Christopher Reed
From Nikos Strangos (ed.), Concepts of Modern Art:
From Fauvism to Postmodernism, 1994,
Thames and Hudson, pp. 271-93.

In art textbooks, the postmodern period is often said to begin in 1977, with the publication of Charles Jencks's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, which sought to supplant the minimalism of International Style design with more eclectic approaches.² In fact, the end of modernism has been announced since modernism began - Jencks dates the term's earliest use to the Victorian era.³ But the term postmodernism gained currency only in the mid-1970s, and then was applied retroactively to the previous decade in an attempt to categorize developments in art from Pop to Conceptual that seemed to challenge formalist aesthetics and reverse the modernist evolution toward increasingly pure abstraction. The broadest definition of postmodernism, then, would be: the non-abstract art of the sixties, seventies and eighties. From this point of view, the lineage of Conceptual Art - from Duchamp through Dada and Surrealism to Rauschenberg - as it is traced in this volume's essay on Conceptual Art in contrast to 'mainstream modernism' - is the story of postmodernism as well. Indeed, some critics, those looking at Duchamp especially, have derided 'postmodernism' as a misnomer, arguing that there has always been a postmodernist subcurrent within modernism. Even the term's claim to supplant modernism (the 'post' in 'postmodernism') might be seen as itself quintessentially modern according to the definition of modern art advanced in the preface to this book: a 'questioning and rejection of the past'.

Used broadly, as it often is, the term 'postmodernism' is quite susceptible to critique as illogical and over-ambitious. In the highly influential body of theory that has come from artists and critics who identify with postmodernism, however, the term has acquired a more specific set of meanings, revolving around terms like signification, originality, appropriation, authorship, deconstruction, discourse and ideology. Put as simply as possible, postmodernism challenges the modernist certainty about the autonomy of art - the kind of certainty evidenced, for instance, in Ad Reinhardt's epigraph for the essay on Abstract Expressionism in this book. Postmodernists see representation and reality as overlapping, because conventions of representation or language ('signification') are learned and internalized so that we experience them as real. Especially in an age when television and the other mass media play such a significant role in creating human consciousness, what we perceive as real is revealed to be always present in and filtered through representation. The term 'simulacrum'- drawn from the writings of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard - is often used to signify this idea of representation as reality.⁴ For the postmodernist, then, nothing we can do or say is truly 'original', for our thoughts are constructed from our experience of a lifetime of representation, so it is naive to imagine a work's author inventing its forms or controlling its meaning. Instead of pretending to an authoritative originality, postmodernism concentrates on the way images and symbols ('signifiers') shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts ('appropriated') revealing ('deconstructing') the processes by which meaning is constructed. And because no set of signifiers, from art to advertising, is original, all are implicated in the ideologies (themselves patterns of language or representation, hence, 'discourses') of the cultures that produce and/or interpret them.

These postmodernist principles are exemplified by some of the artists who achieved celebrity around 1980 with work that recycles conflicting images and systems of representation. Julian Schnabel's successful career is often cited to describe the soaring art market of the early eighties. His huge panels combine images quoted from films, photographs and religious iconography on surfaces patched together from posters, ponyskin, rugs, driftwood and - most famously - broken crockery. With titles like Giacomo Expelled from the Temple (1976-78), Painting Without Mercy (1981) and The Patients and the Doctors (1978) [illustration 1241, Schnabel's works engage conventional forms of authoritative ideology (religion, art history, medicine), yet their ultimate effect denies the viewer any certainty about their meaning. Overwhelming in scale, simultaneously rough and fragile, messy, yet obviously labored over, Schnabel's works seem desperate to communicate something, but that something is never clear; their mismatched signifiers force the viewer to confront the process of meaning-making itself.

Like Schnabel, David Salle combines images from various sources, juxtaposing and overlapping cartoons, news photographs, technical drafting, famous paintings, movie stills and pornography. Characterized as 'the ultimate Baudrillardian, reveling in the non-narrative play of detached signifiers',⁵ Salle became famous for works like Savagery and Misrepresentation (1981) [illustration 127], which superimposes line drawings of a cartoonish horse-man and recumbent nudes over a waterfront scene drawn from Reginald Marsh, a Depression-era painter of working-class life. The relationship between the two images is left unclear. Does one erase or cancel another? Do they comment on each other? Do they replicate the effect of vision in the world today, where (as, for instance, on televisions that allow you to watch two channels at once) things seen together may have no relationship to each other at all? Perhaps the most telling example of this kind of postmodernist destabilization is the 'collaboration' between Salle and Schnabel (a collaboration where one participant was not consulted) in which Schnabel acquired a diptych by Salle, reversed the two panels, superimposed a portrait of Salle over one image and retitled it Jump [illustration 125]. The image's meaning, along with the very idea of authorship, is here left dramatically unresolved.⁶

In the early eighties, both Schnabel and Salle were celebrated for their sophistication in disrupting previously authoritative assumptions about the function and nature of art. At the same time, however, both artists were the objects of vehement criticism. Predictably, conservative critics, hostile to postmodernism, derided their departure from modernist convention. Under such headlines as 'A Painter's Pratfall' and 'Expressionist Brie-a-Brac',⁷ both major American mass-circulation newsweeklies attacked Schnabel by contrasting his paintings to the modernist paradigm set by Jackson Pollock, while David Salle was awarded 'the title of Most Overrated Young American Artist' in a review that interpreted his fame as a symptom of the overall triviality of postmodernism in comparison to 'serious painting'.⁸ Disparaged in this way by the defenders of modernism, both Schnabel and Salle also came in for criticism by avowed postmodernists. These challenges demonstrate important divisions within postmodernism, divisions over questions of identity.

Issues of identity are crucial to postmodernism, so much so that som theorists propose a new awareness of certain identities to be the defining characteristic of the postmodern age. In an influential essay, Andreas Huyssen maps four identities (which he calls 'phenomena') that 'are and will remain constitutive of post-modern culture for some time to come': national identities, especially those formed in response to imperialism; sexual identities; an environmentalist identity; and ethnic identities, especially non-western.⁹ Huyssen's analysis reaches beyond art to characterize postmodern culture in general, yet it is easy to see his observations exemplified in the rise of environmental art¹⁰ and feminist art, or in the expression of sexual, ethnic and racial identities in individual artworks or thematic exhibitions. Such emphasis on specific identities challenges formalist beliefs in a transcendent or universal art (that just happens to have been created overwhelmingly by and for a specific demographic group: white, Western, apparently heterosexual men of the upper middle class).

These art world developments, of course, reflect broader social critiques of hierarchies based on race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity. But the specific social position of the arts - as they are closely tied to economic and academic privilege - has focused particular attention on sexual and gendered identities, which were always present, though previously repressed, in the art world. Art's commodity status as a luxury for the most privileged, reinforced by the unequal educational opportunities that mark all the academic disciplines, contributes to the near-invisibility of non-dominant racial, ethnic and class identities in the art world, which remains far less diverse than the broader culture.¹¹ Despite occasional exhibitions and essays in art journals, artists and commentators dealing with artifacts that engage these issues generally work outside or in uneasy relation to art institutions, where their projects are often labeled 'craft', 'popular culture', or as some other category of imagery outside the realm of 'art'. Although these same categories have been invoked to dismiss art associated with women and gay men, such work also found defenders already in the relatively privileged, mainly white constituency of the art world.¹² Identities rooted in gender and sexuality became central forces in the development of postmodernism.

Since the Renaissance, which began the systematic recording of artists' biographies, these chronicles have recorded stories of ambitious women and of same-sex eroticism.¹³ Yet it is only in the last century that these characteristics have become identities - even the words 'feminist' and 'homosexual' are barely a hundred years old. And the art world, until very recently, precluded the articulation of these identities, sometimes by overt discrimination against women and homosexuals,¹⁴ but more often by subtly ruling their expression incompatible with artistic quality or accomplishment, or even with the definition of art itself. This process of exclusion is reflected, for example, in the other essays in this anthology where twenty times as many men as women are mentioned, while the effects of gender are nowhere discussed. Similarly, when gay artists like

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, David Hockney or Gilbert and George are cited, their sexual identity is ignored as irrelevant to their artistic production. While the conventions of modernism (still championed by many) ruled such concerns 'ideological', and hence outside the realm of art and aesthetics, parallel expressions of heterosexual masculinity - like the Futurists' machismo and 'contempt for women', Pollock's aesthetic of 'physical violence', or Rothko and Newman's determination to be 'human' by producing 'man-sized' paintings - were perceived as easily compatible with artistic achievement.

Feminists, in particular, questioned the way the anti-authoritarian rhetoric of postmodernism seemed to become itself a form of cultural authority, a litany of proper names (mainly French and male) and complicated jargon that enabled artists and academics (again, mainly male) associated with postmodernism to sweep into-the most conventionally prestigious positions in established galleries, museums and universities. Griselda Pollock, a prominent British feminist, argues that modernism must be understood as more than just a visual style (abstraction) and its supporting critical theory (formalism). Abstraction and formalist theory, she says, are merely the products of a 'system of interpretation' that emphasizes 'stylistic innovations and reactions embodied in the masterpieces of great individual geniuses'. The fashionable heroicization of individual theorists and artists during the eighties suggests to her that postmodernism is just one more style in the sequence of styles determined by modernist structures of production and consumption'.¹⁶ Her theoretical point is exemplified by specific episodes throughout the eighties. When Schnabel, for instance, published black and white photos of himself at work on his huge canvases outside a Long 1sland beach house, he invoked the famous ARTNews and Life Magazine photospreads on Jackson Pollock that made him the I 950s paradigm of the inspired genius. ¹⁷ Here Schnabel, though his art looks different, seems to assert a claim on the most traditional kind of modernist fame.

An early, and perhaps definitively clear, critique of postmodernism comes from the pioneering American feminist, Lucy Lippard, who in 1980 reviewed the feminist contributions to the previous decade's art, which was already heralded for breaking with modernist traditions. Lippard cited as feminist influences the emphasis on 'central imagery and pattern painting' as well as 'layering, fragmentation, and collage', the introduction 'of real emotion and autobiographical content to performance, body art, video, and artists' books', and the appropriation of 'traditional art forms such as embroidery, sewing, and china painting'. Anticipating Griselda Pollock, however, Lippard insists that feminist art is more than just another style, like 'postmodernism, post-Minimalism, and post-beyond-postness'. The difference, Lippard asserts, is that feminists know 'that it is impossible to discuss [art] without referring to the social structures that support and often inspire it'. Undermining the authority lodged in clich6s of unique artistic genius, she says, 'We take for granted that making art is not simply expressing oneself, but is a far broader and more important task: expressing oneself as a member of a larger unity, or community'.¹⁸ For Lippard, it is this enunciation of a collective identity that separates feminism from postmodernism, distinguishing feminist practice as something more challenging to modernist convention: an art of identity. For her, the massive all-women, collaborative installations of an artist like Judy Chicago exemplify the potential of feminist art. Chicago's 1972 Womanhouse (co-organized with Miriam Schapiro), 1974 Dinner Party [illustration 128] and 1978 Birth Project assembled women using various 'craft' techniques to explore the specificity of their experience. Like Salle's quotations from pornography and Schnabel's glued-on crockery, Chicago's work challenges the modernist conventions that separate art from the rest of life, but her use of sexual imagery and 'crafts'- including ceramic plates - has a different aim: rather than simply deconstructing conventional ideologies, her work constructs an alternative narrative, in this case a story of women's history.¹⁹ While David Salle insists, 'I never felt that my work located itself within any specific subculture',²⁰Chicago's work asserts a feminist identity.

An emphasis on constructive 'comm/unity' over deconstructive authority led feminists to a second major conflict with postmodernism. over issues of activism. Postmodernist efforts to reveal all reality as a series of shifting simulacra can foster a kind of nihilism, feminists argued; what basis for principled action remains once everything is equalized as just representation? Looking specifically at works by Salle, they challenged the way his apparently random mixing of imagery exploits the shock value associated with pornography as a deconstructive device. When the counter-image that is undermined is one associated with political struggle (such as the Reginald Marsh quotation in Savagery and Misrepresentation), the porn shot's dynamic of masculine mastery is preserved, while 'Salle turns familiar symbols of cultural hope and activism to signs of cynicism and impotence'.²¹ Again, the artist's own statements bear out the feminist critique. In interviews, Salle describes the 'enormous identification' that prompts him to follow physically handicapped little girls on the New York subway. Apparently uninterested in the social implications of his actions, Salle does not address whether his presence disturbed or frightened the girls, but concludes with a kind of aestheticized nihilism: 'I don't know what it was I wanted, because you can't go home with them. Just the fact that that moment of recognition to me is one of excruciating beauty.'²²

For critics with an ideal of 'comm/unity', Salle's personal aesthetic thrill is not enough. Indeed, it is the same old pleasure that modernism has always promised to viewers privileged enough to distance themselves from 'life' in the name of 'art'. If 'postmodernism' is really meaningful, it cannot merely label a new modernist style, but must mark a shift away from such conventional notions of art's purpose and function. An example of this difference is revealed in a comparison of works by the French artist Sophie Calle and the American Bette Gordon, both of whom use their art to address the kind of voyeuristic pleasures Salle describes. Calle's photographs document practices in the tradition of Conceptual Art, including her 1979 The Sleepers (a.k.a. The Big Sleep), in which she invited individuals from the neighborhood to sleep in her bed while she took pictures, and the 1980 Suite venitienne, which was published as a book with an enthusiastic commentary by Baudrillard. Here she documented two weeks of her life in which she surreptitiously followed a casual acquaintance as he visited Venice. Though highly susceptible to gendered analysis, neither Calle nor Baudrillard engages these issues * Indeed, in detailing the implications of Calle's project, Baudrillard's text echoes Salle's stance of nihilistic aestheticism:

In comparison with our ideas of liberation, of individual autonomy ... how much more subtle, more amazing, more discreet and arrogant all at once is the idea.. that someone else looks after your life. Someone else anticipates it, accomplishes it, fulfills it.... [I]t is certainly no more absurd to envision things this way than to rely on the decisions of a State, of a lottery ... or of one's own will.

And Baudrillard concludes, discussing Calle's The Sleepers by invoking a traditional figure of aesthetic pleasure: 'Imagine a swooning woman: nothing is more beautiful...'²³

Calle's work, including its presentation as a book, is eminently postmodern in the way it challenges modernist beliefs in originality and in the separation of artistic representation from lived reality. Yet, as artist and critic Anne Rochette has observed, Calle is like other contemporary French artists influenced by postmodern theory - and unlike 'similarly influenced art made in Great Britain and the United States'- in that she does not explicitly engage the 'political implications' of postmodernism as they relate to issues of identity.²⁴ In contrast, Bette Gordon's 1984 film, Variety, is rooted in feminist concerns with pornography and the dynamics that gender the very act of looking. Gordon explains:

From a feminist perspective, the pleasure of looking in the cinema has been connected with the centrality of the image of the female figure. This has involved an exploration of the way in which sexual difference is constructed in cinema, the way in which the gaze is split (men look, women are looked at), and the representation of female pleasure.²⁵

Gordon's film creates a narrative in which the female ticket seller at a New York porn theatre begins following a man from the audience, fantasizing about him. The film foregrounds the relations between the porn 'industry' and other capitalist structures that channel our desires, the way our erotic fantasies are structured through the media, and thus the fallacy of claiming a unique personal voice. Finally, the woman contacts the man, explains that she has been following him, and they arrange to meet on a dark, rainy corner that is the film's final scene. When neither of them shows up, the film seems to be suggesting the ultimate impossibility of representing an authentic personal experience. Gordon's denial of the aesthetic satisfaction of conventional narrative closure flies in the face of art that would fuse modernist pleasures with postmodernist stylistic techniques. At the same time, her focus on feminist issues prevents viewers from overlooking these concerns and reminds them that she speaks from her identity as a woman in a community of feminists, and that she sees her audience in similar terms. Though it resembles Calle's - or even Salle's - work in its engagement of postmodernist ideas about representation and reality, therefore, Gordon's film is very different in its emphasis on identity, both the author's and the viewers'. Gordon's engagement of postmodern and feminist ideas is indicative of developments in postmodern art through the eighties.

It is, of course, dangerous to generalize about a decade that is barely over; a century from now, we will have a much stronger consensus about what became of postmodernism . . . and a century later, a different consensus may prevail. Whatever the eventual consensus(es), however, it is important to recognize that history always reflects the purposes of the recorder - we select stories from the past to make sense of who we are (or aspire to be) today. Writings on recent history make this process especially clear, for they impose a narrative on events that continue to unfold in all their daily complexity, and these acts of narration become themselves documents of the history they seek to chronicle. The story this essay proposes is one of a reconciliation, during the decade of the eighties, between postmodernism and the art of identity that Lippard called for in 1980. As feminist pressure opened greater opportunities for women to exhibit and publish, feminists moved into the postmodernist art world. At the same time, because of the AIDS crisis, gay critics already associated with postmodernism gravitated toward the identity-based activism of the feminist movement. The result was a convergence of postmodernist theory with identity-based art and activism.

Among artists, the merging of feminism and postmodernism is often cited in the works of the New Yorkers, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer, or of the London-based artist Mary Kelly, all of whom rose to prominence in the eighties. The potential as well as the possible pitfalls of this conjunction of forces, however, may be nowhere better exemplified than in the career of another of the decade's best-known artists, Barbara Kruger. At the beginning of the decade, Kruger gained recognition with a series of untitled works that combined generic-looking black and white photographs with provocative texts, accentuated by a 'trademark red frame. Kruger's professional background as chief graphic designer at Mademoiselle animates the visual dynamic of these images, but their sustained popularity in the art world derived more fundamentally from their ability to reach two distinct audiences: feminists who identified with their activist tone and the new generation of mainly male postmodernists who were rising to positions of power at journals such as Art in Americo and October. Both groups claimed Kruger as their own, using strategies of explication and appreciation that ranged from the contradictory to the downright confrontational.

When Art in America ran its first feature on Kruger, its editor, Hal Foster, said her goal was to 'call language into crisis' (the phrase is quoted from an essay by the French theorist, Roland Barthes) by having the image address the viewer as 'you', so that the meaning shifts with each spectator according to a grammatical process analyzed by Baudrillard. Foster praised Kruger for refusing old modernist ideas about the purity of aesthetics by blending 'languages of the self, of art, and of social life', but he sought to distance her from viewers who might read the 'we' or 'us' as the authentic voice of the artist or believe 'that power can be named [or] located'. Denouncing such essentialism (a belief that there are essences beyond or apart from their representation), Foster insisted:

power and desire are not fixed things 'out there': they exist, they hide, in representations. This is why Kruger reworks her images - to see who works through them, and to reverse the order of the speaker 'I,' the subject 'you.'

Foster's conclusion, 'the address of each work implicates us all', denies the claims of identity politics by returning to the modernist rhetoric of universality.²⁶ The contradiction between feminist identity and a postmodernism associated with theories of representation, which is implicit in Foster's argument, becomes explicit in the introduction to a 1986 museum catalogue of Kruger's work:

[T]o peg Kruger as a feminist is not to give her work its due. For while many of her images support a narrowly feminist reading, the cumulative effect of her work is to draw our attention to a key social fact of life in media-ridden culture ... : the showers of semiotic sparks touched off in our consciousness every day by constant exposure to fabricated images.²⁷

Feminists, while they also admired Kruger, rejected an analysis that subordinated their concerns as 'narrow' in comparison to the rather ejaculatory image of semiotic spark showers. Reviewing a London exhibition of Kruger's work, the Woman's Art Journal asserted:

The review quotes from interviews with Kruger about her aim 'to make for a more active spectator in some way, a goal she said was important 'for me, as a woman first and their as air artist'. Citing Hal Foster bv name, the Woman's Art Journal went on to complain that Kruger's point 'has escaped the consciousness of some (male) viewers. . . . If Foster had understood the. gender-address, he would have known that Kruger's address is riot ambiguous, but unquestionably feminist.' And again Kruger is quoted:

Exploring potential intersections between the art world and activism, Lippard cited several instances, among them, 'There is no reason ... why some artists can't be protesting in Saint Patrick's Cathedral while others act up about AIDS in museums'. These examples were drawn from events in the gay community, in particular the massive public demonstrations organized by the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. ACT UP. Founded in New York in 1987. ACT UP quickly gained notoriety for its public confrontations with individuals and institutions obstructing the prevention and treatment of AIDS. The Archbishop of New York, who campaigned against preventative AIDS education, became a target of protests, which culminated when ACT UP (in coalition with the feminist Women's Health Action and Mobilization. 'WHAM!) disrupted his celebration of mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in 1989. As with all ACT UP demonstrations, the visual impact; of the event was crucial. Posters announcing the action blanketed the city for weeks before and floated above the crowds at the ralIy. Inside the cathedral, activists held a 'die-in' (where they fell to the floor) and threw condoms into the air. The process of planning and executing the event was documented by ACT UP as a flint. Stop the Church, so that it entered the realm of representation in a way that was closely controlled by its creators.

This emphasis on ‘visuals' is typical of ACT UP, which drew many members from the New York art world that was being decimated by AIDS. Along with postmodernism, the legacy of Performance Art informed ACT UP's productions, which were reviewed as they occurred by established critics like Douglas Crimp. In 1987. Crimp devoted an issue of October to AIDS, forging a high-profile link between this postmodern journal and political activism. Here and in his subsequent writings, Crimp publicized ACT UP's installations and demonstrations, linking them explicitly to the many questions of identity, authorship, and audience and the ways in which all three are constructed through representation - have been central to post-modernist art, theory, and criticism. About ACT UP's posters. Crimp writes, 'Assaults on authorship have led to the practice of anonymous and collective production. Assaults on originality have given rise to dictums like - If it works use it" or "If it's not yours steal it".³²

Looking at the decade of the eighties, many commentators have been struck by the way art dealing with AIDS drew from 'feminist-based analysis that considers representations of sexuality within culture' for strategies to effect social change.³⁷ The use of feminist strategies is evident, not oil] ' v in the forthright address of ACT UP imagery, but also in its emphasis on identity. Just as Judy Chicago, recognizing that identity is rooted in a notion of shared history, used her Dinner Party to embody -women's history, so too ACT UP imagery asserts and celebrates a gay history at the same time that it addresses issues about AIDS. The pictures for ACT UP's Read My Lips campaign [illustration 133], for instance, were drawn from archival photos documenting lesbian characters on Broadway in the twenties and gay bars for servicemen during World War II. More subtly, the iconography of targets, flags and faded city scapes in ACT UP posters recalls the art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to assert the legacy of gay art history. Similarly, Andy Warhol's colorful photo-portraits echo strongly behind ACT UP's acid-green Ronald Reagan with pink eyes in the AIDSGATE poster. In a direct quotation of a gay artists most famous work, ACT Upturned Robert Indiana's Pop invocation LOVE into another call: 'RIOT' [illustration 136] .³⁸ Eventually, well-known gay artists like Keith Haring began to create directly for ACT UP and other anti-ATDS campaigns, while ACT UP artists like Adain Rolston marketed their related work through established galleries. At the same time, artists' collectives like Group Material and General Idea put AIDS-related installations in museums and galleries around Europe and America, often drawing on the techniques of Dada and Pop art. which brought non-art objects into uneasy juxtaposition with each other and their art context, but now with a much clearer didactic intent. Where, at the opening of the eighties, the art world espoused a postmodernism defined in opposition to the identity-based practices associated with feminism, by the end of the decade, the development and articulation of identity was central to this kind of postmodern artistic practice.

The re-orientation of postmodernism could not have happened without a critique of postmodern theory. As critic James Alever explained, ‘[T]he epidemic has caused us to question the post-modernist leitmotiv of an unknowable spectacle. . . . AIDS (an epidemic. a movement, a friend's death) does not sustain one's belief in an account of the social-as-text, a free-for-all of floating simiulacra.'³⁹ Indeed, the eighties saw postmodernism reassessed by the critics associated with the theory of its early phase. By 1985, Hal Foster, recognizing the nihilistic danger in Baudrillard's ideas, suggested that deconstructive art had itself become 'a convention in need of critique', and began advocating for the art of -counterhegemonic (feminist, third World, gav . . . ) social movements' and minority cultures. When he revised and republished his 1982 essay on Kruger, its title was all that remained the same: a lengthy preface on political artists and the acknowledgment of the feminist implications of her work marked the critic's new interest in the art of identity.⁴⁰

Where Foster's shifting emphasis went unacknowledged in his text, articles by Craig Owens and Douglas Crimp drew attention to their changing priorities over the course of the eighties. Owens began his 1983 'The Discourse of Others' by upbraiding himself for what he called 'gross critical negligence in his blindness to feminism, an oversight, he argued, that 'indicate[s] a blind spot in our discussions of postmodernism in general: our failure to address the issue of sexual difference - not only in the objects we discuss, but in our own enunciation as well'. In both its message and its reception, this essay is paradigmatic of the philosophical shifts taking place in the eighties. Today it is among the most often anthologized essays for college textbooks.⁴¹ At its 1983 publication in an anthology of postmodernism, however, feminists privately noted Owens's position as a spokesman for feminism as symptomatic of the new avant-garde's perpetuation of masculine authority. Indeed, despite Owens's argument for attention to ‘sexual difference' in 'our own enunciation', his position as a man - and as a gay man in particular - remains unaddressed and is, indeed, undermined by the conclusion of the essay, which accepts that 'the address of Kruger's work is always gender specific' but argues that her texts 'demonstrate that masculine and feminine themselves are not, stable identities, but subject to exchange'. By 1987, Owens had taken the step he himself called for in 1983. In 'Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism', which he acknowledges was provoked by feminist criticism of his earlier piece, Owens is explicit about his own gay identity, and he praises feminists who see the link between homophobia and misogyny as twin forms of social control. In addition to its frankly gay voice, 'Outlaws' evidences a second shift in Owens’s Writing, for he draws upon a new theoretical foundation. Semiotics and the delicious slipperiness of signifiers have given way to history and anthropology (in citations of Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss) along with frankly political analysis of Nazi Germany and the American Supreme Court. Far from concluding, as he did about Barbara Kruger in 1983, in praise of an art that 'engages in neither social commentary nor ideological critique', Owens ends his 1987 piece with a call for gay men and feminists to band together to make resistance to homophobia 'a central concern of any Left political coalition'.

Nowhere is the importance of this issue for society at large more apparent than in the government's and media's scapegoating, of homosexual men for the AIDS epidemic a homophobic tactic which is as threatening as the disease itself to the welfare of the entire population.⁴²

Within two, years, Owens himself had succumbed to AIDS. Like Owens, by the end of the eighties Douglas Crimp had also publicly reassessed his own criticism, and with it what he, calls ‘postmodernist theory'. Looking at his earlier treatment of two artists who deal with gender, Crimp recounted how in 1983 he had celebrated Sherrie Levine's postmodernist appropriation of canonic modernist images. Levine simply rephotographed one of Edward Weston's celebrated photographic studies of his son, presenting it as Untitled (After Edward Weston), in a challenge to modernist conventions of authorship, originality and indeed art itself. In contrast, Crimp had considered Robert Mapplethorpe whose old fashioned modernist appropriation', he believed, simply borrowed modernist convention of art photography to make highly marketable objects. Looking back at the eighties from a 1990 perspective, however. Crimp found that controversies over AIDS-related imagery and public funding for the arts cast his comparison of Levine and Mapplethorpe in a new light. What he, missed, he suggests, was the way both types of images were the same: both present the male body as sexual, raising the possibility of a homoerotic gaze. Measured by the recent actions of the academic and political establishment, Crimp says, even this suggestion of gay identity is more challenging than the 'parochial' issues of authenticity and appropriation are ever likely to be. What we have had to learn recently, not from but in spite of postmodernism, he says, is 'the dangerous, even murderous, ways in which homophobia . . . structures every aspect of our culture'. He concludes: 'What must be done now - if only as a way to begin rectifying our oversight - is to name homophobia'.⁴³

This urge to name - to name an identity and the mechanism of oppression that structures it - may be what is most characteristic of postmodernism at the end of the eighties. No longer the modernism that sublimated social concerns in a rhetoric of spiritual abstraction, neither is it the equally abstract play of social signifiers that was celebrated by the post modernists ten years earlier. One logical outcome of the move away from abstraction and toward specificity is autobiography, which became an important vehicle for artists dealing with issues of identity as the eighties gave - way to the nineties- Jack Pierson, Lyle Ashton Harris and - best known - David Wojnarowicz combined personal and mass-media imagery in their auto biographical paintings and gallery installations. Their work accepts the postmodern supposition that individual subjectivity is created through social signs and symbols, but far from defaulting to an impersonal universality - it emphasizes the specificity of the artist's position at the intersection of gay identity with identities based on race and class. Like the feminist autobiographical art Lippard cited as characterizing the seventies, this work, although it is personal, is not solipsistic; the focus on identity renders the individual exemplary of a community. Wojnarowicz's bleak images, often including furious political commentary, were cemented in the American public consciousness as expressions of gay identity when they were made the focus of highly publicized attacks by right-wing religious and political spokesmen, who objected to the exhibition of his work in tax-supported settings.⁴⁴ Similar attacks on Robert Mapplethorpe altered the perception of this photographer from, as Crimp's comments indicate, a master of formal technique to an emblem of gay identity.

Neither a throwback to the feminist art of the seventies nor the deconstructive spectacle of early postmodernism, works like these exemplify the convergence of these two trends over the course of the eighties. Lucy Lippard's word, 'comm/unity', might be the verbal emblem of this art, for it combines the kind of deconstructive linguistics that dismantle a term to reveal its meaning with an assertion of collective identity. In this development of an art of identity, both feminism and AIDS activism have been profoundly influential, grounding postmodern theory in social practice and inspiring a new generation to Participate in and care about art.

13. Surveys of women's artistic production through history include Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London, 1981: and Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, London, 1990. For surveys of homosexuality in the arts, see James Saslow. 'Closets in the Museum: Homophobia and Art History', in Karla Jay and Allen Young (eds), Lavender Culture, New York. 1978, pp. 215-27; and Emmanuel Cooper. The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last One Hundred Years in the West. London, 1986. An excellent in-depth study of homosexuality in Renaissance art is Saslow's Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society, New Haven. 1986.

14. A concrete example is seen in the rules of the Abstract Expressionists' 'Artists Club', the founding constitution of which excluded dealers, critics, women and homosexuals from participation. See Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism Race, and Gender, New Haven, 1994.

15. Hilton Kramer. Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984, New York, 1985.

17. Julian Schnabel, 'The Patients and the Doctors'. Artforum, February 1984. pp. 54- 8. See also Mary Lee Corlett, 'Jackson Pollock: American Culture, the Media and the Myth', Rutgers Art Review, 8, 1987, pp. 71-106.

19. Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, Garden City, NY, 1977; The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage. Garden City, 1979 Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework, Garden City. 1980; The Birth Project, Garden City, 1985.

21. Carol Zeniel. 'Postmodern Pictures of Erotic Fantasy and Social Space'. Genders, 4. Spring 1989,pp. 27 and 31-2. For a similar critique. see Robert Storr, 'Salle's Gender Machine', Art in America, June 1988. pp. 24-5.

36. Robert Atkins in conversation with Thomas Sokolowski. Front Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS. Independent Curators, Inc., New York. 1992. p. 18. An earlier important exhibition of AIDS related work is Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. Artists Space, New York, 1989.

37. Joyce Fernandes, 'Sex into Sexuality: A Feminist Agenda for the '90s'. Art Journal, Summer 1991. pp. 35-8.

40. Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Port Townsend, Washington, 1985, pp. 99- 115. 146~ 154-5~ 170. 176- 7, ellipses in original.

41. Craig Owens. The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in Hal Foster (ed.). The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post-Modern Culture, Port Townsend, Washington, 1983. pp. 57-82: reprinted in Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (eds), The Expanding Discourse: Feminist and Art History, New York, 1992, pp. 487-502: Howard Risatti (ed.), Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1990, pp. 186-207; Stephen David Ross (ed.), Act and its Signifcance, 2nd ed., Albany, 1987, pp. 584-91; as well as in Beyond Recognition, cited above (note 29), pp. 166-90.

43. Crimp, 'Boys', cited above (note 32). Compare his 'Appropriating Appropriation', catalogue essay for Image Scavengers: Photography, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. 1983.

44. Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions, New York, 1992, pp. 208-19. For an overview of David Wojnarowicz's work, see Larry Blinderman (ed.). Tongues of Flame, University Galleries. Illinois State University. 1990.

46. Kiss & Tell (Susan Stewart. Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones), Drawing the Line: Lesbian Sexual Politics on the Wall. Vancouver. 1991. n.p.