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HAROLD ROSENBERG
a stopping short, or even a return to a state preceding the modernist
excitement. Post-modernism is the epoch of worn out ideologies, even
the anti- or endgame ideology of the sixties. No more vanguards, sys–
tems, dreams. No more radical tradition.
Yet post-modernism is not a "return to solid principles." It is in–
novation without aim, a policy of eccentricity -·the mental habits of
modernism but lacking its expectations.
When Duchamp drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa he demon–
strated that for him art meant the Renaissance. A Duchamp today
would be compell ed to distribute mustaches among carvings from the
Congo, East Indian tantras, pre-Columbian temple fragments, Navajo
blankets.
In the post-modern period, art is anthropology. The basic model
is folk art, with or without professional training. Modernism is Inher–
ent ly polemical; it
advocates
the present. By its very nature it generates
vanguards, that is, representatives of the future who issue orders
to
those lagging behind that they must catch up. In post-modernism the
present sinks back into the past. As for the future, it will be another
CBS evening-news sign-off: "That's how it is ... "
Put simply, the idea of post-modernism is that the time has come
for a ll radical thinking and activity denoted by the word modernism
to
come to a halt. Henceforth, to keep striving
to
advance in any direction
will be taken as a sign of backwardness.
The notion of post-modernism has one advantage: it normalizes
the modern as a period that can be left behind, like other periods in
history. In the post-modern age, for example, modern art is, for the
first time, fully assimilable by the museum.
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It
is possible for an epoch to be struck dumb.
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THE PATHOS OF THE PEOPLES: to be half way into a new world
yet be unable
to
enter it. This is the material condition of millions on
every continent.
