The Last Exit

2D Blog

10 Dec

The Last Exit

Thomas Lawson

As he goes through the dozens of ISM’S that have come and gone over the past 70 plus years I notice that this was written in 1980 during the heights of minimalism and conceptualism so we need to add another 30 years.

To put that in perspective, there were no cell phone, no computers, no Tweet, no Skiping, no social networking.

No one back then could conceive (well a very small few) the vast changes to come, let alone predict the end of anything. The world of communication has exploded. So now we can search the web for one hour and view more images of painting than you could see in a week 30 years ago. Could this be a definition of Postmodern?

Octavio Pas asks a good question “Was painting irrelevant in 1980?

Painting is not at it’s end, just another bump in the road, one of many over the past 30 years, question is with all the digital, electronic, photographic gizmos out there will these one day be described as Painting???

Has criticism turned to rhetoric?

Was painting really irrelevant in 1980?

Has TV negated the movie industry to the back seat of entertainment business?

We still paint but are we painting in the back of the bus?

How do we answer Lawson’s question today???

One answer is the debate goes on.

You have to ask what is it that the critics were looking for in 1980?

What was missing from Modern painting then?

So now we are looking at Postmodern painting, what has it done to breakaway from Modernism that works.I was hoping that Lawson would have been more descriptive or detailed but he seems as lost as I am. I want to know what he means by “The denial of history by the Modernists.As I read this I see Lawson describing the total breakdown of direction, a kind of Chaos.

I agree with his thoughts on the loss of artistic discourse and everyday life.

I can not see that the Postmodern / Pluralist of today exhibit any commitment to social change. Lawson seen to see more of a self love in this movement, it’s all about the artist NOT the art.

He hits so many critical points, the intrusion of photography, the danger of art becoming a commodity, something Postmodern seems OK with.

But even photography in Postmodern terms has turned to the unreal, reimaging, giving weight to copies, leaving its roots interring into competition with painting.

We live in this world 30 after Lawson wrote this could never have dreamed the Postmodern reality brought to us at a distance ,unemotional, cold via Skip, twitter, cell phone, computer, TV all connecting us to that brave new world.

Is our Postmodern world just another part of the bigger media complex???

I have faith in painting, it is still here and we have a challenge, it will be interesting to see where we go with it.

Drew