hi class it's professor Whitlock let's begin our third and final unit of the semester and this final unit will be discussing the concept of post-modernism now the concept of post-modernism is really tricky to define but essentially it's a philosophy it's a way of trying to comprehend and understand the contemporary culture that we're living in right now in the 21st century now we didn't arrive at this culture overnight it's something that that came on gradually over time throughout the 20th century so we're going to take a look at kind of how post-modernism came to be and what its characteristics are now if you want to look at the long view of history you could chop it up into three categories pre-modern modern and postmodern and in this class we've looked at all of those time periods so we've looked at all the way back from prehistoric times cave paintings the Venus of Willendorf we looked at ancient Greece we looked at the Byzantine era we looked at the Renaissance we looked at the neoclassical era right right about the time of the French Revolution which brought us right into what you would call the modern era now there are no hard and fast rules about exactly when the modern era began and when it ended but for the purpose of this discussion let's just say that the modern era emerged in the wake of the Renaissance and then over the course of the 20th century you see elements of the postmodern era creeping in to understand post-modernism you first have to understand what what the modern era was all about so let's tackle that first the modern era is characterized by enlightenment values so emphasis on reason and logic equality democracy science these are all harm hallmarks of the modern era and of course the French and the American revolutions were really important mile-marker in this to the modern era because this was the moment where democracy really became the prevailing style of government in the Western world there is a prevailing attitude that all people are created equal that we are all the same that there is no hereditary principle or this idea that some people are somehow a better class than other people now do we always live up to that ideal no we don't but that's the value of democracy those are the values that are expressed through the revolutions and democracy the idea that we're all created equal and that we want to rule ourselves another important aspect of the modern era is the emphasis on science so the scientific method was developed after the Renaissance and now we as a society have a systematic a reliable and objective way of arriving at answers and solving problems so for example in the modern era we know a lot more about disease how disease can be prevented how it can be treated we have the development of things like penicillin and vaccines that protect us from diseases in the pre-modern era often times things like autopsies were considered sacrilegious the idea was that we don't need to know what's going on inside the body that is not our role as humans we need to leave that up to God so that's that was a big shift you also see the development of lots of scientific technologies that help us to observe and understand our world so you have things like microscopes that help us see things on a molecular a molecular level you see things like telescopes that help us to understand the universe in a more precise way and of course the Scientific Revolution is what makes the industrial revolution possible in the 1800s you see this emergence of all kinds of new technologies that are made possible through science so we have better community Haitian tools we you know think about even going back to the printing press that was invented in the 1400s this was a huge transformation for culture before this if you wanted to have a copy of a book someone had to hand copy it and it was a very laborious process and therefore very few people had access to books and written material but once you have the printing press you can distribute information to a mass amount of people at once and this of course improved year after year after year you then have the Telegraph and then you have the telephone and radio and television and then later the internet and now we're all walking around with these little computers in our pocket I can't you know someone in the 1400s could have never been able to wrap their heads around that science also made it possible for us to travel more easily so you know first you see things like steam engines and then later cars and then airplanes I can hardly look in the sky nowadays without seeing an airplane going by that kind of blows my mind sometimes and if I I bet that if I asked you all if you've ever traveled outside the country my guess would be about 75% of you would say yes and you're young you know you have your whole life ahead of you and if I had asked that same question maybe 20 years ago I bet the answer would have been a lot different we're living in a time where international travel or just travel in general is very easy it's accessible it's relatively inexpensive and this is new this is a new phenomena that of course is gonna have a huge impact on our culture a lot of people say that it's shrinking our world meaning that our world doesn't feel so big and inaccessible but we feel like we can go anywhere and see lots of lots of places in this world and we're all kind of a closer knit global community of course science also impacted industry so in the pre-modern era you have artisans who take a lot of time to make individual one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture and products and you know people didn't have as much stuff as as we have now now everything is mass-produced in factories that were made possible through Zions and so this impacted our our culture in many many ways and one of those ways was the way that society is organized so people started in the Industrial Age in the modern age you start to see more people living in cities their movie you know whereas in the pre-modern era you have more agrarian lifestyle people are living on farms and they live in smaller communities but throughout the industrial era you start to see people kind of come together in cities and working in factories and working in those kinds of jobs where they punch a clock you know where they go and they work in this job and then they come home and the concept one kind of funny example that always kind of makes me chuckle that comes from the Industrial Revolution is the concept of a weekend before the Prix you know before the modern era they the people wouldn't have understood the concept of a weekend you know you just work all the time every you know your work and your life are intertwined in such a way that you don't really see a difference right but in the industrial era where people are going and they're working in a factory you actually won advantage to that is that you have leisure time you have blocks of time where you can kind of do what you want this was something that the Impressionists of the late 1800s were fascinated with this concept of leisure time and also just the idea that classes are starting to mix together in new ways but you don't always see this really rigid class distinction between like the Hana Xie regime or the the ruling classes the noble classes and all the rest of the people that there's more of like an intermingling and of course that comes out of democracy as well of course Science and Industry is a bit of a mixed bag for all the wonderful things that science and industry has given us better communication better transportation better health all of those things you could also argue that it has made war more destructive so we've been fighting wars since the pre-modern era but in the modern era war takes on massive proportions with all these new technologies like machine guns and airplanes and mustard gas and and all of these things that were made available because of science but also meant a greater loss of life and as we've discussed before this kind of led to a period of intense anxiety for culture the age of anxiety where people were really feeling disillusioned about the state of the modern era they were feeling disillusioned about the where civilization had had come to and if it had led us to this very destructive place maybe we needed to go back and rethink some things so this is where you have artists like Mondrian who and Kandinsky who are trying to come up with some new ideas about how to think about civilization and how art could help us to transform our society into something new something better you have a Dada artists like do Shah really questioning the nature of culture and how can we rethink things how can we go back to infancy as a society and maybe arrive at a better place and for many people it's this work the fountain that it was like I've said was the what considered one of the most influential works of art of the 20th century and many people look to this work of art as being the birth of post-modernism this work is all about questioning its questioning the meaning of art and it's questioning on some level what is the meaning of truth and that is really the fundamental premise of post-modernism is about questioning trying to break down what had been established in the modern era and rethink it and come up with something new now Duchamp was not the only person to be thinking about these things there were lots of other artists and philosophers kind of thinking similar things and one such philosopher is Jacques Derrida now Jacques Derrida was doing in philosophy what Duchamp was doing with sculpture Derrida was thinking about the nature of truth and how much can we really depend on truth Derrida established a type of philosophy known as deconstructionism and in this philosophy there's a lot of questioning of and asking yourself well what exactly is truth is there is it possible to arrive at an objective truth that everyone can agree on and Derrida did a lot of interesting mental exercises to kind of help answer some of these questions now one of his ideas and and he's written many many many many things and we're really just scratching the surface here but one of one of his core ideas is that this concept of logo centrism this idea that had been very prevalent in the modern world that if we write something down if we use logic and reason and scientific method to come up with something and we write it in a book then it must be true and that we can all agree on that truth and it's very stable right and he says no I don't believe it I don't buy it I don't think that that's really possible I think people are deluding themselves ok this was his idea he said instead we should embrace what he called aporia or the inevitable contradictions that come from the written word and just accept the fact that there's always going to be of confusion there's always going to be a disconnect and people are not always going to see the truth in the same way okay this might feel a little confusing so let me give you an example to illustrate my point here is an image on the screen what does this mean to you so I'll just pause for a moment and get a mental picture in our mind of what this means to us so I did this little exercise with my family and here were the different ideas that we came up with one of my my younger son thought of the dog from the up movie my older son said you know I'm just picturing this really generic drawing of a dog you know not a lot of detail there my husband thought of this doll that we used to have when my kids were little from word world if you ever saw a word world because he was picturing the letters you know that's and arguably none of those are actual dogs they're all just figments of people's imaginations I of course I thought of a little puppy because isn't that a cute puppy you know come on so we all had a different idea and that's just four of us and I bet if I asked each one of you you would each have some different picture in your mind of what this word means it's interesting a cultural difference that I have noticed when talking about this topic with my students is that students who are from Latin American cultures said when I see the word dog it makes me think of like a man who's a really woman like a womanizer and treats women badly now I never thought of that that like never occurred to me so for every person this worked like if you don't even speak English this is just gonna look like a bunch of random shapes and letters on on the screen and it won't even have any sort of meaning for you and this is exactly so this is exactly what Derrida is trying to illustrate here is that even though even something as simple as the word lacks clarity it's going to have a different meaning a different truth for every person here's another example and this time instead of just a short three-letter word we have a full sentence even more room for misinterpretation right so this is a sign that I have seen in the bathroom of a one of my favorite restaurants and it always gives me in my family a bit of a chuckle because if you read this it says do not flush anything down the toilet except for toilet paper now clearly we understand what they mean they don't want you to put paper towels and random things down the toilet but if you were to read this literally it's leaving out a really important thing that you do want to flush down the toilet so there's a big there's a lot of this example right here illustrates exactly how words can lack clarity and no matter how hard you try that there's always going to be a disconnect between what is intended and what is perceived and this is what Derrida was getting at so a lot of deconstructionist philosophy is basically you know these are two very simple examples that we've been looking at but in deconstructionist philosophy there is a lot of looking at higher level thinking ideas and and deconstructing them kind of picking them apart and illustrating how the intended meaning is maybe not as clear as we would like to think just because it's written down and this is a hallmark of post-modernism it's about questioning the nature of truth it's about questioning meaning and acknowledging the fact that we all have our own version of reality that we are all kind of living in this little bubble and we're constantly trying to communicate with other people and help people to understand what we're thinking but at the end of the day it's futile that we'll never really fully be able to understand one another so let's do a few side-by-side comparisons of the modern era versus the postmodern era okay we'll start with the concept of truth so in the modern era it's born out of the Enlightenment values of the scientific method and reason and logic and there's this confidence that if we just follow those plans that we can arrive at some sort of universal truth that we can all under understand and that we can all agree on on the other hand in the postmodern era there's a real crumbling of that idea there's this idea this this realization truth is not universal but in fact it's relative that we all have our own unique understanding of what the truth is and each one of us is going to have a different interpretation of what the truth is another comparison that you could make between the modern era and the postmodern era is in the way that cultural institutions are perceived and when I say cultural institutions I'm talking about things like the government and public school system I'm also talking about things like religion and family structures I'm talking about you know the field of science itself these are all cultural institutions and in the modern era there was a lot of trust there was a lot of confidence in these institutions so for example you know it people tended to do what the government said and trusted the government and said you know that there the government has our best interest at heart if they're telling us to do something then we should do it likewise if if someone with who was a scientist and had a lab coat and had a PhD after their name you know we thought well they must have some expertise in that area and we will do what they say right now we're living in the postmodern era where there's a whole breakdown of that kind of confidence now there's a lot more distrust of institutions like government and science so you see this like in things like the vaccine debate is a really good example of this in the past when people had were introduced to a vaccine they were like yay no more polio you know and they were like please the government is taking care of us and they were very happy to have those vaccines now in the post modern era you see a lot of people who are very distrustful of science and the medical field and government and they are reluctant to listen to what those people have to say they you know so I think that's a really good example of the difference between the modern era and the postmodern era you also see it just in the way that people live their normal daily lives so thinking about family structures is a good example in the modern era there was a lot of rules about okay this is what you know family looks like it's a mom and a dad and two babies or whatever you know and now people are saying you know we don't need to follow those rules we will create our own sense of family we might get married we might not you see a lot more same-sex marriages you see a lot more interracial marriages so they're the kind of rules and the kind of traditions that were established in the modern era are now kind of people don't really feel and they don't feel the need to follow those rules they they're much more inclined to kind of do their own thing religion is another area where you see a big difference between the modern era and the postmodern era so in the modern era there was a lot of emphasis on organized religion you know you go to a Catholic Church or an Episcopalian Church and you kind of follow their rules and structure in the postmodern era we are at an unprecedented level of people who are not a Philly with any religious organization now that's not to say that they're not religious it just means that they don't affiliate with a particular organized religion they kind of are doing their own thing which is very a very postmodern kind of a thing another comparison that you could make between modernism and post-modernism is the way that we perceive Authority and this kind of goes back to what we were talking about with cultural institutions so when the modern era you see much more of a tendency for people to follow Authority without question police military government the idea was that these people are here to protect us and we should follow their lead so think about the people that you know in your life who are old or you know like in their eighties and think about like maybe when they go to the doctor misil in that generation tend to really follow the doctor's orders without question they say oh well the doctor told me to do this and I don't need to know why I the doctor knows what he's doing and I will just do what I'm told right but younger people in today's culture have a much different attitude they're much more than they see almost like the doctor is like an advisor but they're kind of doing they're making the decisions they're calling the shots and people are not afraid to question doctors now in fact it's pretty regular routine expected thing that you question the doctor and you ask questions and you make sure you understand why they're telling you to do what you're doing and and so on and I think that really is a good illustrative point for what I'm saying here and of course you also see it in terms of military or I'm sorry you see it with police issues you see a lot of distrust of police and military and you know there's a lot of questioning that the police are are they corrupt are they abusing their power you know so you really see that kind of questioning of authority come to play in that arena as well when thinking about how our perceptions of authority have changed over the course of the 20th century and beyond I think about how Authority kind of comes emerges from the people it's kind of more of a bottom-up rather than a top-down so instead of just a few select group of authority figures like police officers and government officials giving us edicts and saying this is what this is what you're gonna do and enforcing their authority now we kind of the people almost have their own authority that comes up from the people and it all kind of comes because of this I think this has a lot to do with it we all are carrying a phone and a video camera with us almost all the time so when we see things that are happening all we have to do is catch it on film and distribute it across the Internet and that gives us a little piece of authority and if all of the members of society have a little piece of authority we are all kind of collectively enforcing an authority and I think that's an interesting shift and for better or worse you know those in some ways that's an advantage but I think there are a lot of disadvantages that come with that you know it lacks due process sometimes it lacks a certain common sense sometimes it can be manipulative can be manipulated through things like Photoshop and clever editing techniques and you don't always see the full truth even though when you're looking at a video so it's kind you know it's kind of an interesting thing to consider but it is a shift in the way that authority is expressed in our culture another way that you could compare the modern era and the postmodern era is in the way that we interpret progress the modern era was very much concerned with making steady progress towards what is hard to say some sort of destiny some sort of ultimate that if we just follow the scientific method if we follow reason and logic and order that we will ultimately reach some sort of goal as a human species kind of feels very like science fictiony to me like Star Trek or something like that but in the postmodern era there's a real rejection there's a real pushback against that idea that we're not actually making progress that it's progress is an illusion it's kind of a fantasy that we like to think that we're making progress towards some sort of ultimate goal but all we're really doing is changing we're just kind of running around in circles and I think that I that's a question that I love talking to people about because it's it's always an interesting conversation so I encourage you to maybe when you're having dinner with your family tonight to maybe have that conversation do you think that as a human species we are making steady progress you know and if you think back to the Paleolithic era are our lives better today than they were back then that's kind of debatable I mean some people would say definitely you know we live longer we have nice comfortable homes and clothes and warmth and cars and videogames and we have all kinds of great stuff that we didn't have back then of course we've made progress right but on the other hand you could say well are we really any happier are we real our lives better is our do we have a more meaningful as existence today than we did back then some some might argue that we don't that we're all just kind of obsessively looking at our phones all the time and that we're missing life you know so I think that's a really interesting conversation to have so there are many many ways that you can compare the modern era and the postmodern era and like I said this was not just some sort of snap your fingers hello it's the postmodern era today it was something that very grad Julie shifted over the course of the 20th century and in some ways we still have elements of modern culture in in today's society and in some ways we have postmodern culture you can kind of read things both ways so it's not a real black-and-white thing it's definitely a very gray subject and that's what makes it fun right and one way to try to digest all of this complex ideas about philosophy and culture is by looking at art this is kind of where art really has its place because it helps us to digest and understand these things so in this unit we're going to look at a number of works of art that kind of helped us to understand post-modernism so for example we're going to look at architecture and I think that architecture is one of the most useful ways to really understand the difference between modernism and post-modernism because with with modern architecture it's it's this very clear symbol of modern enlightenment values it's all about efficiency and mass production and that's why modern architecture tends to look like boxes everything is very efficient and orderly on the other hand with postmodern architecture and we're gonna look at a particular architect named Frank Gehry you may have heard of him he's kind of the quintessential postmodern architect it's all about breaking the rules it's about you know why do we do it that way why do we need to do it that way maybe there's a better way maybe there is a form of architecture that's more reflective of contemporary society so in modern and the modern sensibility the idea is less is more you've probably heard that expression that it's all about simplicity right in the postmodern idea is that that's boring let's do something more exciting another thing to pay attention to in the postmodern era is this concept of pastiche and we talked about pastiche before it's essentially a fancy word to describe collage a blending together of different cultures differ genres different time periods it's kind of like a remix right some might even say that it's plagiarism so you know it's really kind of a controversial approach to art but in the modern era what was valued was originality that you make something that's one-of-a-kind and that one-of-a-kind piece hangs in a museum and you know that's what makes it special in the postmodern era that kind of originality is not valued instead we are more of like a meme culture it's more about taking images from the past so here's an example on the right you have an image that was painted in the Baroque era by Vermeer this is considered like the Mona Lisa of the north right it's very special painting and here we are in the 21st century and you have street artists like Banksy taking that image taking that very famous image from the 1600s and putting it on the side of the building and putting where the earring should be is an att symbol of security systems of the symbol so it's this real blending together of cultures and time periods and genres to create new meaning and in a way I you know I do think that there can be an argument that artists of today lack originality they're always borrowing things from the past and taking things from other artists and making them their own yeah maybe that's laziness but in a way another way to look at it is that they're having a conversation they're having a collaboration the artist from today is collaborating with this artist from centuries ago and they're coming together to make something new we see it all the time and hardly any music that you hear on the radio is 100% original so much music contains samples and you know it's collaborative effort sometimes the P who are collaborating and musical projects are not they don't even they're not even in the same room at the same time they may not have ever ever met but they are working together because they are collaborating via the internet which is another important aspect of post-modernism is that we are have a lot of technology available to us that changes the way that we make art the internet you know Photoshop YouTube these are all technologies that we have that have a huge impact on the way that we make art one of the big shifts that took place in the art world from the modern era to the postmodern era is the way that the artist is perceived so in the modern era is kind of like what we were talking about with authority earlier in this lecture in the modern era the artist was seen as the voice the artists like jia chloe dahveed in this painting is sending us a message he is saying something to us and we are receiving it and it's a very one-way street he is providing us a message we are receiving it whereas in the postmodern era that interaction between the artist and the viewer becomes more interactive and you really begin to see that with works like the fountain that was exactly what what Duchamp was after there is trying to engage the viewer trying to make art more of an interactive experience more of a process it's not just something that is being downloaded into us right but it's something that we are arriving at together the artist and the viewer come together they have kind of a conversation metaphorically speaking and they arrive at meaning together as a collaborative effort and this is very connected to that concept of product versus process this idea that in the modern era art was a product it was a thing it was a noun it was something tangible that you could hold in your hand or you could hang it on a wall or you could sell it at a gallery or visit it at a museum art was a thing in the modern era but in the postmodern era art is perceived less about the tangible qualities of the art and more about the intangible qualities the the process the conversation that you're having about the art that is the art the idea the concept the reaction that you're having when you when you look at a work of art like the fountain and you get angry maybe that is the art your reaction your anger your emotion it's not the toilet that's incidental that's really not the point the art is the reaction that you're having and so here's another example of that kind of thing this sprite here that you're seeing is a sculpture called gum head now this was made by a Canadian artist named Douglas Coupland and what he did was he created this colossal self-portrait of his head it's a sculpture and so this is this is what Douglas Copas Koblin looks like and he put it outside this gallery and he invited people to stick their used gum on this sculpture and he didn't really know exactly what was gonna happen he didn't know what it was gonna look like but he wanted to let that process unfold and through that process you know you kind of get a sense for how we all come together and we all create something collaboratively whether we realize it or not we're always doing that all the time so in this way he was letting this process unfold the art is not that colossal head the art is not even the gum the art is the process of all of the people doing that and yet another big shift that you see take place between the modern era and the postmodern era in terms of art is this idea of high art versus low art so high are it went if you you may have heard that term before but it's basically referring to art that is in museums or it's by some sort of well-known artist and it's considered the real art you know because art historians have said that it's real art or that it's somehow valuable have you ever kind of wondered that like why is van Gogh starry night considered valuable work of art but this beautiful drawing that I made when I was in third grade why is that not art you know what's the difference and this is exactly what post-modernism is trying to break down those rules it's all about breaking down rules you know breaking down those structures and saying hey that thing you made in third grade it is just as valuable as van Gogh starry night and there really is no difference if you say that it's art that's all that matters so one example of this so like an example of high art would be something that was made by gosh the the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles right the the guys from the Renaissance are considered kind of the ultimate examples of high art so anything that's made by Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael that's high art right but in the postmodern era there's a lot of pushback against that and you see it with douches ella shaw aku remember when we looked at the postcard where he defaced Mona Lisa that was kind of his attempt at at this it at poking at this concept of high art like why do we put Mona Lisa on such a pedestal what's so great about Leonardo da Vinci you know it's really more about the idea so here's an example I don't know if any of you hadn't had the opportunity to go to that Lego art exhibit that was came around a couple years ago it was really cool I really I went to it because my kids are into Legos and I just thought it would be a fun thing to do but it was actually really a cool experience and this guy basically he had one whole section of works of art that were bought laughter masterpieces well-known masterpieces like Michelangelo's David or the starry night or the Great Wave was one of them you know and anyone that you can think of he did a whole bunch and then he also had a section of original artwork as well but they were all made of Legos now in the modern era if someone had done that they would have just been seen as just doing something kitschy and silly it wouldn't have been taken seriously and it certainly wouldn't have been given the term art it would have just been seen more as like a hobby or a funny thing to do but in the postmodern era that type of work is valued it doesn't matter if you make something out of Legos or if you make it out of gum or if you make it out of garbage you know all of these things can have equal weight and just because you are not famous just because you didn't go to art school your work is still considered just as legitimate in the postmodern era so these are just a few of the ways that you can you can look for modern philosophy and postmodern philosophy when looking at works of art there's we're gonna explore lots lots more in this unit but I want to before we close this lecture I want to draw your attention to your study guide there is a list of common postmodern themes listed here and this is going to really be a helpful guide for you and as you're looking at the works of art I want you to come back to this list often and and ask yourself how are these concepts manifesting in these works of art that I'm that I'm observing as we've said many times throughout this class art is a way of understanding culture it's a way of trying to understand why we do the things we do what do we value where did you know how did we get here why is our culture the way that it is right now so hopefully the topics that we're covering in this unit will give you a framework for trying to understand culture to and maybe give you some good food for thought for where you want culture to go in the future you know this is your time you are young this is your world and now you're in a position to shape culture how do you want to shape it so I'll close there and I will see you on the next lecture bye