Postmodernism - A Very Short Introduction

Carl Andre’s rectangular pile of bricks, Equivalent VIII (1966),
annoyed lots of people when shown at the Tate Gallery, London, in
1976. It is a typically postmodernist object. Now re-enshrined in the
Tate Modern, it doesn’t resemble much in the canon of modernist
sculpture. It is not formally complex or expressive, or particularly
engaging to look at, indeed it can soon be boring. It is easy to repeat.
Lacking any features to sustain interest in itself (except perhaps to
Pythagorean number mystics) it inspires us to ask questions about
its context rather than its content: ‘What is the point of this?’, or
‘Why is this displayed in a museum?’ Some theory about the work
has to be brought in to fill the vacuum of interest, and this is also
fairly typical. It might inspire the question ‘Is it really art, or just a
heap of bricks pretending to be art?’ But this is not a question that
makes much sense in the postmodernist era, in which it seems to be
generally accepted that it is the institution of the gallery, rather than
anything else, which has made it, de facto, a ‘work of art’. The visual
arts just are what museum curators show us, from Picasso to slicedup
cows, and it is up to us to keep up with the ideas surrounding
these works.

List of illustrations viii
1 The rise of postmodernism 1
2 New ways of seeing the world 13
3 Politics and identity 44
4 The culture of postmodernism 62
5 The ‘postmodern condition’ 110
References 129
Further reading 133
Index 135