SEVENTH DREAM OF TEENAGE HEAVEN EVERYTHING SEEMED SO POSSIBLE A theatrical moment about modern, postmodern, and super-hybrid culture and our relationships with the passage of time PROLOGUE ACT I: ACTION ACT II: MEDIA ACT III: IDENTITY & THE SPATIAL Starring Guy Ben-Ner, Joachim Brohm, Gerard Byrne, Malcolm Cochran, Peter Dayton, Ben Kinsley, Lara Kohl, Jeremy Kost, Mark Leckey, Mary Lum, Dennis McNulty, Timothy Nazzaro, Johannes Nyholm, Pipilotti Rist, Cassandra Troyan, Jeffrey Vallance and Alejandro Vidal With Guest Appearances by Jennifer Allen, Jean Baudrillard, Clement Greenberg, Jürgen Habermas, Matthew Higgs, Shosuke Ishizu, Fredric Jameson and David Pagel Narrator James Voorhies PAGE 2 PAGE 3 PROLOGUE (The preeminent American literary critic and political theorist FREDRIC JAMESON (Curtain rises; lights up; center stage.) rushes from stage left and pushes NARRATOR to stage right. JAMESON starts to speak loudly. Lights go low. Bright NARRATOR spot on JAMESON at stage center.) What ever happened to postmodernism? JAMESON We never really got a handle on it. It hung around from the early 1960s Indeed, the concept of postmodernism is until the late 1990s in an elusive, not widely accepted or even understood nebulous, shape-shifting form. It teased today. Most postmodernisms emerged as and taunted us, appearing occasionally specific reactions against the established to take a position that would help us forms of high Modernism. Those formerly comprehend the architecture, art, music, subversive and embattled styles--Abstract television, video or film of any given Expressionism; the great modernist poetry moment during those years. That mystery, of Pound, Eliot or Wallace Stevens; the even mystique, was part of its appeal. International Style of Le Corbusier, Its combination of intellectual cachet, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies; plus intrigue and down-and-dirty dealings with Stravinsky, Joyce, Proust and Mann-- popular culture made it a catchall phrase felt once to be scandalous or shocking for everything. Whereas we know when the were, for the generation that arrived word “postmodernism” first entered use at the gate in the 1960s, felt to be in print, no one can say exactly when the establishment and the enemy--dead, it entered parlance, what gave it that stifling, canonical, the reified monuments initial rise, nor can they agree on when one has to destroy to do anything new. its popular use ended. Postmodernism had This means that there were as many none of the tidy habits of its eminent different forms of postmodernisms as forebear Modernism. No slotting of ideas there were high modernisms in place. and disciplines into easy categories. That obviously does not make the job of Some naively believe postmodernism describing postmodernism as a coherent still exists, but they can’t clearly thing any easier, since the unity of this articulate why or what it is. They are impulse was given not in itself but in wrong. It’s not with us any longer, the very Modernism it sought to displace… as we will see here. Its precarious condition contributed to its uncertain (Spot on NARRATOR standing at stage and unceremonious dissolution, which right.) feels fitting for a thing so abstract, so difficult to know yet so pervasive. NARRATOR We can at least begin to talk about its And it became even more complex. Time has obvious relationship with Modernism due certainly proven that since you delivered to the prefix post in postmodernism… those words in 1982 in your lecture PAGE 2 PAGE 3 “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” accretion has now finished up the job and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, excised kitsch. postmodernism continued to evolve into something much more pervasive than a (Lights go low; a dim, greenish glow one-to-one reaction against each high illuminates the barren stage. JAMESON Modernism… and NARRATOR stand quietly as the slow drawl of CLEMENT GREENBERG permeates the JAMESON space.) Yes…but as I was saying…another feature GREENBERG of postmodernism is the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, As I said in 1939 in “Avant-garde and most notably the erosion of the older Kitsch,” where there is an avant-garde, distinction between high culture and so- generally we also find a rear-guard. And called mass or popular culture, those that rear-guard takes the form of kitsch. rigid distinctions that Modernism tried To fill the demand of the new market, hard to maintain. This is perhaps the a new commodity was devised: ersatz most distressing development of all culture, kitsch, destined for those who, from an academic standpoint, which has insensible to the values of genuine traditionally had a vested interest culture, are hungry nevertheless for the in preserving a realm of high or diversion that only culture of some sort elite culture against the surrounding can provide. environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch. In walked kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of NARRATOR genuine culture, welcoming and cultivating this insensibility. It is the source of Kitsch is no longer a relevant term. its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and It is 2011. There is little difference operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious between what was called kitsch and experience and faked sensations. Kitsch anything else in our culture today. changes according to style, but remains Kitsch has been eroded by a culture that always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of is simultaneously high and low. Whereas all that is spurious in the life of our folks like the American art critic times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing Clement Greenberg tried vehemently to of its customers except their money. elucidate some sort of understanding about kitsch and the avant-garde, both NARRATOR have without a doubt become extinct, fossilized, absorbed in the abyss of a Mr. Jameson, this sounds not so different contemporary culture à la “Artstar,” from some of your ideas about pastiche YouTube and Facebook. Postmodernism took and postmodernism? care of eradicating the avant-garde, and our super-hybrid condition of cultural PAGE 4 PAGE 5 JAMESON to kitsch, we can say that kitsch no longer exists because the avant-garde no Pastiche is yet another key feature that longer exists. Because how does an avant- I outlined at the Whitney in my analysis garde get ahead of a continual present of postmodernism. Pastiche involves that has no desire to differentiate imitation or, better still, the mimicry between high and low culture? of other styles and particularly the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of (There’s a rustling in the audience, other styles. It gives us a chance to and an elderly gentleman stands in the sense the specificity of the postmodernist third row. It is the distinguished German experience of time. Postmodernism sociologist and philosopher JÜRGEN expresses the inner truth of that newly HABERMAS. He moves slowly to the aisle emergent social order of late capitalism, and walks down it, then up the steps to a new type of social life and economic center stage. He sits on the top step and order--what is often euphemistically slowly faces the audience.) called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the HABERMAS media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism. It can be dated from the Let us not forget that aesthetic modernity postwar boom in the United States from is characterized by attitudes, which find the late 1940s or early ’50s or, in a common focus in a changed consciousness France, from the establishment of the of time. This time consciousness Fifth Republic in 1958. expresses itself through metaphors of the vanguard and the avant-garde about NARRATOR which Mr. Greenberg speaks. The avant- garde understood itself as invading The new social order has turned into an unknown territory, exposing itself to the all-encompassing, completely integrated dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, human relationship with communication and conquering an as yet unoccupied future. technology, leveling high and low culture The avant-garde must find a direction in a into one and the same. This condition landscape into which no one seems to have has emerged partially because of the yet ventured. dissolution of an avant-garde vis-à-vis the end of Modernism, precipitating a NARRATOR new kind of relationship with time that privileges constant accessibility to So in the past high culture, or let’s say everything, a kind of forever present. the work of avant-garde art, served to Today, who is interested in “making it react against and change aspects of what new,” pushing it forward? Who and what might be considered the everyday, ideally are the avant-garde? And, if they exist, advancing mass culture through its which culture are they pushing forward critique and insistence on maintaining or reacting against? Building upon Mr. a certain level of seriousness and Greenberg’s connection of the avant-garde aesthetics. High Modernism’s critique PAGE 6 PAGE 7 became less critical and even irrelevant impulse of modernity as connected to a because its audience became limited and time consciousness is now completely its defining characteristics too esoteric. exhausted; anyone who considers themselves Postmodernism sought to reinscribe a avant-garde today can read their own place for low culture and rebel against death warrant. the distanced and elitist place Modernism had carved out for itself. But, as NARRATOR Theodor Adorno warned in advance of what eventually became postmodernism, Why? Because they don’t realize that with this reconciliation of high and the art they produce is complicit in low art as a democratic move against the very culture they believe they are the tenets of high Modernism, a culture reacting against, as they continue to industry emerged, establishing an opening work and work in a modernist void long for advertising, technology, design, after the lights have come on and the lifestyle and communication to eventually party is over? Because they continue to co-opt art and aesthetics into one spin away in some hypothetical historical consumer totality.