Beyond Post-Modernism Theory It is true that in our visual arts there have lately been, and still are, an apparently bewildering welter of movements in contemporary fine art that are all in operation at once. These include: Conceptual, Environmental, Performance, Installation, Appropriation, and Minimal Art; more late abstraction of various sorts; the final stages of Pop Art (e.g.Photo-realism, Graffiti); other miscellanea; and finally that current art, such as the most recent work of Joseph Palermo, which this particular curator playfully christened Vegasism, in the Las Vegas Art Museum?s Asian Art Now 2000 exhibition catalogue. The new term refers to that small portion of recent art which transcends the overall deconstructive Post-modernism to which all the other movements just mentioned belong. Promoters of esthetic pluralism claim that all these different kinds of current art are equal participants on the playing field of high art. But they could not be more mistaken. Considering how recently Post-modernism, the final historical phase of the analytic dismantlement of traditional art, was completed, it ought not be surprising that so many different manifestations of its completion, each one a mode of art with outmoded high-cultural intent, should be produced contemporaneously with the still relatively small body of new art, including that of Joseph Palermo, which actually transcends Post-modernism. This new art coexists chronologically with these other movements, but is wholly unrelated to them in terms of both cultural epoch and actual practice. The community of high culture never moves forward en masse with the most advanced innovators; only exceptional sensibilties do this. Yet it is a contradiction in terms for there to be more than one true vanguard operating at the same time. The notion of pluralism in this context is merely a cop-out: an admission of failure in being able to isolate and correctly evaluate the initial, identifiable segment of today's art which is truly innovative at the highest cultural level. Moreover, artistic pluralism is really a misnomer, because in the end, all the miscellaneous Post-modern movements coexisting with Vegasism belong to the single overall esthetic of late deconstruction (or analytic dismantlement). They are simply different modes of manifesting the same esthetic. The intellectual bankruptcy of the pluralistic position is perfectly rendered in this passage by Arthur Danto in a 1984 essay, "The End of Art": "As Marx might say, you can be an abstraction in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon, a minimal minimalist in the evening. The age of pluralism is upon us. It does not matter any longer what you do, which is what pluralism means. When one direction is as good as another direction, there is no concept of direction any longer to apply." Is one direction really as good as another? Or does this statement merely expose the inability to perceive a larger pattern behind the above-mentioned superficial appearance of chaos in contemporary art? A better model for understanding the dilemma of the serious artist today is a brief summation of art history along the following lines. Before 1800, all fine art was synthesizing in its fundamental nature. Until then, artists assumed their overall culture was valid. If they found fault in some aspect or condition of it, they sought to ameliorate this imperfection, through the corrective of their own new work, and thus improve the culture as a whole. However, they never questioned the basic validity of the culture itself. Their corrective adjustments always had a view and an aspiration toward and ultimate, satisfactory synthesis. After 1800, on the other hand, the romantic artist found the culture itself no longer sufficiently viable. This artist found the enveloping culture critically flawed and sought to create work that would transcend that culture, thereby overcoming its pitfalls. By analytically dissecting in one's work the prevailing failure of the current culture, such as artist invalidated that dysfunctional version of culture, and accordingly replaced it with a more adequate version, which itself would then eventually meet the same fate. Before 1800, synthesis; since 1800, analysis. But after the total, reductive deconstruction of art over the course of the twentieth century, analysis itself has run out of material to work with, and that leaves art in its true, present situation. Analytic romanticism cannot continue operating with no vestige of the former tradition left to pick apart, examine, and transcend. But the priceless legacy of romantic culture bequeathed to today's art lies in the incorporation of its basic pattern or procedure, analytic dismantlement and cultural transcendence, into the notion and practice of the work of art as deliberate construct. This notion and its practice now succeed analysis as the inevitable, next esthetic paradigm, for the art of the new century just begun. Visual art fulfilling this paradigm, including the later work of Joseph Palermo, is what this curator seriocomincally calls Vegasism. The future o fall the fine arts in transcending Post-modernism, in moving beyond it, encourages artists to explore all levels of the surrounding culture for their innovative purposes. Because of the essential legacy, Pop Art, which dispensed with the authoritarian, artificial hierarchy heretofore separating high from popular art, artists of the greatest cultural ambition (Palermo among them) can now adequately reconstitute the fine arts only by using the available expressive and technical resources found in all levels of culture. In today's diverse and chaotic culture, the most competent and valuable art will be that which makes the fullest and richest use of the entire range of culture at all levels, both past and present. The esthetic orientation or direction is precisely what, on a practical level, drives the exuberantly indiscriminate, multi cultural design and decor of Las Vegas's newest, major hotel-casinos. Therefore, the lighthearted name of Vegasism need be considered as neither arbitrary nor ironic, but rather as perfectly appropriate, for the new art which it is meant to denote. Any advanced, superior execution of art hereafter will generate works of fine art that are themselves ad hoc constructs, partially combining both synthesis and analysis. Such a construct is an artistic solution, to real yet temporary intellectual problems, using not only the limited resources of synthesis and analysis, but in addition all the possible human resources of art worldwide (just as do the new Vegas megaresorts, and their imitators elsewhere). Eurocentric art history has proven that synthesis and analysis both were ultimately dead ends. Yet the new artistic construct, the most advanced new work of art, can use them both as rich resources. The new construct can thus involve both synthesis and analysis in its own production, making plentiful, selective use of their centuries of fine-arts history. Thereby the innovative new work of art will constitute a whole new vision of the two former paradigms by way of its own, most highly advanced creation. After this artistic construct's intellectual problems are solved by its birth or origination, however, that work or body of work's particular solution will eventually disintegrate into a whole new set of problems. Then its positive effectiveness for future work, by the same artist or by others, will finally fail. In the meantime, nevertheless, it will have brought about new conditions of perceptual experience, and this is its ultimate value. For as long as its solution is considered adequate, its vision can penetrate and to some extent reorganize the artistic culture it springs from. Once it devolves over time into inadequacy, however, a new construct to replace it must be satisfactorily devised. |
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