Miško Šuvaković Epistemology of Art - TkH

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Postmodern post-pedagogy: eclecticism,
nomadism, and pleasure in the image
Post-pedagogy, in a broader and more ambiguous sense, also refers
to processes of educational formation of the postmodern ‘retro’,
eclectic, nomadic, and ecstatic artist. Epistemology of postmodern
art education is determined by these very concepts of postulating
the postmodern subject-as-artist-as-painter. In other words, the artist
can not be perceived as a ‘practitioner’ or ‘designer’, indeed an
‘author’, but as a plural symptom – locus of slippage of the symbolic
order – art, culture, and society. ‘Retro’ 143 characterization denotes
retreat from the idea of advancement and progress in the name of
synchronic renderings of hybrid diachronies. The artist therefore
re-directs his epistemologies towards the ‘learned’, i.e. towards the
selection of paintings and potential meanings derived from archives
of the past. Characterization ‘eclectic’ designates plural and, most
commonly, arbitrary cultural knowledge featuring heterogeneity and
crossbreed. The artist becomes a kind of a ‘nomad’ 144 who crosses
parallel, seemingly conflict-free worlds. Artist-nomad is artist on the
move, in displacement, assuming different roles, none of which being
the right one. The postmodern artist is being coached in unsafe and
slippery movement through open concepts and worlds of production
of the ‘artistic’ – from painting (Francesco Clemente), through
film (Peter Greenaway) and theatre (Ian Fabre), to music, dance, and
opera (Philip Glass). The postmodern artist must face his pleasure 145
in the work – the very substance of retro, eclectic, and nomadic concatenations
or interlacings with imperatives of the ‘impossible truth’
in art. Educational epistemology of the ‘eclectic postmodern’ is ba-
143 Achile Bonito Oliva, The Italian Transavantgarde, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milano,
1980; Marina Gržinić, Fiction Reconstructed – Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism & The –
Retro-Avant-Garde, Springerin, Vienna, 2000.
144 Dorothea Olkowski, „Nomadism“, from Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, pp. 47-53; Achile Bonito Oliva,
Transavantgarde International, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milano, 1982.
145 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, New York, 1975.
sically ‘right-leaning’ and ‘neo-conservative’ preference for the latecapitalist-media-culture
‘Romantic artist’. It is contradictory and its
contradictions obscure its aesthetical and cultural potential, which
should be apprehended by way of transformation – into the constructed
world of images’ images.
In the postmodern (transavantgarde 146 , neo-expressionism 147 , anachronism
148 ) painting is defined as visual speech (rhetoric, citation, collage,
montage, simulation) on models of representation and expression
of symbolic, archetypical, narrative, and allegorical topics of the
Western history of art (Renaissance, Manirism, Baroque, Classicism,
Romanticism, Symbolism, Futurism, metaphysical painting – but also
alchemy, magic, occultism, eroticism, perversion, travesty). Postmodern
painting is an eclectic attempt at restoration, but also of parodying
and deconstruction of the grand mimetic historical painting of the
West, or heroic authenticity of expressionist modernism – stipulating
the transcendental shift from pictural to invisible (death, sexuality, politics,
religion). The post-historical eclecticism of the late 70s and early
80s is not a true renewal (recycling) of several mutually incompatible
sources of Western art, but rather modulation (in terms of expression)
and relativisation (in philosophical-historical terms) of modern
art institutions. Eclectic representation of the routes to the origins of
Western art was not established for the sake of the origins, but for the
sake of domination and hegemony of modernism.
The postmodern eclectic promise of a transcendental turn is, paradoxically,
realized as pleasure in sense, but also as pleasure in the very
act of painting in all its erotic or auto-erotic overdeterminations. Skin
146 Achile Bonito Oliva, The Italian Transavantgarde, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milano,
1980; Transavantgarde International, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milano, 1982; see also
Avantguardia Transavantguardia, Electa Milano, 1982.
147 „Zwischenbilanz II – Neue deutsche Malerei“, Kunstforum no. 68, Köln, 1983; Donnald
Kuspit, „Flak from the ‘Radicals’: The American Case Against Current German
Painting“, from Brian Wallis (ed), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation,
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1986, pp. 137-152.
148 Branka Stipančić (ed), Anakronisti ili slikari memorije, Galerija SKC Beograd – Galerija
suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb, 1984.