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| In 2011, German newspapers '']'' and '']'' proclaimed metamodernism the new dominant paradigm in the arts.<ref>Meixner, C. ''Die Zeit'' (3 January 2011)</ref> | In 2011, German newspapers '']'' and '']'' proclaimed metamodernism the new dominant paradigm in the arts.<ref>Meixner, C. ''Die Zeit'' (3 January 2011)</ref> | ||
| In 2013, the artist ] created ''Mist'', a magazine that juxtaposes fashion and science in a way that he says is for "the metamodern age."<ref>{{cite news | url=http://www.wildculture.com/article/making-science-sexy/1291 |title=MAKING SCIENCE SEXY? | last=Templar Lewis |first=Katherine | date= October 14, 2013 |work=Wild Culture |publisher= |accessdate=January 21, 2014}}</ref> | |||
| == See also == | == See also == | ||
Revision as of 04:36, 16 July 2014
| Postmodernism |
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| Preceded by Modernism |
| Postmodernity |
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Metamodernism is a post-postmodern movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that both departs from and is informed by modernism and postmodernism. While divergent readings of the term in the arts and in criticism have been offered since the 1970s, a common feature of its usage is treatment of metamodernism as a mediation between important principles of modernism and postmodernism.
History
Origins
The word metamodern was used by University of Oregon professor Mas'ud Zavarzadeh in the Journal of American Studies in his April 1975 article The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives. Zavarzadeh described the metamodern as a "response to the emerging realities of a technetronic culture," specifically the "overwhelming actualities of contemporary America, which render all interpretations of 'reality' arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd." Zavarzadeh, quoting Alain Robbe-Grillet, described a body of literature in which daily experience was rendered as "neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply." According to Zavarzadeh, the "fusion of fact and fiction blurs the dichotomy between 'life' and 'art' and indeed such a sharp division between the two does not exist in the emerging aesthetics which I shall, for the lack of a better term, call 'Metamodernist.' As a result of these changes in the chemistry of contemporary reality, the fictive novel--a closed, self-sufficient set, independent of raw experiential life--is yielding to other forms of narrative which operate as an open set, combining such allegedly antithetical elements as the 'fictional' and the 'factual,' 'critical' and the 'creative,' 'art' and 'life.'"
Literary critic Larry McCaffery credited Zavarzadeh with "provid a useful starting point for an understanding of metafiction in his discussion of various new literary tendencies..." In 1992, Pamela A. Genova reviewed Zavarzadeh's and Donald Morton's book Theory (Post)Modernity Opposition for World Literature Today, calling it "a radical oppositional critique as a means to uncover the social contradictions in writing" which "proposes not to explicate a text but to implicate it in global frames of knowing...a new perspective on postmodern thought, a metatheoretical critique of contemporary theory in the context of its sociopolitical problematic."
In a 2000 article in The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Moyo Okediji instead described the metamodern as a "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism." Okediji identified as metamodern a coterie of black American artists who expanded existing definitions of form while also aiming to "transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity at nearly every available point."
In 2003, Andre Furlani attempted to describe metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate in "Postmodern and After." Writing in Contemporary Literature, Furlani relied on the meaning of the preposition and prefix "meta-" to describe metamodernism as an literary paradigm in art that is "after yet by means of modernism...a departure as well as a perpetuation."
In 2007, literary theorist Alexandra Dumitrescu, analyzing the poetry of William Blake, chose to describe metamodernism as partly a concurrence with, partly an emergence from, and partly a reaction to postmodernism. To her, metamodernism is "a turn away from both modern individualism and postmodern fragmentarism" towards the story itself, not merely as a source of entertainment (as in postmodern literature) but "as meaningful narrative that involves the audience, and answers some of its quandaries, thus aiming to either coax or shock the reader into regaining their humanity of concern, care, and compassion." In 2010, Dumitrescu published a study of Arundhati Roy entitled "Intimations of Metamodernism," which noted the "principle of polarity at work...in the metamodern attempt to recover unity after fragmentation has become the norm and to integrate....intuition or emotion with what is thought of as 'masculine' reason."
Vermeulen and van den Akker
In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker described metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate in their essay Notes on Metamodernism. They asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of the 1980s and 1990s. According to Vermeulen and van den Akker, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism", characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. The prefix "meta-" here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them.
In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism based on the text by Velmeulen and Van Den Akker, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin and Mariechen Danz.
In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing Metamodernism in collaboration with van den Akker and Vermeulen, billed as the first exhibition in Europe to be staged around the concept of metamodernism. The show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden, Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Rönkkö.
Writing in ARTnews, Kim Levin noted that Vermeulen and van den Akker "propose that ‘the Postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche’ is finished, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling. ‘Meta,’ they note, implies an oscillation between Modernism and Postmodernism and therefore must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne.”
According to Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, Vermeulen and van den Akker's conception of metamodernism "allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self—Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments—and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism’s virtues."
The Metamodernist Manifesto
In 2011, the artist Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto, later credited to his collaborator Shia LaBeouf, based on Vermeulen and van den Akker's text. The manifesto called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child", and instead proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons."
In January 2014, LaBeouf stated that his Twitter account was "meta-modernist performance art”. Collaborating with Turner and performance artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, LaBeouf embarked upon a series of actions described by Dazed as “a multi-platform meditation on celebrity and vulnerability.” This included a sequence of appropriated Twitter apologies and skywriting messages, following revelations he had plagiarized the work of graphic novelist Daniel Clowes; walking out of a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival quoting Eric Cantona’s famous “seagulls” speech, before turning up on the red carpet wearing a paper bag over his head with "I am not famous anymore" emblazoned on it; staging a six day performance in a Los Angeles gallery entitled #IAMSORRY, in which he sat wearing a tuxedo and the paper bag, crying in front of visitors; and presenting a lecture on metamodernism via Skype at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Abramson
Writing for The Huffington Post in 2013, American poet and critic Seth Abramson positioned metamodernism as "much more than the implicit proclamation that postmodernism is dead... an active and expanding poetics that makes positive submissions of a historically idiosyncratic sort". J.T. Welsch, at a conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies, said that Abramson's definition "sees the 'meta-' prefix as a means to transcend the burden of modernism and postmodernism's allegedly polarised intellectual heritage".
According to Abramson, this new poetics submits "that the time for merely edifying America as to the realities of language is over; the time for speaking primarily in the language of realities is beginning". In 2014, Abramson began a regular column for Indiewire entitled "Metamericana," which focuses on the "film, television, drama, and comedy... American metamodernism, a cultural paradigm that uses both fragmentary and contradictory data to produce new forms of coherence."
In May of 2014, outlaw country artist Sturgill Simpson told Country Music Television that his album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been inspired in part by the reading of metamodernism offered by Abramson. According to Simpson, "Abramson homes in on the way everybody is obsessed with nostalgia, even though technology is moving faster than ever." In lauding the album as "a vehicle for big, unwieldy ideas about human consciousness and the nature of life," Pitchfork referred to Metamodern Sounds in Country Music as "Ray Charles by way of Seth Abramson." Calling Simpson "the Radiohead of country music," Salon noted that his second album was "a nod to magna-cum-weirdo Seth Abramson, known for his poetry and head-scratching essays that creatively contextualize the twenty-first century." Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was subsequently nominated for the 2014 Americana Music Honors & Awards.
James and Seshagiri
In January 2014, David James and Urmila Seshagiri positioned metamodernism as a reaction to and expansion upon modernism. According to the two literary scholars, "Metamodernism regards modernism as an era, an aesthetic, and an archive that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment."
Reception
In 2011, German newspapers Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel proclaimed metamodernism the new dominant paradigm in the arts.
See also
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References
- Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. "The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives". Journal of American Studies, Vol. 9, no. 1 (Apr. 1975). Retrieved July 4, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - McCaffery, Larry (1982). The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Cass. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 5.
- Genova, Pamela A. (Spring 1992). "Perspectives on world literature". World Literature Today. 66 (2): 413. Retrieved 11 July 2014.
- Harris, Michael D., and Moyo Okediji. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2000).
- Okediji, Moyo. Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art In and Out of Africa. Oakland Museum of California. Retrieved June 18, 2014.
- Furlani, Andre. Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After. Northwestern University Press. Retrieved June 18, 2014.
- ^ Dumitrescu, Alexandra. "Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space". On Space. Deakin University. Retrieved September 15, 2011.
- Dumitrescu, Alexandra (June 30, 2010). Intimations of Metamodernism. Rodopi. Retrieved July 4, 2014.
- Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker. "Notes on Metamodernism", Journal of Aesthetics and Culture" 2 (2010): 1–14.
- Moraru, Christian."", "American Book Review" 34:4 (2013): 3-4.
- Editorial, 'What meta- means and does not mean' Notes on metamodernism, Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- 'No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism' Museum of Arts and Design, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
- 'The Metamodern Mindset' Berlin Art Journal, Retrieved June 26, 2014.
- 'Discussing Metamodernism with Tanja Wagner and Timotheus Vermeulen' Blouin ARTINFO, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
- ^ 'Discussing Metamodernism' Galerie Tanja Wagner, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
- Levin, K. (15 October 2012). "How PoMo Can You Go?". ARTnews. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- Knudsen, S. (March 2013). "Beyond Postmodernism. Putting a Face on Metamodernism Without the Easy Clichés". ArtPulse. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- McCahill, M. (12 February 2014). "Shia LaBeouf: Is there genius in his madness?". The Daily Telegraph (UK). Retrieved 19 June 2014.
- ^ Welsch, J.T. John Beer's The Waste Land and the Possibility of Metamodernism. British Association for Modernist Studies (June 26, 2014). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
- Turner, L. "Metamodernist Manifesto" Retrieved November 7, 2011.
- Swift, T. (19 May 2014). "An Interview with Luke Turner & Nastja Sade Ronkko". aqnb. Retrieved 8 June 2014.
- "Shia LaBeouf: My Life Is Performance Art". The Independent (UK). Retrieved 2014-02-08.
- Stampler, L. (11 February 2014). "Shia LaBeouf is Really Sorry, Plans to Say So in New #IAMSORRY Project". TIME. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- ^ Tsjeng, Z. (March 2014). "Meet the two artists behind Shia LaBeouf's #IAMSORRY". Dazed. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- Child, B. (2 January 2014). "Shia LaBeouf attempts to skywrite wrong over Daniel Clowes plagiarism". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- "Actor Shia LaBeouf walks out of Berlin press conference". BBC News. 9 February 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- Eordogh, F. (14 February 2014). "I don't know if Shia LaBeouf is sorry, but he's a master image transformer". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- "Nijmegen students skype with Shia LaBeouf". de Gelderlander. 18 March 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- "Shia Labeouf live Skype performance at RU". 21 March 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
- Pritchard, Daniel Evans. "Weekly Poetry Links". Boston Review (July 24, 2013). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Abramson, Seth. "On Literary Metamodernism". The Huffington Post (July 20, 2013). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Bowden, Rus. "Videos, Tickers, and Poetry News". Del Sol Press (July 23, 2013). Retrieved July
5, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); line feed character in|accessdate=at position 6 (help) - Abramson, Seth. "The Lego Movie: Metamodernism for Kids". Indiewire (February 14, 2014). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Abramson, Seth. "Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty Is Exactly That". Indiewire (February 28, 2014). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ Hight, Jewly. "Sturgill Simpson's New Set is a Mind-expanding Take on Country Traditionalism". Country Music Television (May 8, 2014). Retrieved July 6, 2014.
- Deusner, Stephen M. "Review of Sturgill Simpson's Metamodern Sounds in Country Music". Pitchfork (May 16, 2014). Retrieved July 6, 2014.
- Moss, Marissa R. "Sturgill Simpson Is the Radiohead of Country Music". Salon (July 11, 2014). Retrieved July 14, 2014.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Strong, Danna. "Americana Honors & Awards 2014 Nominees Announced". Americana Music Honors & Awards (May 12, 2014). Retrieved July 6, 2014.
- James, David and Urmila Seshagiri. ", Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 129: 1 (January 2014): 87–100.
- Meixner, C. 'Was Macht die Kunst in 2011?Die Zeit (3 January 2011)
External links
- Notes on Metamodernism - van den Akker and Vermeulen webzine
