Reading 3: Jean-Francois Lyotard “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”

According to Lyotard, postmodernism essentially operates retrospectively. It is the unquantifiable presentation of the unpresentable governed by rules it is in the process of discovering. Ironically postmodern principles in art can often be discerned reflectively in modernist works, Lyotard explains, “postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”1

Postmodernism is arguably a conceptual impossibility. Pure postmodernist experimentations in art attempt to present what is truly unpresentable (that referred to by Kant as the sublime). Lyotard believes modernism fails to truly present the sublime as it does so nostalgically by using representational methods already familiar to the viewer. Postmodernism however is an attempt to present what is unpresentable by means yet to be determined. It does not subscribe to any pre-established rules but rather, as Lyotard explains, “those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for.”2

Postmodernism is the ‘none-thing’, ‘the nothing’, the space between the lines, and yet it is not ‘void’. By virtue of its ontology art has to present something that is presentable in order to exist. This presentation can be largely conceptual; however, even in its ultimate state of ‘non-being’ something has been conveyed making the concept conceivable and thereby ‘presentable’.

Many Conceptual artists have wrestled with attempts to present art in its most ‘sublime’ state. They have gone so far, and succeeded, in removing the ‘object-ness’ inherent in art works.3 In so doing art has effectively been sublimated to the cognitive processes of concept. An excellent example of the precedent of concept superceding the object-ness of an artwork is a performance piece by Robert Barry entitled Telepathic Piece. Performed in 1969 the piece was presented with the following statement, “during the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image”.4

Has art reached a state of complete nonsense?
Sorokin would blame the postmodern condition on the progressive detachment of society from an ideational focus. He argues that postmodern society has forfeited ideological ideals to become an entirely sensate culture.5 If modernism presented the conceivable sublime and Postmodernism the actually unpresentable, what then is left for art to present? To return to the representation of art for its own sake would be regressive, art as a tool used to illicit veneration and worship has also been fully exploited. Has art overreached its own capabilities? Is it in danger of implosion?

1 - Jean-Francois Lyotard. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” translated by Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p 79.
2 - Ibid, p 81.
3 - Meyer, U. Conceptual Art. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1972. P XV.
4 - Nikos Stangos, (ed), Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism, London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2003. P 264.
5 - Sorokin, P. The Crisis of Our Age. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1992. P 26.