Post Modernism and Visual Culture

Post Modernism and Visual Culture - from 1980s to present? Time we're living through but not defined?

Modernism:
- Roughly 100 years - Mid 19th century in Europe to late 1970s in America. 
- Sustained period of innovation in the arts - linked to changes in industry, science, media, etc. 
- Context - overarching political and power constructs. 

Key themes:
- Rationalism.
- Technology > culture.
- Belief in grand narratives.
- Foreground of high (elitist) culture. 

Post truth culture:
- Distrust in fact/expert opinion.
- Truth is relative, contested, not absolute. 
- Replaced by authenticity. 

Anti Modernism:
- Complex reaction to failure of modernism > conflicts, holocaust, ecological disasters etc. 
- Anti foundational - reject rationalism, truths, etc. 
- Scepticism of grand political schemes of modernism. 
- Feminist views to modern media. 

Hyper Modernism:
- State is constant, incomplete. 
- Cyclical culture. 
- New media and technology.
- Technology acceleration. 

Visual culture 

 Mutations of public space:
- Urban or fantasy architectural spaces, eg. theme parks are hyper reality. 
- Global/cultural hybridity. 

The unstable image:
- Real/untouched
- Bricolage, parody and pastiche. 
- Intertextuality and double coding. 
- Hybrid genres and recycled narratives. 

The real, retouched or recycled:
- No longer trusting images as a true representation. 
- The degradation of image, reading representation and not meaning. 
- Semiotic overload. 

The society of the spectacle:
- Mediation - life lived on and through a screen.
- Complexity and simulation is the new reality - more information but less meaning. 
- Multi-modal narratives.