The Strange Art and Literature of Postmodernism

The Strange Art and Literature of 3 Postmodernism New Radicalness in the Early Phase of Postmodernism VER SINCE a clear distance from the guiding principles of late Modernism and the start of a new phase known as “Post- modern” was established in American literary criticism of the 1960s,1 a debate developed about whether this new era should be seen as something totally different or merely as a second phase of Modernism. The debate continues to rage, and seen in retrospect the reason is clear: with the exception of the use of the new media, all recent art production and literature take up conceptions and modes of representation which had already been discovered and developed dur- ing Modernism. However, they differed for the most part clearly enough from the art (and literature) of Modernism’s later phase in terms of their claim to validity, the concrete form they took, and their effect that one could quite correctly speak of a new period of literature 1 The first such attempt was Leslie Fiedler’s programmatic essay “Cross the Border – Close the Gap,” Playboy (December 1969): 151, 230, 252–54, and 256– 58. 68 MAKING STRANGE u and art. The way in which one assesses this major change therefore de- pends on whether one assumes an evolutionary development or a break with the past. With regard to the aesthetic of the strange, what is apparent in particular in the literature and art of early Postmodernism – i.e. from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, is a gradual shift towards a stronger effect of estrangement. Taking recourse to examples from the avant- gardist literature and art of early Modernism, artists and writers tried to create even more radically estranging effects to the point of shock- ing viewers and readers. That they only partly succeeded was due firstly to the fact that the inclusion of genres and images taken from popular culture gave the general public something familiar to work with; and secondly that those who were familiar with the experimental literature and art of Modernism were in the meantime so used to pro- vocation that they were prepared to accept even something very un- usual as a welcome surprise. Lyotard’s interpretation of the aesthetic of Postmodern art as a version of the aesthetic of the sublime is therefore doomed to fail alone on the fact that even those very strange new things were too quickly and easily integrated into a meanwhile very extensive understanding of what qualified as art and were thus unable to cause that shock indispensible to an experience of the sublime. It is true that new possibilities for the presentation of the very strange were sought and indeed found, but they met with a horizon of expectations which reacted much too positively to new stimuli to allow for a real shock effect.2 Such an attitude on the part of viewers and readers is to be under- stood to a large extent as a reaction to an extremely heterogeneous art production in which a large variety of conceptions and styles were on 2 “Contemporary art has in fact become an integral part of today’s middle-class society. Even works of art which are fresh from the studio are met with enthu- siasm”; Klaus Honnef, Contemporary Art, tr. Hugh Beyer (Cologne: Taschen, 1988): 11. .

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