In Rethinking Postmodernism(s) Katrin Amian declares that “Postmodernism, it seems, is history”[1] for the simple reason that “the term appears to have exhausted its potential as a means of describing and understanding the shifting alliances of literary and cultural production in the new millennium.”[2] I, too, believe contemporary literature can not be understood as …
The history of photography carries with it a history of abstraction. Since its inception, artists have used the medium to transform, to lift loose the appearances of the world, and to present us with images beyond our recognition or expectation. Karl Blossfeldt’s close-up studies of plants revealed the otherworldliness of endless Fibonacci spirals, set in …
Photography as Metamodern Alchemy: the work of Stuart Bailes Read More »
In the late 1980s, Joost Zwagerman’s (1963) debut novel Gimmick[1] caused a sensation in press and public as a novel that defined the Zeitgeist and spoke for a generation, the postmodern generation. Recently he wrote Duel[2] (2010), a shorter novel published as the traditional gift of the annual week-of-books, which can be considered as a …
Walk into Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin and you suddenly are face-to-face with the man Ulf, himself. He’s there in photocopied-form; he’s there in his art works. Facing you are sheets and sheets of art works photocopied and taped to the white gallery walls, corners fluttering and overlapping, installed in a way that does not …
The first line of a press release by Am Nuden Da directs the reader as to how to approach the text that follows. The preamble to an exhibition of some form, the context of which we are presumably about to be enlightened, it invites us to engage “(Romantically)”. The words that follow might, one assumes, conform …
Metamodernism is above all about oscillation. Or at least for me it is. It is about the oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, history and ahistoricity, optimism and pessimism, sincerity and irony, the concept and the material, the figurative and the formless, narrative and the plotless, discursive originality and individual intertextuality, meaning and meaninglessness. …
