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Xinyu Zheng

Gregory Williams

AH393 Contemporary Art 1980 to Now

Jul. 10, 2017

Entering Postmodernism: Change of Form and Concept

Starting in the mid-1960s, more and more artists noticed the limit of contemporary art

forms to express their concepts, mostly through painting, sculpture, architecture, orlater

photography. When a genre of art experiences its golden period, artists who practice this genre

the most would reach the boundary that connects them to the next stage, such as Manet, Cezanne,

Seurat, and other art pioneers. Enlightened by their early predecessors, who largely contributed

to the fundamentals of Modernism, the later Modernists also started to practice with new formats

to express art, which eventually led to the controversial Postmodernism style with the most

various forms of art. However, the path to the next period is always covered with brambles and

taunts.

Even till now, Postmodernism always relates to confusing, barely understandable, and

lacking in traditional sense as art for the public. As Paul Wood proposed, as a descriptive term,

Postmodernism has no universally accepted definition, does not refer to a specific style, and

shares no relevance to a historical period, region, or event (5). In addition, a lot of

Postmodernism practitioners are interested in experimenting with any new form and media that

can be used to express the concept of art rather than keeping the art in stable shape. Due to the

lack of a standard for judging and analyzing, those various early attempts are thought of as far

away from the classical art aesthetics (8).

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After the difficult beginning phase of Postmodernism, Wood discusses a watershed

period that occurred between 1965~1975 (8). Being challenged by Minimal Art and Pop Art, the

late Modernism style in the mid-1970s was largely replaced by Conceptualism, the early form of

Postmodernism. With the highly recovered economy and developed technology, art was applied

in multiple fields of human life, such as with furniture, space layout, and the continuingly

emerging new medias. Artists of Postmodernism seek a way to move art out of the studio and

from relatively flat formats into spaceor to build the space as art. The sculptor Donald Judd

claimed that their art is something structurally and procedurally of contemporary reality the feel

and look of openness, extendibility, accessibility, publicness the product of clear decision

rather than groping craft (9). On the other hand, the completeness was no longer their

consideration, since it was already challenged by the much earlier style of Impressionism. Then,

the form of displaying the process of creating art was born.

Considered as the first phase of Postmodernism, the Conceptual Art shares the same

thought of art with Postmodernism, which emphasizes an idea itself rather than the standard or

shape of art. This concept largely reduced the importance of all the traditional formation and

standards of art, and it also leads the world to a new consideration of judging art. With the

developing step of human society, the art also requires innovation. The Postmodernism comes

with the tide of development, which as Wood proposes, mixes photographs and texts,

performances and installations, and making increasing use of the new technology of video (21).
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Works Cited

Wood, Paul. Themes in Contemporary Art: Inside the Whale. New Haven: Yale UP in

Association with The Open U, 2004. Print. Art of the Twentieth Century (Yale University

Press); [v. 4].