Postmodernity is not reducible to the explosion of mass media and consumerism in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also necessary to reference the growth and dissemination of social-scientific visions of the everyday evident in sociology, psychology, and anthropology. These disciplines and their popularisation are fundamentally as much a replacement for the loss of faith in God as is shopping. They give us the hope that we can understand ourselves, and thereby make sense out of life. One of the fundamental frames of reference that the human sciences have offered is that of systems. (more…)
Bank Violette’s Untitled installation at the Whitney (2005) represents the skeleton of a burnt out church consisting of beams covered in salt spotlit in a dark room and accompanied by an unobtrusive soundscape. Violette explains that the concept was based on a series of arson attacks on churches in Norway by heavy metal kids: ‘They actually liked the way that the churches looked when burnt. One band even took a picture of the result and put it on an album cover, which led to a criminal conviction’ (Violette 2005). What attracts Violette to this Norwegian phenomenon is the fact that Norwegian youth are reacting against the decline of the relevance of the church in their culture. Historically the church has played an important role in Norwegian culture. The dominant political party are the Christian Democrats indicating the strong link between church and politics in that nation. (more…)
Sarah Oppenheim takes an empirical approach to art production, by observing viewers’ activity in social spaces. She believes that analysing the behaviour of people in urban spaces can reveal how such spaces form behaviour and how behaviour can in turn impact on inhabited spaces. Oppenheim notes: ‘One of the premises I work on is that late capitalist urban space is abstracted [standardized, homogenized] and as such limits the multiplicity of human inputs. The approach I take is to record human behaviour under a variety of conditions, observing the physical response to a given space. This act of analysis of human behaviour makes such behaviour more abstracted.’ (Oppenheim 2005).
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Postmodernity is not reducible to the explosion of mass media and consumerism in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also necessary to reference the growth and dissemination of social-scientific visions of the everyday evident in sociology, psychology, and anthropology. These disciplines and their popularisation are fundamentally as much a replacement for the loss of faith in God as is shopping. They give us the hope that we can understand ourselves, and thereby make sense out of life. One of the fundamental frames of reference that the human sciences have offered is that of systems. (more…)
