Point of View: Postmodern Principles in Action

Recently, I read Olivia Gude’s article, “Postmodern Principles: in Search of a 21st Century Art Education” (Art Education, January 2004). In it, she questions why the elements of art and principles of design are heralded as the timeless “essence of art-making,” rather than simply as one tool among many for understanding art.

Gude and Dow
Gude credits early 20th-century art educator Arthur Wesley Dow with concentrating attention on the formal qualities of works of art. I suspect that Dow’s emphasis was conceived in response to the formalist art that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and America and embraced as a way of attempting to gain a concrete, albeit limited, foothold in a world—the art world—that is nothing if not infused with subjectivity. The elements and principles are a more straightforward way to think about art and even to organize a curriculum than considering the nuances and subtleties of other aspects of art.

Gude posits, however, that today’s art students need a new paradigm for invigorating and expanding their creative powers, one that is less prescriptive and more ambiguous. Therefore, art educators in search of a new approach to curriculum should start by probing the art of our time. Her own probe led her to generate a list of postmodern principles.

Postmodernism
Gude emphasizes that the principles are overlapping, rarely existing in isolation, and dynamic and organic rather than finite and exhaustive. Though tricky to define, Postmodernism is a late 20th- and 21st-century stance that embraces pluralism and generally rejects hierarchies and the authority of specific styles and definitions within the art world.

With these caveats in mind, I have listed the postmodern principles with abbreviated definitions, plus two (obsessive repetition and destruction) that I’ve added from Morgan Singleton, and three of my own.

Postmodern Principles
Appropriation: Borrowing or recycling other imagery, making it one’s own.
Juxtaposition: Combining radically disparate elements to create energy and ambiguity.
Recontextualization: Positioning a familiar image in relationship to pictures, symbols, or texts with which it is not usually associated.
Layering: Piling images on top of each other to create a visual metaphor.
Interaction of Text and Image: A disjuncture between words and images that creates a rich association.
Hybridity: The bringing together of different media in a work of art and/or cultural blending.
Gazing: A consideration of who is doing the looking and who is being looked at. Addressed by Laura Mulvey in a 1973 paper that explores the male gaze that empowers heterosexual men and objectifies women, and later by art historian John Berger in Ways of Seeing.
Representing: A slang term that refers to the expression of one’s personal history and culture of origin
Obsessive: Repeating an action, which often takes on a ritual significance; often deals with consumerism.
Destruction: Artists’ purposeful damage to their work, which often becomes part of the work.
Viewer Participation: The viewer’s physical interaction with the art that activates it or helps complete its meaning.
Immersion: Installations that surround the viewer in a constructed experience, sometimes site-specific.
Site Specificity: The hyper-self-conscious and inextricable interrelationship of art and location.

Artist Cards and Figure Compositions
After an exploration of the postmodern principles via slideshow presentations, my students first created Artist Trading Cards and then, to conclude a figure-drawing unit, compositions that incorporated the postmodern principles of their choice to communicate a concept of their choice.

Student Caitlin created two artist trading cards inspired by hybridity. She writes, “These cards contain a hybrid of American and Argentinian cultures. My mother is from Argentina, and she always talks about the purple jacaranda flowers from her childhood. In one of the cards, I included fifty jacaranda flowers/dots, which reference the fifty stars of the American flag. The other card includes jacaranda flowers as well, and it also includes red and white stripes, which reference the American flag.”

Student Keira created a composition about living with diabetes using hybridization, layering, and recontextualization that also celebrates her love of jewelry-making, sewing, and craft materials.