Reading Day 1
The PostmodernES #academic, #functionality, #activist, #utopia
‘We oppose a nihilistic vision of ‘art for arts sake.’ We are interested in an art form that crosses disciplines, integrating both the poetic and the functional’. Lucy Orta, in an interview with Nicolas Bourriard Broadly speaking, the postmodern can be defined by three strands: Skepticism, irony, and philosophical critique of concepts of universal truth and objective reality. The postmodern, or postmodernity, is a western philosophical movement that began in the late 20th century, largely as a reaction against intellectual values and ideologies of the modern period, of the 17th to 19th century. Indeed, the doctrines characteristically associated with postmodernism can be described as a straightforward rejection of the ‘grand narratives’ of Modernism (or ‘metanarratives’, as Jean-Francois Lyotard coined in his book The Postmodern Condition in 1979), specifically criticising Enlightenment rationality. Postmodernists dismiss the tendency within Enlightenment discourse to adopt ‘totalizing’ systems of thought, and so their reliance on a transcendent and universal truth particularly with regards to biological, historical, and social development. They declare this nature of thinking not only to be false, but also to be imposing conformity on other discourses and so through this marginalising, oppressing, and silencing them. Therefore, as a postmodernist you are skeptical of claims that any explanation, or so called ‘truth’, is ever valid for every culture, every tradition or every race. You believe that truth is relative, and reality is a mental construct.
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