Representation‘Representations, it was argued, instead of coming after reality, in an imitation of it, now precede and construct reality. Our “real” emotions imitate those we see on film and read about in pulp romances; our “real” desires are structured for us by advertising images; the “real” of our politics is prefabricated by television news and Hollywood scenarios of leadership; our “real” selves are congeries and repetition of all these images, strung together by narratives not of our own making.”

Art since 1900 -modernism, antimodernism postmodernismPg. 47

The Society of the Spectacle (196) Guy Debord

• In his seminal text, Debord describes a society where a fundamental, catastrophic shift has occurred from material concreteness and use value to exchange value and the world of appearances.

• For Debord “the whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (thesis 1)

• All relationships are mediated by image, with people defined by their status as frozen passive observers of what the spectacle has to offer. The power of the spectacle in western culture rests in its command of an illusory unity of social life grounded in mere appearance.

“At some point following World War Two a new kind of society began to emerge (variously described as post industrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society, media society and so forth). New types of consumption; planned obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television and media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society; the replacement of the old tension between city and country, center and province, by the suburb and by universal standardization; the growth of the great networks of superhighways and the arrival automobile culture – these are some of the features which would mark a radical break with that older prewar society”

‘When I was concentrating on this kind of cultural analysis in the 1950’s I was sometimes told by good Marxist friends that it was a diversion from the central economic struggle.

Now every trade union and political leader cries 'The media, the media'.

Raymond Williams

“Advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.”

Judith WilliamsonDecoding Advertisements

“underneath each picture there is always another picture.” Douglas Crimp

Judy Chicago “the Dinner Party” 1976

Alice Neel The Pregnant Woman 1971 oil on canvas 40 x 60 in.

“a group of women art professionals waging a war of words and images against the sexism and racism of the art world”

Lucy Lippard “The Pink Glass Swan pg. 255

“At that time feminism had become a dirty word. Our idea was to make it sexy, to make it funny” - Guerrilla Girls in Suzi Gablik “Conversations before the end of time” pg. 211

“you don’t have to have a penis to be a genius”.

• “avant gardists tended to regard paint and brushes as forms of kryptonite”.

•Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” ( 1936)

•In the essay Benjamin argued that the ‘aura’ of the original artwork is lost as a result of the impact of photography's ability to infinitely reproduce images. Far from being something to mourn, artists could exploit this opening, producing art works which could be potentially infinitely reproduced and disseminated. This was an excellent option in terms of producing a more democratic form of art capable of reaching a far larger mass of people, as well as potentially greatly increasing the political and social impact of such art.

•For women artists this undercutting of many of the cherished central ideas of western (male) art - originality and authenticity, was especially attractive as it avoided the baggage of being unfavorable compared to, and dismissed in relation to the ‘geniuses’ of the canon.

•Photography's centrality and history within the very mediums of mass entertainment also of course made it an excellent, potentially invisible carrier of counter cultural sentiment. It could be seamlessly injected into the very spaces of culture it wished to critique.

Victor Burgin

• “Richard Prince focused on the conventions of advertising and fashion images for what they reveal about subjective modelling. At stake in this patterning of images, Prince implies, is the patterning of identities, of identities as images, which are now shaped by media representations far more than any other cultural, form.”

• The Simulacra Image in “Art since 1900”

Barbara Kruger

• “It is precisely at the legislative frontier between what can be represented and what cannot that the postmodernist operations being staged - not in order to transcend representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others.“

• Craig Owens

•“Who speaks?Who is silent? Who is seen? Who is absent? On both an emotional and an economic level images and text have the power to make us rich or poor. “

•Barbara Kruger

• The American writer Hal Foster described this work as representing a shift from the artist being a producer of objects to a manipulator of signs, with the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic.

“The use of the pronoun really cuts through the grease on a certain level. It’s a very economic and forthright invitation to a spectator to enter the discursive and pictorial space of that object.”

Barbara KrugerQuote in Brandon Taylor Art Today. Pg. 99

“is fundamentally predicated upon a sense of its own moral security and rightness, as against the inequality and oppression it attributes to the dominant culture… There is a disquieting sense in which such work remains unconcerned by its own status within the enriched product range of contemporary culture. The culture it addresses carries on – and carries on generating materials susceptible to radical criticism. The problem arises when that which is marginal with respect to social values generally, accedes to a kind of power of its own in its own relatively restricted institutional compass”.

Paul WoodModernism in Dispute

“When I was in school I was getting disgusted with the attitude of art being so religious or sacred, so I wanted to make something that people could relate to without having to read a book about it first. So that anybody off the street could appreciate it, even if they couldn’t fully understand it; they could still get something out of it. That’s the reason why I wanted to imitate something out of the culture, and also make fun of the culture as I was doing it:”

Cindy ShermanQuoted in State of the Art edited by Sandy Nairne

“this false search for the real her is exactly what the work is about ..the attempt to find the real Cindy Sherman is so unfulfillable, just as it is for anyone, but what is so interesting is the obsessive drive to find that identity.”

Judith Williamson

The centred subject - the modern man

The sovereign self - the subject is defined as an ‘inner space’. This inner space contains the consciousness, a repository of feelings, memories and needs. It is the I or ego. It is bounded, masterful and independent. It has a core essence which in art, finds exterior expression and manifestation in artworks. It is cohesive.

This sovereign self is the source of all action. It is perceived as free as it decides its own goals. It engages in an ongoing process of self reflection, monitoring its own thoughts in an ongoing internal monologue.

This subject is self sufficient and distinct form everything outside of itself, including its own body. To be a subject is to be capable of making rational, objective decisions regarding the self - being able to make your situation or your body. This process leads to self fulfillment .

The decentred self• Postmodernism widely disputes the notion of the bounded, sovereign self.

• In the work of various seminal postmodern writers such as Michel Foucault,Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, these ideas of an essential, ‘eternal’ bounded self are undermined and critiqued.

• In such work the self is seen as fluid and dependent for its sense of self on its context.

• It has limited powers of autonomous choice

• It has multiple centres with diverse perspectives - there is on one real me. We inhabit instead a series of masks - identity is ‘performed’ -it is a masquerade.

• The self and our identity is constructed

“Slavoj Zizek has argued that deconstructive criticism has often misunderstood an Hegelian notion of identity as being impossible; deconstruction always leads to a deferral of identity. For Zizek it is this very impossibility of a closed subjectivity that is the very name of identity itself. He would describe a realisation of the contingency of self in time and space as consciousness, that is something that can never be grasped and that is continually slipping away.”

Paula Smithard“Grabbing the Phallus by the Balls”Everything magazine

“Early feminist readings of Sherman’s photos drew enthusiastic attention to ways in which they revealed woman as cultural construct, a pawn of media inventiveness; even today Sherman is held up as a pioneer investigator into the feminine masque. Yet the artist herself has consistently resisted that interpretation.”

Brandon TaylorArt of TodayPg. 95

“Ironically, in overlooking the question of female pleasure, critical texts that privilege feminist appropriation art for its refusal of the desiring male gaze have maintained the boundaries of masculine critical and viewing authority even as they have worked to celebrate practices that critique it”

Amelia Jones

“Whatever happened to the old 1970’s idea of the revolutionary power of women’s laughter? Who would want a revolution that didn’t allow for dancing in the first place? And what could make the over swollen dick of culture shrivel faster than women’s well timed laughter?”

Aimme Rankin

“The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgement onpostmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgement on ourselves as well as on the artefacts in question.”

Fredric jameson‘The Politics of theory:Ideological Positions In the Postmodernism Debate’, New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984), p. 63

Cindy Sherman

• Staged, glossy, seductive photographic images of herself in a variety of stereotypical, mass media representations of woman. Sherman is always at pains to point out that her photographs are not self portraits.

• For many writers, especially feminist critics, her work reveals how femininity is a masquerade - how femininity is performed, with women drawing on a range of available cultural produced representations of femininity.

• In a more abstract sense her work ties in with postmodernist critiques of modernist notions of the self. In postmodern theory the self is conceived of, not as a unitary, bounded, autonomous entity but as fluid and dependent on context. In postmodern theory our selves are always in a process of being made and made over .

• Sherman’s work is often humorous, playful, with the artist displaying a palatable enjoyment and pleasure in the process of ‘trying on someone else's cloths’. There is a lack of moral righteousness in the work, rather a paradoxical pleasure is expressed.

Jo Spence

•“As we view images and witness their mutability it becomes apparent that truth is a construct, and that identity is fragmented across many truths’. An understanding of this frees up the individual from the constant search for the fixity of the ideal self and allows an enjoyment of the self as process and becoming.”

•Jo Spence

“Class and education…as a working class artist I feel I have an obligation to offer something back to my own group; to help other women and men to seek

and find the resources they need for an art education which suits their particular class/ethnic/racial/sexual needs (something I never located within

higher education). My work within education has always been class identified and linked to a political consciousness, but it was not until the late 1980’s that

the question of my class unconsciousness became relevant .I then moved rapidly away from social or socialist realism and began to develop the concept of the psychic realism with Rosy Martin, taking techniques from psychotherapy

and merging them with photography into a Theatre of the self. Such work remains grounded in humorous, ironic, and paradoxical cultural forms with

which I grew up as a working class child, playing with puns and contradictions as it represents subjectivity in process. Here I am beginning to unravel the

knots of the psychic, social, economic and ideological processes which have constructed the ‘me’ who struggles in and out o consciousness. A large

component of this work has begun to devolve around shame, to make visible my apparent shifting between classes, masquerading as someone else, my self silencing and my intermittently repressed rage which often manifested itself as

sarcasm…”

Jo Spence “Class Confusion and Cultural Solidarity” printed Fan magazine in 1991.

Sarah Lucas

Tracey Emin

Alex Bag

GladiaDaters, 2005, video still

Erica Eyres