On Sampling the Pleasures of Visual Culture: Postmodernism and Art Education

The differences between Postmodernism and Modernism are explored firstly through an examination of the different epistemological allegiances or assumptions that underpin artistic practices during the last forty of so years of 20th C. It is argued that during this period the concepts of how things mean and what constitutes quality furnished by Late Modernism become challenged and contested to a sufficient degree that work emerges that can be read only as 'senseless' and 'dross' within the Modernist paradigm but from outside as a challenge to it. Underlying this incommensurability it is suggested is the fundamental epistemological opposition between understanding meaning as immanent and autonomous or as relational. These issues are explored concretely through the shift from the idea of sculpture as 'object' Judd's work to sculpture as 'sign' in that of Steinbach's.

Secondly the idea of a culture shift is explored through the claim that characteristic of the postmodernity of culture is the collapse of distinction between high and low culture. Whilst not denying some notion of cultural shift the paper challenges that this is an accurate account of it, claiming that it is not the distinction between 'high' and 'low' that has collapsed but rather that the grounds for making it have been challenged and re-thought. (This too is pursued through discussion of Steinbach's work). The implications that the meaning of art objects are relational (rather than autonomous) and that distinctions between art and non-art are less an inherent property of an object than of the knowledges in relation to which they are read are then teased out in relation to the possible rationale(s) for art education.