CHAPTER ONE
3. Reflections on Postmodernity, Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness
The preceding characterisations of the postmodern present collectively a nightmarish picture of the present and imminent future. In spite of the complex of opinions about what it means to work and live in the present age, theories of the modern and postmodern (particularly those of Jameson and Bauman) have become significant to my practice.
Gablik’s writing about the meaning and future of art under conditions of rapid social change and spiritual crisis (1991; 1995) also inform this project in important ways and have helped to contextualize the environment and extend and challenge the way in which I think about and produce work within it. While the preceding arguments, drawn from contemporary thinkers’ conceptions of the present age, suggest multiple interpretations of postmodernity and testify to its “protean” character (Bertens 2002:xi), I draw attention in the following sections of Chapter One to those ideas which are paramount to me and significant to this research enterprise.
I emphatically agree with Bauman that it matters particularly now - what we do and don’t believe, and how we do and don’t act (my emphasis). In order to act meaningfully as an artist in the postmodern environment one needs to be aware of, and think about the implications of, several different conceptions of the postmodern. While the views of the cultural theorists on which I draw are often contradictory, there are large areas where their concerns overlap: they all agree that the world is, as Bauman repeatedly notes, full:
comprising no place in which really to escape from the present paradigm and begin anew.
All hold that, as Smith describes, “the global economy is like an accelerating truck with no-one at the wheel” (1999:156). Under these conditions, as suggested in the various writings of Bauman, Jameson, Baudrillard and Gablik, it would appear that freedom has
41 been gained for the wealthy elite while human connectedness and the idea of a
meaningful life have dissolved for the majority of people. These are the significant features that the various conceptions of postmodernity collectively highlight. It is, in my view, unavoidable and morally imperative to engage with these characteristics of
postmodernity as an artist. My practice serves as an effort to simultaneously engage with these conceptions of the present age and, as I will show, to query and counter the
predominant narrative of hopelessness and inertia contained in them.
In this kind of world, visual art (and creative endeavour in general) might seem to
contribute little, perhaps even adding unhelpfully to the seemingly endless fullness of the present and the Gordian knot of production and consumption. Richard Kearney, in Chapter Five of Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries (2002),
suggests that in the crisis of the present age humanity finds itself surrounded by images – ours is a world saturated in, bombarded with and engulfed by imagery – and yet,
simultaneously, this is a space in which individuals are deemed less and less responsible for the workings of their imaginations (Kearney in Glowacka and Boos 2002:85). In such a situation, Kearney, following Levinas, suggests that the dominant role of imaging becomes parody: the image loses its referent to something original becoming “instead a simulacrum: an image of an image of an image” (85).
As noted earlier, Baudrillard too, speaks of the danger and prevalence of the simulacrum and the complicity of art in the collapse of the real. Contemporary art Baudrillard
suggests, is “empty and insignificant” even in its claim to practice irony (2005:27). It conspires with rather than critiquing a world that “has already become hyperrealist, cool, transparent, marketable” (26). Baudrillard comes close to suggesting that visual art has no role to play in uplifting society. Are there convincing counterpoints to this conception of art? Might art also be able to contribute usefully in such a world? These are questions that plague me and many artists who are working today and answering them is not simple.
Questions concerning how art might usefully contribute to society today direct the many areas of my practice and drive me to consider various ways of approaching, conceiving and executing my creative ideas. My search has prompted me to read widely, to look
42 beyond the confines of art theory (the boundaries of which, in typical postmodern
fashion, have grown permeable anyway), to consider the writing of several social and cultural theorists and to reflect on their thinking about how to live meaningfully in a postmodern environment.
Questions about living meaningfully must, for an artist, concern questions about how to render their role (and/or the objects they create) useful to others. The first and potentially most valuable point regarding the role of art in a postmodern context is made by Bauman in numerous of his writings, and is concerned with how to live a meaningful life under liquid modernity. Bauman stresses that when confronting ethical dilemmas in the postmodern world individuals can no longer pass these questions on to experts
(bureaucrats, politicians, scientists) who act as conduits of moral knowledge. Instead of looking to others for answers, the responsibility for answering ethical dilemmas is each individual’s alone. In Life in Fragments (1995), for example, Bauman notes:
More than two centuries after the Enlightenment promise to legislate for an ethical and humane society, we are left, each of us, with our own individual conscience and sentiment of responsibility as the only resource with which to struggle to make life more moral than it is. (279)
In this kind of environment, “dilemmas have no ready-made solutions” and “it is equally easy” to overdo or underdo what is ideally required by acting responsibly (2-3). “Moral life”, Bauman acknowledges, “is a life of continuous uncertainty” (3).
I agree with Bauman’s view that people “are able to make several aspects of society different and better by acts of choice” (Smith 1999:21). Our capacity and responsibility to do this are greater than we are generally led to believe or would like to admit. “Belief in their own powerlessness”, notes Smith, “disenfranchises ordinary men and women” (21).
It is the responsibility of intellectuals and educators to redress the balance of power by
“dissolving this belief” (21). While it is not the responsibility of intellectuals and educators to make or direct the moral choices of others, it is their responsibility (and an urgent one at that) to “provide interpretations and explanations of the world that relate to the experiences, needs and wishes of their audience” (21). Bauman refers to Richard
43 Rory’s assertion that true intellectuals serve others by trying to “expand their moral imagination” and “enlarge their sense of what is possible” (Bauman 2005:13). Their task is to “make relevant knowledge and understanding” accessible to as many people as is possible (Smith 1999:21).