HA Schult is a German conceptual artist who goes to famous landmarks and fills them up with hundreds of life-size statues made of garbage. This is a picture of one of the installations.Postmodernism would appear to be stitched into the fabric of our contemporary global existence. Just as the industrial revolution parted people from their rural paths and led them down the lane of urban alienation it would appear that the contemporary visible information 'superhighway' has continued to lead the masses to an invisible black-hole of consumption.
Who gains from this consumption? Does mass consumption and production of visual images contaminate visual pleasure in a psychological way? The constant fragmentation we experience between real and unreal seems to behave like a fracturing between wakefulness and sleep -- the phase where one has disarranged snippets of reality combined with the surreal. Maybe we are just copying and pasting ourselves into a new reality as JibJab or Second Life allows us to do.
I find that I am fragmented by Postmodernism as well. I used to feel secure in knowing fact from fiction in the visual realm. However, I no longer feel that confidence. Postmodernism has fractured my security. There is no one 'real' truth with Postmodernism. Sometimes that is liberating; sometimes that is terrifying. It depends on what I am looking at and when.
Hey Lisa it's Chris. Reading your post reminded me of the book _Underworld_ by Don DeLillo--ever read it? The main character has an obsession with garbage (essentially). He's also obsessed with collecting memorabilia, trying to get something that's an authentic "original," and that's linked to a specific historical event (in the novel he's trying to find the original baseball hit in the famous "shot heard round the world"). Anyway, your notion of a "visible information superhighway" leading people down the "black-hole of consumption" reminded me of that book. Nick (the main character) started out trying to just dispose of everything, but throughout the entire book, all that he had gotten rid of eventually came back to consume him. There are constant reminders, too, in the book, of the unsustainable build-up of garbage in our modern society, with the implication that if we don't deal with it in a substantive way soon, it will overrun--and consume--our entire culture.
ReplyDelete