CERJ LALONDE
SELECTED ARTIST'S WRITING
ADDITIONAL
XIIIth International Congress of Empirical Esthetics
Lecture on the Concept of
Postmodern Esthetics
August 3 1994
By
Cerj Lalonde
Good morning.
First, I would like to say that my language is French and that my English is fare from ... perfect.
Now, for my very modest contribution to this panel, I will present you, in few minutes, some reflections develop by Jean-François Lyotard on the theme of this congress : postmodern esthetics.
Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most interesting French intellectual, well known in European and American universities for his contribution to the debate modernity-post modernity, and the elements of his thought I will resume for you are assemble particularly in his book Le Postmoderne.
First, Lyotard presents three main fields of application where the debate modernity-postmodernity has developed. This help to understand the general historical context where the specific postmodern esthetic has grown.
The first opposition modernity-postmodernity he shows is the one rise in architecture. Some people believe that postmodernity consist in the abrogation of the hegemony of Euclidian geometry sublimate by example in the plastic poetry of the "Stijl", this movement energize by the work of Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg, between else.
According to others, explain Lyotard, the difference between modernity and postmodernity is better characterized by the disappearance of the tight relation between the modern architectural project and the idea of a progressive realization of social and individual emancipation at humanity’s scale. The disappearance of the Idea of progress in rationality and freedom would explain a kind of style or mode specific to postmodern architecture : assembling and jointing, abundance of quotations burrow from previous styles or periods, classic or modern.
And Lyotard observes already that this aspect of postmodernism is understood in that sense of a succession, of a diachronic sequence of periods where each is clearly identify. This "post" indicates a kind of conversion.
In fact, this idea of linear chronology is perfectly modern, expose Lyotard. The concept of modernity is correlated with this principle that it is possible and necessary to break with tradition and to establish a new way of thinking and living.
These observations lead Jean-François Lyotard to an other connotation of the debate modernity-postmodernity. The general idea is quite common : we can observe and establish a kind of decline in the confidence that Occidental world place in the principle of general progress of mankind. This idea of a progress entrenched in the certainty that development of arts, technologies, knowledge and freedom would be profitable to humanity as a whole. After two centuries, we are aware of signs showing opposite tendencies. Development of techno sciences has become a way to increase faintness, not to soothe it. We can not call anymore this progress a development. Mankind is in this condition to run after the process of accumulation of new objects of thought and practice.
The third field of expression of our debate is more complex, explain Lyotard. The question of postmodernity is also or first this one of these expressions of thought which is arts, literature, philosophy, politic.
And in the arts, especially visual arts, the idea is that the great movement of the avant-garde is over. He notes however that the reel process of avant-gardism was a long and persistent work in searching for presuppositions involve in modernity. And he also notes that to understand the work of modern artist, like from Manet to Duchamp or to Barnet Newman, we can compare it with the elaboration, the working out process involve in psychoanalytical therapeutic. Cezanne, Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevitch, Duchamp develop on searching for the reel meaning of modernity.
At the historical level of progressive and global emancipation and enrichment of humanity as a whole by progress of capitalist techno sciences, it seems clear to Lyotard that the project of modernity is been not only unfinished, but destroy. "Auschwitz" can be taken as paradigm for the tragic non-fulfillment of modernity. We are now, definitely, in postmodern time.
But at the esthetic level, the conceptual difference between modernity and post modernity is much more difficult to establish. Modernity is for Lyotard not a period of time but a mode, a way of thinking and of sensibility. Modernity, from whatever period of time it is date, never goes without shaking beliefs and foundations, and without the discovery of the little reality of reality, associates with invention of new realities. This expression of little reality of reality could be match, Lyotard said, with what Nietzsche call nihilism. But he also sees a previous modulation in what Kant call the sublime. For Lyotard, modern art and avant-gardes find their spirit and axioms in the esthetic of the sublime. The sentiment of the sublime is then a strong and ambiguous affectation. It develops when a contradiction occurs between the faculty of conceive something and the faculty to present or to show it. We can conceive infinite or eternity but we can’t realy show examples, any presentation appearing desperately insufficient. These are ideas without any possible presentation. They are irrepresentable.
Lyotard call modern art the art working to show that there is some irrepresentable. And he refers to Kant again to indicate the way to do it, talking about formless, absence of form, abstraction, saying that the empty abstraction feels by the imagination searching for a presentation of the infinite is like a negative presentation of this infinite. Kant quote the “You will not make any trimmed picture" (Exude 2, 4) as the most sublime sentence of the Bible, in that sense that it prohibits any presentation of the absolute. There is not very much to ad to these observations, according to Lyotard, to sketch an aesthetic of the sublime in painting : as painting it will shows of course something, but negatively, it will avoid, always according to Lyotard, figuration or representation, it will be white like the square of Malevitch.
Now, what is postmodernism? Well, for Lyotard, postmodern aesthetic is an intrinsic part of modernity. It is the movement, in modernity, which make modernity possible. An art work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernity is in this way not the end of modernity, but its beginning state, and this state is constant. On which space is working Cezanne? This one of the impressionism. At which object Picasso and Braque? This one of Cezanne. With which presupposition Duchamp breaks down in 1912? This one that painting has to be done, would it be cubist one. And Daniel Buren questions an other presupposition he estimates leaved intact in Duchamp's work: the environment where the art is shown.
Postmodernity would be, in modernity, what put forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself; what refuse the consolation of good forms; what is inquiring for new presentation to show that there is some unpresentable.
The postmodern artist is in the same position of the philosopher: the text or the artwork they accomplish are not govern by clear and established rules, and can not be judge by determining judgment or by the application to there works of clear and known rules and categories.
For Lyotard, it is important to understand that postmodern aesthetic is not a process to show realities, but to invent allusion to this concept of unrepresentable.
And I will finish this lecture saying that the concept and practice of experimentation is probably one of the most active one in the process of postmodern aesthetics.
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