its
enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field”
(8). Through the work of art, reality is drawn into a revelation
unavailable in the everyday world. The viewer can be stunned and edified
by the experience of this painting. This painting is a
unique object, created by an artist who is known to have been profoundly
alienated from his own immediate social world. Van Gogh created
paintings for sale as commodities, rather than – as in the exchange
relationship characteristic of premodern art – offering artwork as the
communication of meanings that could be deciphered and agreed to by the
audience. This exchange relationship opens the work of art to an
extraordinary individual freedom. Artist and audience can separately,
privately and individually meet the art object as an infinitely
productive opening to otherwise unavailable significances. When
capitalism makes art’s social meanings unnecessary and ignorable, art
becomes a free space – perhaps the last one – in which thought and
invention are possible.
In contrast,
Jameson refers to these “shoes of a very different kind” (8). He
writes, “Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer
speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed,
I am tempted to say it does not really speak to us at all.” (8). These
shoes are fetishised commodities and perversely eroticised objects that
are “shorn of their earlier life world” (8). Warhol’s is an art of
the playful and superficial (or perhaps, the cynical and despairing)
where the disassociation of objects from meaningfulness situates both
artist and viewer in a simulacrum where there is no truth. Gopnik (2005)
comments, “Taken as a whole, [Warhol’s] art seems to portray a world
so thoroughly sold out that there’s no hope for it.” It is a world
where the difference between a unique art object and a mechanically
reproduced commodity is queried. Art’s detachment from social
significance is at once the subject matter and the limit of the work.
Baudrillard (1993) writes, “What we call art today seems to bear
witness to an irreparable void” (p. 13). Jameson argues
that Warhol’s shoes evoke the world we live in: a postmodern period of
“late capitalism” whose features include “the disappearance
of the individual subject ….; the emergence of schizophrenic
consciousness that conflates past and future into a perpetual present; a
crisis
in historicity which reduces the collective human record to
empty images of nostalgia; the stylistic triumph of pastiche,
which randomly cannibalizes past cultures, processing their substance
into sheer simulation” (McPheron, 1999). Jameson comments on the
effacement of the frontier between high culture and commercial culture,
and describes a collapse of distinctions between economic, political and
cultural spheres. Some
theorists yearn for an art with the moral force of Van Gogh’s shoes,
and decry the irresponsibility and superficiality of the postmodern. But
Jameson argues that an historical period cannot be adequately grasped by
way of moral judgements. He refers to the Marxian view that “the seeds
of the future already exist within the present and must be conceptually
disengaged from it” through both theory and practice (p. 62) in order
for that possible future to come into being. Of art, he writes that “the
new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the
truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object –
the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which
it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of
representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our
positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity
to act and struggle ….” (p. 54). One
of many artists who have addressed the challenges Jameson identifies is
B.C.-born artist Brian Jungen, whose series Prototypes
for New Understanding (1998)
consists of facsimiles of native masks of the Pacific Northwest Coast
constructed from pieces of Nike Air Jordan athletic shoes. These are
shoes that suggest the possibility of a postmodernism of resistance,
described by Foster (1985) as “concerned with a critical
deconstruction of tradition” and seeking “to question rather than
exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and
political affiliations." Jungen speaks “for” and “from” his
own native identity, while simultaneously provoking analysis of how
identities are constructed through the operations of power, colonialism,
global capitalism and localized resistance.
In postmodern art and its economies, the art object remains detached
from social significance; this is a solitude that cannot be transcended.
Unique art objects speak to each of us individually; they fail to be -
and refuse to be - collapsed into their political relevance or made to
communicate one verifiable meaning to all viewers. Even when reproduced
on postcards and the Internet, or purchased by the state for display in
a museum, Jungen’s mask inhabits space as a commodity that can be
privately – but not socially – significant. Yet in this private
space it suggests “new understandings” that invite us to remake the
social world. Through
an art of critical postmodernism contemporary artists can be said to
explore the question, “What are empowering approaches to generating
knowledge?” According to Lather (1991): “Emancipatory knowledge
increases awareness of the contradictions distorted or hidden by
everyday understandings, and in so doing it directs attention to the
possibilities for social transformation inherent in the present
configuration of social processes” (p. 52).
Questions 1)
What are empowering approaches to generating knowledge within your own
everyday field of activity? 2)
Through this course we have studied premodern, modern and postmodern
ways of looking at and living in the world. How might these different
approaches to knowledge change your understanding of, or approach to, a
particular phenomenon or task? Appendix I
have based this chart on one constructed by Patti Lather (1991). I offer
it as a reductive but perhaps still-useful way to clarify some
implications of postmodernism for the practice of art. I do not see this
chart as identifying an historical progress but rather as marking out
separable trajectories that today all operate simultaneously within the
cultural sphere.
References: Baudrillard, J. (1993). The aesthetic illusion. Parkett
37 13-15. Briton, D. (1996). The Modern Practice of Adult Education: A Postmodern Critique.
Albany: State University of New York Press Gopnik, B. (Oct 7, 2005) Sad comment on a sold-out
society. Guardian Weekly,
p. 23 Guly, C. (2004). Brian
Jungen, retrieved online November 23, 2005 at http://www.canadacouncil.ca/aboutus/artistsstories/fy127243593232968750.htm Foster, H. (1985). Postmodernism: a preface to The
anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay
Press Jameson,
F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press Kelley, C. (1995). Art and life. Rethinking Marxism 8: 1, pp. 19-26. Lather, P. (1991). Getting
Smart: Feminist Research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New
York: Routledge McPheron, W. (1999)
Fredric Jameson. Retrieved online November 23, 2005 at http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/ Image
Sources: All
images retrieved online November 23, 2005: Van
Gogh Shoes: http://achim-art.com/shoes1887_k.jpg Warhol
shoes: http://www.abacus-gallery.com/shopinfo/uploads/960640187_large-image_as.jpg Jungen
shoes: http://www.tlingitculture.com/55secession.jpg
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