Postmodernity – Fusion of High and Low Art
“Fluids travel easily. (…) they pass around some obstacles, dissolve some others and bore or soak their way through others still”.
According to Bauman, we are a generation of “liquid modernity”, a period that pays no heed to the obstacles and barriers of old systems or the intellectual backwardness of previous ages. “Fluids travel easily. (…) they pass around some obstacles, dissolve some others and bore or soak their way through others still”. [1]
Postmodernism or postmodernity calls into question not only all previous political systems, the historical narrative, but also the existing art; it opposes modernity (modern art), which followed impressionism and preceded conceptualism (late 19th and early 20th centuries).
Postmodern faith in progress, the relationship between art and technology, and discovery of ever new formal tools have finally undergone metamorphosis, taking hold in the ideas of destruction and deconstruction. In practice, this involves taking elements out of context and putting them in new artistic environments, thus assigning them new meanings. As a result, an image (we are still exploring the territory of painting) becomes an intertextual representation; i.e. an interrelation of texts building a new, unique painterly context; in other words, it is an association, connection, or interrelation of meanings, from which the image narrative emerges.
The image no longer requires a user’s manual; it has started to be intertextual, its meaning mutating under the influence of meetings with different audiences, having different awareness, mentality, knowledge, and imagination.
In my opinion, the postmodern creative freedom blurs the boundary between the so-called “low art” and “high art”.
“High art” is reserved for the elite artists, who have always demanded from their audience a certain level of knowledge and familiarity with the cultural code to make possible a “meeting” between a spectator and, shall we say, an “art product”, i.e. a painting, sculpture, theatre performance, musical composition, etc. It has been contrasted with “low art”, i.e. everything that is associated with mass (popular) culture (see Mass Culture and Popular Culture), whose character is determined by the mass media, i.e. television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet. In contrast to high art, its “trans-mission” must be standardised and reduced to a common denominator so that the message becomes clear and legible to the public, to the masses.
However, despite the huge gap between the characters of both arts and their bipolarity, their common ground is the area of mutual influences. That is where the mutation occurs. The arts undergo a fusion. Do the results of such transformations allow “low art” to aspire to “high art”?
Of course, one can disagree with this theory and claim that “low art”, associated with kitsch, focused on quantity and seeking plaudits, will never match the art of the salons. And yet I am convinced that this artistic misalliance is justified.
In my painting, a major sphere of intellectual inquiry is a music video, which is a medium of mass culture in its pure form. Both freeze frames and music are for me a source of creative inspiration. In this way, an element grabbed from the mass media stream becomes a part of the painterly representation – a painting, which is a traditional artistic medium of the elites. This classic, painterly form of representation arms pop mediocrity with refined individualism and vice versa – it multiplies small audience into mass audience. This is so because knowledge of and familiarity with the cultural code is no longer a necessary intellectual skill, but still a welcome one. The image no longer requires a user’s manual; it has started to be intertextual, its meaning mutating under the influence of meetings with different audiences, having different awareness, mentality, knowledge, and imagination.
[1] Bauman Z., “Liquid Modernity”, Polity Press 2000, p. 6.