Showing posts with label Eng. 350 SP 2010 - Post 12 - PoMo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eng. 350 SP 2010 - Post 12 - PoMo. Show all posts

Friday, March 5, 2010

How does PoMo make you feel?

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.