Jameson on Postmodernism

The main argument for Jameson’s Chapter reflects on the changes and growth, or lack there of, from art in the modern era to art in the postmodern era. Jameson emphasizes that one is not an element of the other, but rather he focus’ on what he believes to be a clear and unfavorable distinction between the two. He argues that postmodern art has lost its depth and meaning when compared to the modernism era. As Jameson sees it, like other modernists, Van Gogh grasps the truth behind his image with just the raw materials using certain hues and depth to stimulate the viewer with emotion and produce a “Utopian realm of the senses” (7).
Jameson’s motivating question, therefore, attempts to identify what has been lost in meaning when we look at the postmodern era. He argues that its features come from depthlessness, schizophrenia and lack of historicism, lack of individual style, new technology as a figure for a new economic world system, and the connection to multinational capital. He uses work by Andy Warhol to show how the “external and colored surface of things has been stripped away,” and that with postmodernism emerges a flatness in the art. Art like his Coca Cola bottle and Campbell’s soup can only portray the “fetishism of a transition to late capital and political dimensions” (9). Unlike Van Gogh’s work, Jameson refers to Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as more of a “random collection of dead objects hanging together on a canvas” (8). Any potential that such art might have had has been stripped away by new methods of photography and contemporary art like that of Warhol’s.

To Jameson, the postmodern era lacks the gestures and compliments that are offered in modernism that are meant to give the viewer a sense of emotion. In a sense, the larger picture or story behind the meaning of such later art is lost by it’s visual effects and new photographic technology. He argues that the subject of works such as Warhol’s are alienated and lost as a result of its fragmentation, which creates a sense of lost meaning, lack of individuality, and not much overall significance. Overall, Jameson thinks that postmodernism has lost what artists such as Van Gogh were trying to capture and create with their work.

1) “For with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style…the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.” I kept coming back to this quote to figure out what exactly is it saying, but it seems a little unclear and contradicting to me. Doesn’t the past consist less of dead styles and more of work like that of modernists?

2) Even though we consider the modernism era to be over, is there still art that reflects the same interests and meaning as artists like Van Gogh? It is hard to believe that we have completely abandoned modernism styles.