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    Post-Modernism, Part 2: “Bad Girls,” Abstraction, and the Body

    Key decade: 1980s - 90s

    Terms: Postmodernism, Appropriation, "Neo Geo"

    1. Various returns: to painting, to the body, to "figurative" sculpture
      1. Women painters surge into view (painterly, personal, less photographic)
        1. Jennifer Bartlett (trained by AbEx Tworkov, via Minimalism, to Painting)
        2. Katherine Porter (trained by AbEx Guston, semi-abstract signs)
        3. Elizabeth Murray (trained in California, out of Minimalism to lush cartoons)
        4. Susan Rothenberg (horses: "portraiture without people")
      2. Return of the repressed? The abject body in the 90s
        1. Kiki Smith
        2. Robert Gober
    2. Critical Postmodernism in the "image world"
      1. The impact of post-structuralism (anti-essentialist feminism)
        1. Cindy Sherman
        2. Barbara Kruger
        3. Jenny Holzer
      2. Appropriation
        1. Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo: questioning authorship
        2. Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach: commodity fetishes
      3. Neo-Geo
        1. Philip Taaffe: the wit in pattern and pastiche
        2. Ross Blechner: emotion hiding in the field
        3. Peter Halley: deconstructing power in abstraction

    Slide List

    Bartlett At the Lake, Morning 1979
    Murray Mouse Cup 1981-82
    Porter From Two Windows 1988
    Rothenberg United States 1975
    Rothenberg Beggar 1982
    Smith (Kiki) Untitled (The Virgin Mary) 1990 (paper mache)
    Gober Untitled 1989-90 (wax, cotton, leather, human hair, wood)
    Sherman Untitled (Film Stills) 1978-82
    Sherman Sex Pictures 1992
    Kruger Untitled (We are being made spectacles of) 1980
    Holzer Truisms: "Abuse of Power..." (offset posters, T-shirts, LED signs) 1979-86
    Levine After Walker Evans 1981 (photograph)
    Bidlo Restaging "Anthropometry of the Blue Period" 1980s
    Koons New Hoovers or New Shelton Wet/Dry Double Decker 1981
    Koons Michael Jackson and Bubbles 1988-89
    Steinbach Fantastic Arrangement 1985
    Taaffe Concordia 1985
    Bleckner ...As of January 1986
    Halley Two Cells with Circulating Conduit 1986

    Bartlett, At the Lake, 1979
    Porter, Night Moves, 1978
    Murray, Heart and Mind, 1981
    Rothenberg, The Hulk, 1979

    Various women emerged in the 1980s as strong individuals, visible perhaps because of the space created by feminism, but not espousing a visible politics in their work. Minimalism was in the background of many (Bartlett, Murray) but they pushed increasingly toward a more sensual engagement with the medium of paint, and a free vocabulary of images that were developed privately (Bartlett's gardens, Porter's meteorology, Murray's cartoon forms, Rothenberg's horses) but then presented publicly, with claims made for their larger significance.

    Critics were at a loss as to how to characterize this range of artistic modes. One solution was to celebrate the variety as "Pluralism," a kind of chaotic freedom emerging as the tenets of modernism began to crumble.

    Sherman, Untitled Film Still #7, 1978
    Sherman, Untitled #96, 1981
    Sherman, Untitled, 1991

    Sherman was not trained as a photographer and did not aspire to status within the photographic tradition. She aimed for the "prize," painting, and her photographs have grown larger and more commanding each year. Her early practice of appearing in each image as its fluctuating postmodern subject has now changed -- her work since the 90s presents more and more repelling imagery, as if to refuse the success and critical desires that have been kindled by the early work.

    Holtzer, Posters, 1980
    Holzer, (LED sign, Times Square NY) 1985 Protect me from what I want
    Holzer, (LED sign, San Francisco baseball park) 1987 from Survival Series
    Holzer, Venice Biennale, 1990
    Holzer, Venice Biennale, 1990

    Holzer shares the appropriation artist's critique of commodity culture ("protect me from what I want"), but she is much more engaged with entering the public sphere to question authoritative "voices" that seem to weild power in disembodied and impersonal ways. As her work has become global in the 90s, she has been forced to deal with the non-transparency of language and its implicit nationalist biases.

    Kruger, I shop therefore I am, 1987
    Kruger, You construct intricate rituals..., 1980s
    Kruger, You construct intricate rituals..., 1980s, as installed in an urban site

    Kruger, with a background in graphic design at Vogue magazine, culls her imagery from the 50s (as does Sherman and many of the postmodern painters). Her work forces the viewer to choose a subject position from among the "shifters" (you, we, I) -- becoming aware of the shifting identities required of the postmodern subject.

    Smith, Untitled, 1991
    Smith, Bloodpool,1992
    Gober, Untitled (Leg), 1989

    Artists in the late '80s and '90s turned increasingly away from the public sphere and the "image world" and began to make insistent works that seemed grounded in particular bodies. Was this a resistance to the "constructed" arguments about identity in the preceding decade? Was it a dialectical response to the burgeoning of a net-based virtuality that constructed the body as so much "meat" to be transcended? Keep thinking, and looking.