Anish Kapoor | Cloud Gate | 2004-2006
Doing Honours has me experiencing weekly earth-shattering realisations. It’s been a bit exhausting but also kind of good; I am the kind of person who enjoys brain explosions. Some people take drugs but I guess I am a bit of a nerd.
If I had to choose perhaps the most pervasive of these world-falling-down-around me, earth-shattering, mind-blowing realisations, it would the slightly uncomfortable idea that the thoughts I have, the experiences I undergo… somebody else has inevitably already had them, experienced them, thought about them, and, usually… written about them.
My whole thesis is based around the way in which contemporary audiences experience photography’s relationship with reality in the post-analogue era (right now). Obviously people have already said stuff about this. I’m particularly trying to break through (what I find are) unhelpful postmodern ideas about representation being a ‘hall of mirrors’ - where reality is represented as being intangible, uncertain, undecidable, entirely contingent on… everything, but, most of all, our changing and changeable relationship with it. I find this interpretation of photography’s relationship with reality somewhat (boring) limiting, and unhelpful in explaining the impact of the particular artist I’ve chosen to analyse.
TURNS OUT SOMEBODY ALREADY THOUGHT OF THAT.
Have you guys heard much about post-postmodernism? It has been blowing my mind for like, almost a week. There is this whole new line of criticism that has been saying that post-modernism is not really useful or relevant any longer, and doesn’t adequately describe the kind of thought that is being produced in art, literature, film, philosophy, architecture, “the humanities”.
Am I really behind the 8-ball, here? Did everyone else already know about this?
You know American Beauty? Post-postmodern. Life of Pi? Post-postmodern. Who knew?
Anyway, this post-postmodernism goes by a variety of names (post-postmodernism (stop saying it!) is a bit clunky but then again it does take into account the new theory’s contingency on both modernism and postmodernism). I quite like “metamodernism”, which refers to Plato’s metaxy (which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond). As in, there is something between modernism and postmodernism, which is also beyond what those theories offered.
There is also a related thing called ‘performatism’, and, rather excitingly, in art, post-conceptual realism (going on from conceptual realism, der). Artists who deal in this area are some of the contemporary artists I find most interesting - Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Demand, and, one that I’ve recently happened upon, Pierre Huyghe. They play with phenomenology (conscious experience) and the tangibly real (‘virtual’ realities, and optics). I think I’d probably go so far as to put Odani Motohiko (who I saw in Japan) in this category as well.
Sorry. This is really boring, isn’t it.
I don’t really know how to feel about the whole idea that there is ‘no such thing as original thought’ these days. I wouldn’t ever have thought this was the case until this year, but seriously, almost every week the ‘originality’ of my message is eaten away and eaten away and I worry that by the end there will be nothing left. I suppose I’m lucky in that at least my topic is very contemporary. So at least there has been a few centuries’ less opportunity to think of what I’ve thought of, than there has been with some of my peers’ topics.
Our knowledge is increasingly fine-tuned. In order to conduct original research into something (which is a necessary element of any kind of research higher degree), you need to show that you are contributing something new to a field of knowledge. And so it follows that people will begin to find a) new ways to conceptualise things, for example, in light of other things, or b) new applications for ideas that already exist. It just means that anyone’s knowledge will be quite strictly limited to one field. Not likely to be any Renaissance (wo)men these days.
But it is kind of disappointing to find that so many people have written about things that are very similar to what I thought was simply something I’d observed. On the flipside, often it is quite famous philosophers that have done so. Which is a little bit validating.
All this has caused me to reflect on the human mind, and the fact that people all over the place, at all different times, have had almost the exact same thoughts and experiences that me, age 24, living in Brisbane, Australia in 2011 has had. Kind of like we are not so much individuals as imprints of everyone else who has ever come before us or will come after. I’m not sure if that is a comforting thought or not.
