Schizophrenic Postmodernism

In his article, Jameson calls for the deconstruction of analysis in postmodernist art to a method of growingly piece-unique perceptions, which should be contrasted to works of the same period rather than seeking to find a degree of similarity between the two. Jameson urges observers and scholars to diverge from seeking compilation of postmodernist artwork based on similar techniques and overlapping subjects but rather appreciate individual images for their respective aesthetic signifiers and pseudo-factual formulations. Unlike modernist art, as well as that of earlier periods, contemporary art does not “fit neatly” into a particular theme or practice; instead it emerges into an “enormously complex representational dialectic” (54) which requires a digression from the existing approach to artwork analysis which has prevailed since the first observations and studies in Art History.

Given the high volume and scope of art pieces belonging to the postmodernist period, it is understandable that Jameson not expand his argument of fragmentary analysis to every existing painting and photograph; though, he does contrast homogeneity of modernist artwork to that of heterogeneous postmodernist pieces. This writer claims that postmodernism be seen as a cultural dominant rather than an artistic style in order to accede to the coexistence of a wide range of styles, features, and expression. Though at times overwhelming in aesthetic composition, postmodernist artwork embodies parallel dramatization of a society to that of pieces from earlier periods; a realization which observers oftentimes fail to grasp and, also, attribute to the respective image rather than the compilation of works from the postmodernist age. Essentially, Jameson’s argument is summarized in the following “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world” (5).

Throughout the article, Jameson makes the claim that art belonging to the modernist period and before, are characterized by hermeneutical interpretations by the vast majority of observers. He reaches this conclusion after providing the example of Van Gogh’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, “in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken aas a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (8). Though Jameson argues that Andy Warhol’s works do not generate hermeneutical analysis due to their minimalism in objectivity, he fails to describe why he finds Warhol’s relationship to hermeneutical descriptions as representative to all postmodernist art, especially after he encourages observers to refrain from assimilating artworks within particular artistic periods.