Postmodernism, as I researched and understood it...

I have been reading POSTMODERNIST CULTURE, An introduction to theories of the contemporary by Steven Connor to help understand more this movement and especially how it influenced art.
I want to quote parts of the text I have read and then "debrief" it...

" we might say that the characteristics of postmodernism is this peculiarly complex relationship which it has to modernism which in its very name it has once invoked, admired, suspected or rejected."
For me this means that postmodernism and modernism are in many ways closely linked.

ARCHITECTURE:
MODERNISM: Bauhaus Walter Gropius, Henri Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe.

" From now on, architecture was to belong to and express the new. It was to use new materials and embrace the techniques of construction which industrial development had made available, The newness of the modern movement would lie principally in forms of reduction, simplification and concentration."
NEW and SIMPLIFICATION

"Its beauty was now longer to be incidental or supplementary to its function, for its beauty would now be its function."
Introduction of beauty not only as a "plus" but has the aspects of modernism constructions.

"At the same time, architecture was to be the visible expression of a new unity of art, science and industry."

Architecture was the first and most obvious example of the modernist movement.

" Jencks focuses first of all on what he calls the uni valence

of modern architecture. (...) the simple, essential forms (...)usually, this is achieved by the device of repetition, (...) in their approximation of geometrical perfection (...)which does not refer to anything outside itself by quotation or allusion.

Uni valence: the quality of being univalent:

Genetics. (of a chromosome) single; unpaired; not possessing or joining its homologous chromosome in synapsis.)http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Univalent?o=100074

To me this means that modernism is about simplicity to a extend that it doesn't even link to the "world context".

"The first and most obvious of these is through a return to the sense of the meaningful or referential function of architecture."

Not much connection with the current context but more about a message through architecture.

ART:

MODERNISM: Kandinsky,Klee, Mondrian, Clive Bell (critic), Kant (philosopher)

"What holds modernism together in art is a programme or ideology, rather than a particular, identifiable form of practice; correspondingly, what underline debate about postmodernism is a shift in this programme. This is to say that even more than in architecture,artistic modernism is defined at some point between practice and theory, between artistic objects and their definitions. The postmodernism debate makes this interrelationship even more complex."

Modernism art is about its significance, postmodernism is a following of it adding more to its definition.

Greenberg believes, that because Kant was the first philosopher thoroughly to scrutinize the nature and limitations of reason itself , he is the first real modernist.

"For Greenberg, the undeniable dominance of painting in modernism is due to the achievement of this absolute self-possession and self government, and it's painting's absolute dependence upon its own medium."

SELF SELF and SELF : self criticism, scrutinize, self possession, self-government...

I believe the modernism movement was not about matching in the context anymore but about individuals and the own development of each techniques independently and maybe even about each countries evolving independently...

"Greenberg's attempt, then, is to affirm the uni valence of painting, as Le Corbusier wanted to affirm the essential identity of architecture."

"It might be said that Cavell has run into a certain crucial switch point in the division of modernism from postmodernism in the visual arts, a point at which modernism's intensity of self-definition flips over into a radical uncertainty about art's very means and identity."

Where it changed from modernism to postmodernism, that is when the self when too far too a point that there weren't any more identity in art.

The theory of postmodernism can be separated in two by two Critical groups; the conservative-pluralist "Charles Jencks has identified himself as the central figure of conservative-pluralist theories of artistic postmodernism." and the critical-pluralist which is represented by writers from the journal October.

"Where Jencks imagines a simple break between the restriction of modernist 'absorption' and the openness of post modernist 'theatrically', the October group seek to understand the complex relationships between the terms of the binary opposition."

difference between the two post modernist analysis group.

"One of the signs of this openness to that which lies beyond the self-absorbed work, is the unabashed return to representation, symbolism, connotation, and all the other forms of referentiality."

One of the characteristic of post modernism is this come back to the arts referring to a context.

"..forms of artistic post modernism have all been money spinners, and whose central purpose, in recent years, seems to have been to reconstitute art in the way that Jencks so openly acknowledges, as 'the image of the bourgeoisie triumphant and enjoying itself'"

Post modernism is again the comeback of what art was before the modernism movement.

The structure of oppositions which frames the post modernist analysis of the two groups * therefore has much in common, in setting multi valence against uni valence, impurity against purity, and inter-textuality against singleness of the work."

* conservative-pluralist( Jencks) and critical-pluralist (October) .

This part of the text explain clearly what is the difference between modernism and post modernism.

"This complex passage argues that the non representational sign of the modernist painting always represents something, if only the desire to embody non representation."

Interesting point about modernism and in life generally, even if you are against all kind of "group" then you will be grouped as a non-group.

PHOTOGRAPHY:

" As the quintessentially art, modern art, photography has been one of the most threatening adversaries to the integrity of paintings in the twentieth century.Indeed, one may say that it was partly in reaction to the widespread dissemination of photographic technology that modern painting was forced to turn from representation into the abstract interrogation of its own form of conditions."

The role and evolution of photography in these movements(modernism and post modernism), as I understand it art- photography too the self absorption the modernists had.

I am happy I could read this chapter and understand some of it, it was a challenge for me!

What I will remember from it is that Modernism and Post modernism are closely linked and could not exist independently, I will remember the self of modernism and the back to referential values of the post modernism, I have learnt about architecture and influential names linked to modernist art and post modernist art.