Post by minimonkeyjazz on Feb 4, 2017 19:16:58 GMT 8
Our ideas tend towards the postmodern a lot. So this is from our postmodern reading which talks about postmodern aesthetics and the reasoning behind it - thought this excerpt is quite inspiring in what colors to use, what effect to create etc.
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (frederick jameson)
“At any rate, both of these readings (of Peasant Shoes by Van Gogh) may be described as hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shots of a different kind, and it is pelasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol’s ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’ evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van gogh’s footgear: indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. (…) Here, we have a random collection of dead objects…as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz…There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or of glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commercial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in which various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed…one of the central issues about postmodernism itself and its political political dimensions: andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca cola bottle or the campbells soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, the one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.”
“But there are some other significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of andy warhol, on which we must now very riefly dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense - perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we have occasion to return to in a number of other contexts. (….) Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things - debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images - has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhols pieces…this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself - now become a set of texts or simulacra - and in the disposition of the subject."
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (frederick jameson)
“At any rate, both of these readings (of Peasant Shoes by Van Gogh) may be described as hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shots of a different kind, and it is pelasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol’s ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’ evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van gogh’s footgear: indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. (…) Here, we have a random collection of dead objects…as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz…There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or of glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commercial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in which various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed…one of the central issues about postmodernism itself and its political political dimensions: andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca cola bottle or the campbells soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, the one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.”
“But there are some other significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of andy warhol, on which we must now very riefly dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense - perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we have occasion to return to in a number of other contexts. (….) Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things - debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images - has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhols pieces…this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself - now become a set of texts or simulacra - and in the disposition of the subject."