Postmodernism and Pedagogy, by Steven Skopik (1999)

Reassessing the Integration of Theory and Practice in Undergraduate Photography Curricula

[Editor’s note- The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Exposure magazine, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education. Throughout the year, we will be republishing a selection of essays that were first published in the pages of Exposure, to introduce a new generation of photographic educators and students to this rich history. The article is presented as originally published in Exposure 32.2, Summer 1999, pp. 11–18]

Introduction by Steven Skopik, Dec. 2019

When I was approached to republish my 1999 article “Postmodernism and Pedagogy: Reassessing the Integration of Theory and Practice in Undergraduate Photography Curricula” as part of SPE’s initiative to offer select works from the Exposure archive on the journal’s digital platform, I was of course pleased and honored. I was also a little apprehensive. “Postmodernism and Pedagogy,” like all critical writing, is a product of its era, and thus some of its concerns may seem remote, its tone somewhat fractious.

The piece is an unapologetic polemic that chooses sides in an intergenerational dust-up that was, by the late 1990s, well out in the open. On one side of this tangle were photographers and critics, very much in the ascendancy, whose allegiances resided with a particular strain of early postmodernist conceptualism. This point of view generally eschewed technical virtuosity, formal flourish, and expressivity in favor of the suppression of craft, theoretical consistency, and a wear-it-on-your-sleeves political agenda. On the other side of the skirmish were those of us not quite prepared to forgo the traditional pleasures of the image. While we were well aware of contemporary discussions centering on the conditions of representation, the photograph’s capacity to blur subjectivity and fact, and the medium’s complex political dimensions, the prevailing critical climate struck many as wearyingly didactic and sententious.

These strains and controversies were very much in the air at SPE throughout the decades of the 1980s and ’90s. As a student attendee of SPE meetings at the time, I well remember discussions in which it was declared, in so many words, that photography is fundamentally tainted — at best anaesthetizing, and more often simply deceptive. For me, this trajectory towards a rigid logocentric zealotry had its apotheosis at a conference debriefing in the late 1980s, during which participants were informed that “images unaccompanied by words are dangerous.” Certainly for those of us just entering the profession, such proclamations were a major buzzkill — evidence of a snowballing disciplinary self-loathing. It is in this context that “Postmodernism and Pedagogy” was written, and it stands as something of a rejoinder to a then-stultifying status quo whose exasperating analytical blind spot rendered it incapable of sensing its own totalizing prescriptiveness.

Like many minor oppressions, the regime of the 1980s and ’90s art world’s theoretical excess ended not with a bang, but with an exhausted whimper as an emerging cadre of image makers and commentators quietly and inexorably began to upend the priorities of their academic progenitors. By the mid 2000s, younger colleagues of mine were disavowing what they termed (with justifiable skepticism) the “theory by the numbers” approach of an earlier epoch. As I have written elsewhere in the pages of Exposure, this new sensibility favors the poetic over the rhetorical, the sensual over the austere. Conceptually sophisticated — informed by the range of political, theoretical, and representational issues of the past thirty or so years — this newer practice insists upon the worth of the photograph as a locus of visual delectation.

Beyond the increasingly archaic fracases of late twentieth-century art debates, the deeper takeaway might be that in all periods, the antagonist of invention is orthodoxy. Whoever the players and whatever the issues are, the challenges of intellectual and aesthetic conformity are ever with us, and thus present for every generation the ongoing task of disruption, opposition, and, when necessary, overthrow.

Steven Skopik (M.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design, M.A. University of Wisconsin — Madison, B.A. University of Delaware) has exhibited photographic work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. His articles, essays, and reviews on photography have appeared in such publications as Exposure, Afterimage, and History of Photography. Skopik has been awarded an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and has twice been a recipient of a photographer’s grant from Light Work in Syracuse, New York. He is a faculty member at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and currently serves as chairperson of the Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies Department.

Perhaps nothing has altered the character and emphasis of post-secondary photography curricula over the last twenty years more than the discipline’s abrupt collision with continental literary theory in the mid-nineteen seventies. Unavoidably, teaching college level photography these days presupposes at least a passing knowledge of a formidable litany of “isms,” philosophical systems, critical traditions, and creative movements. The journey from modernist to postmodernist photographic praxis traces the parallel influences of structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory — to identify just a few paths, detours, entanglements, and intellectual pileups. This dizzying traffic of ideas crisscrosses itself elaborately; by turns, some branches converge. while others dead-end with surprising suddenness. Even for the committed academic specialist, understanding the interrelationship of these variously allied and competing analytical approaches can be a career-consuming enterprise. For the studio artist/university instructor, called upon to master and reach an ever-expanding checklist of traditional and digital photographic techniques, maintain a meaningful professional profile, and attend to the various petty tasks associated with the administration of any academic department, the effort to remain abreast of the convoluted intellectual traditions of critical theory can be daunting.¹

One can, of course, choose to celebrate or bemoan theory’s influence on the production and consumption of photographic art. On a sanguine note, contemporary critical discourse has proved useful as a tool to blunt modernist pedagogy’s worse excesses. At its dysfunctional zenith, for example, traditional instruction in photography indulged in an obsession with technical control, frequently at the expense of meaningful expression. Involuted meditations on pure form severely attenuated consideration of the wider social meanings and function of images. Resisting these and other equally troubling tendencies, contemporary criticism has offered an escape from modernism’s often deadening self-absorption. Expansion of the permissible conversations one may bring to the production and assessment of photographs has been one of postmodern theory’s most enabling contributions to art school education. Yet, it has also levied a few penalties.

While critical writing over the last thirty years has urged our understanding of the photograph well beyond a simple aesthetic horizon, much contemporary discourse on art evidences an insularity every bit as formally and conceptually blinkered as the most extreme Modernist art. At its best, both in terms of content and presentational style, analytical/theoretical activity is richly provocative. At its worst, it can be awkwardly written, heavy on jargon, light on imagination and infatuated with little beyond its own cleverness.²

THEORY AND PEDAGOGY

It is no exaggeration to suggest that much recent photographic art is virtually incomprehensible without a sound knowledge of postmodernism’s multiple critical positions. Thus, any graduate course of study that seeks to adequately familiarize its pupils with the discipline’s present intellectual and creative milieu must provide a curriculum, which, among other things, examines photographic history and historiography, probes the conditions and politics of representation, and acquaints students with the philosophies of language as they have been applied to an understanding of images. Much less obvious, however, is how such issues should intersect undergraduate photo curricula. Indeed, attempting to integrate theory at this level raises some vexing questions. For example, should a consideration of contemporary critical issues be undertaken in a generalized manner, informing everything from introductory to advanced production courses, or ought this material be confined to dedicated upper-level specialty classes and seminars? What are the peculiar pedagogical challenges of introducing these ideas to beginning artists and photographers? Who might best be expected to teach the material, and from within what academic discipline?

It’s interesting to note that, for the generation of image-makers now handed the task of bringing theoretical concepts to the classroom, immersion in a postmodern intellectual order hasn’t posed a particularly dire pedagogical challenge. The knowledge has conveniently accumulated as a more-or-less lived historical experience. Particularly in the outer provinces of state university art departments, a slightly old fashioned modernist photographic aesthetic held sway well into the mid-eighties. An undergraduate studying photography at the time was likely to be coached in the creative and conceptual projects of New Topographics or New Color work and to continue peeping at -or through- Szarkowskian “mirrors and windows.” In retrospect, it’s easy to recognize these movements as the last gasps of a moribund and static formalism. Fortuitously (or depressingly. depending on your allegiances), just as today’s early career professoriate was finishing its undergraduate training in photography, academically sanctioned modernism coasted quietly to an anticlimactic stand-still.

Entering graduate programs in photography in the mid-eighties meant enduring a whiplash shift in direction-hopping onboard the juggernaut of post­modernism just as that movement had picked up considerable momentum in the precincts of academe and the art market. Remaining sentimentally attached to classical photo aesthetics during these years more-or­less guaranteed being flattened by postmodern ism’s irresistible advance. By mid-decade the critical conversation in photography experienced a major shift, drifting away from the mission of constituting the medium as a legitimate mode of artistic activity. Instead, discussions around photography were swept up in a wider project that sought to understand the problematic relationship between art and culture. Mirroring this change of agenda, graduate seminar reading lists became heavily influenced by French literary and cultural philosophy. Works by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan. Jean­Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida. and Michelle Foucault were the order of the day.³ In the words of Any Grundberg, postmodernist theory’s “linkages to linguistic and literary theory mean[t] that its critical rationale tend[ed] to value intellect more than visual analysis.”⁴

THE “META” PROBLEM

One of the signal (and for some folks most exasperating) characteristics of postmodern theoretical systems is that they never quite contact their own purported object of study, but instead rebound back upon their own analytical limitations. Suggests Terry Eagleton,

… theory of a grand kind tends to break out when routine social or intellectual practices have come unstuck, run into trouble, and urgently need to rethink themselves. Indeed theory is in one sense nothing more than the moment when those practices are forced for the first time to take themselves as the object of their own enquiry …. The emergence of theory is the moment when a practice begins to … scrutinize its own conditions of possibility …. [It] is always in some ultimate sense a self-defeating enterprise.⁵

Certainly much recent artwork and the theory surrounding it adopts this self-conscious, self-reflexive position. To make and write about contemporary photography is, in effect, to stand outside of oneself, to “be aware of being aware”. Many contemporary artists are thus in the business of making images that are. at some level of analysis, photographs about photographs. Such a “meta” position, however, presumes a thoroughgoing familiarity with the object of one’s scrutiny and skepticism, in this case the photographic image itself, particularly in its traditional estimation as a stable, more or less transparent descriptor of external reality and bearer of authorial intent. While most current academics have long-standing knowledge of these debates, beginning students do not.

Unlike many of their instructors whose own early training in photography was limited to the relatively straightforward, if narrowly proscriptive agendas of modernism, today’s undergraduate student inhabits a significantly destabilized pedagogical environment. Given the relative paucity of meaningful instruction in the visual arts at the high school level, beginning photography students must be coached in a basic repertoire of visual competencies, learning the control of photographic materials and understanding the principals of two-dimensional design and composition. Simultaneously, however, today’s pupils are faced with a contradictory mission. To the extent that they encounter postmodernist arguments and critical ideas early on in their undergraduate experience, beginning image-makers are, in effect, asked to learn and unlearn photography all at once. For example. from an instructional point of view. the simple task of teaching photographic technique becomes a rather fraught proposition given postmodernism’s critique of traditional virtues of mastery and virtuosity. Pay too much attention to the rote mechanics of image synthesis and one is arguably reiterating the now unfashionable preoccupation with technical flourish, not to mention a concomitant fetishization of the art object. Unfortunately, the alternative. taking a casual “need to know” approach to instructing students in the use of photographic materials. can leave them floundering. It’s difficult for beginning picture-mak­ers to imagine specific visual solutions to their sundry expressive tasks if they are unaware of the medium’s range of material options.

As another example of this pedagogical double bind, consider the problematic task of teaching students the history of photography. At its simplest. learning the history of the medium means becoming acquainted with a base line of images, issues. and narratives that have influenced the production of pictures throughout photography’s past. For the feminist or Marxist critic, however, the task of historical inquiry is neither objective nor politically neutral. Prioritizing a particular canon of significant photographs, concepts, or causal events is assumed to advance specific, and often objectionable, cultural or ideological agendas.

Taking this skeptical stance further, a post-structuralist would likely reject notions of historical pattern and purpose altogether. Eagleton, writing on what he terms the ‘“new historicism,” suggests that, from this point of view, any history is “a tangled skein of dispersed narratives. none of which [is] necessarily more significant than any other: and all knowledge of the past [is] skewed by the interests and desires of the present.”⁶ Given such a notion, how might we re­imagine teaching the history of photography-or indeed should we? Certainly, a move away from an emphasis on the history of photography towards a concern with the medium’s many ‘’histories” affords a workable means to both teach and call into question traditional accounts of its past. Thus, the reading list required today in a history of photography course is likely to range from Beaumont Newhall to Deborah Bright, Alan Trachtenburg to Richard Bolton. At their best, it would seem, such pedagogical approaches can be admirably inclusive, but they also run the risk of degenerating into a diffuse incoherence. To the extent that one is committed to applying postmodern histor­ical (or actually, it might be more accurate to say historiographical) concepts to the teaching of the history of photography, certain problems inevitably accrue. How does one both relay and interrogate a body of knowledge all at once? In pragmatic terms, is this possible or even desirable? Does such a process end up training thoughtful and rigorous skeptics or half­informed cynics?

An irritating paradox thus attends the introduction of postmodernist principles to beginning level photo­graphic instruc1ion. On the one hand, learning modernist photographic history and aesthetics these days represents an almost unthinkably nostalgic indulgence. To encourage the production of what used to be termed the “fine print, advocate a so-called “straight’’ approach to image-making, or recapitulate Newhall’s version of the history of photography presently has much the same pedagogical cachet as forcing elementary school students to master Latin. Yes, possessing knowledge of an antecedent language or, in this case, aesthetic tradition can productively inform our understanding and appreciation of more contemporary forms and ideas. It’s a tough sell. though. for both teachers and students. Who, after all, wants to endure the grinding effort of becoming fluent in a language which, while important historically, is no longer actively spoken? The temptation is to streamline the curriculum — assume that we can get on to the more interestingly cogent stuff, learning whatever background is called for on the fly.

THE CHALLENGES OF IRONY

If, as has been suggested, the integration of contemporary theoretical concepts into beginning level photography classes sets up a conflicted relationship to one’s own subject of study, then postmodernism’s insistent tone of skepticism vis-a-vis the creation of aesthetic objects often complicates matters even further. While the implicit rhetorical tone of most modernist art is one of impassioned commitment, the postmodernist proffers his or her artwork with a side­ways wink. Indeed for the contemporary image­maker, the very notion of issuing an utterance- to say nothing of fabricating elaborate art objects- constitutes a gesture, which borders on the jejune. After Barthes has pronounced the “death of the author,” Derrida the absolute contingency of meaning, and Lacan the disunity of the human subject, the prospect of indulging in any sort of aesthetic activity presupposes a profound impulse towards ironic detachment. This staggeringly relentless capacity for irony -sometimes humorous, at times poignant, but always overwhelmingly present- is, arguably, one of postmodernism’s most salient characteristics.

The task of initiating inexperienced artists into a postmodernist aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, program is problematic on several levels. To be blunt, selling entering college students on a regime of self-abnegation and irony is, very likely, a losing proposition. Lacanian notions of the illusory subject notwithstanding. Belief in the erosion of the stable Cartesian self is particularly feeble in eighteen-year-olds, most of whom resist the notion of being reduced to what Foucault would derisively term the “author function.’’ It is, perhaps. indulging in a bit of developmental pop psychology, but college freshmen are typically interested in asserting a sense of their own identity as vitally constituted beings. Perhaps they ought to be allowed this, if not until graduate school, then at least up to the point when they’ve taken a few survey courses in philosophy, the history of art, and introductory level image-making.

Of course another rationale for deferring early career immersion in a postmodern milieu is that, of all rhetorical modes, irony is perhaps the most nuanced and difficult to signal. To articulate subtle reversals of expectation, to forward one meaning while intending its opposite, requires a sure sense of one’s intended message and a deft control of means.⁷ In this sense, grounding students in the now archaic traditions of modernist photographic aesthetics makes a certain amount of sense, not necessarily as an end in itself, but as an appropriate point of departure for a full understanding of and participation in contemporary art practices.

Consider that irony- at least in one of its formations- uses language against itself, employing the very terms and traditions it intends to erode. If, for example, the target of one’s critique happens to be modernism’s apolitical formalism or its belief in the transcendent potential of “high” art, one may take aim from the point of view of an external critique, or choose to conduct a cleverly subversive deconstruction from within. As an instructive (and cautionary) comparative example, we might look 10 the work of photo practitioners, Allan Sekula and Jeff Wall (see figures 2 and 3). Both Sekula and Wall share an interest in using photography to call into question modernism’s enclosed formalist agenda; certainly both flout its reluctance to plumb overtly ideological content.⁸ Sekula, unmoved by what he sees as the inert aestheticism of traditional photography, advocates instead a practice that foregrounds the “violence directed at the human body. at the environment. at working peoplc·s ability to control their own lives. We need to counterpose,” he insists, “an active resistance, simultaneously political and symbolic, to monopoly capitalism’s increasing power and arrogance, a resistance aimed ultimately at social tran­formation.”⁹ Towards this end, work such as that of Sekula and others. made in the late seventies and early eighties, evidences a nearly puritanical abhorrence of spectacle and pleasure, presumably because such frivolities are regarded as an obfuscation of photography’s potentially more utilitarian role as an instrument of social change. Thus, even if one is sympathetic to his politics, it’s hard to really enjoy the experience of encountering one of Sekula’s photographic pieces, except perhaps on some intellectualized level of self-congratulatory asceticism.¹⁰

It has become something of a historical truism to suggest that revolutions of whatever stripe tend to invert and reproduce the very oppressions they originally seek to topple. Such. one could contend, is the case with Sekula’s tidy prescriptions, which substitute one set of pieties for another: modernism’s fuzzy metaphysical imperatives mutate into the narrow orthodoxy of a shrill Marxist harangue. Ultimately, arguments like this are easy to dismiss, if for no other reason than that their ham fisted tone is didactic to the point of unintentional self-parody. Artwork that adopts these sorts of tactics is unlikely to sway anyone other than an audience of the already convinced. Coupled to a finger-wagging preachiness, Sekula’s dour rejection of the aesthetic all but ensures his work’s refusal by other viewers. For the image-maker who envisions using the photograph as a goad to political action, this is a severe limitation.

While Sekula’s critical writing and photographic projects scold traditional modernist practices from without, Jeff Wall, in contrast, co-opts from within modernism’s reverence for the aesthetic object. Yet, he does so in the service of an emancipatory impulse not unlike Sekula’s. Wall’s grand-scale. glowing light boxes have a physical presence as fetishistically amplified as the fussiest modernist print. Indeed. compared lo the dinky 8x10s that occupy the crannies of many contemporary museum spaces, Wall’s steroidal Fujitrans tableaux have a comparatively totemic authority. Such a tactic is consonant with Wall’s conceptual mission. In “a luminescent picture,” writes Wall, “the source of the image is hidden and the thing is a dematerialized or semi-dematerialized projection.”¹¹ He goes on to suggest that the schism thus widened between the photographically depicted content of his pictures and the backlit, hovering insubstantiality of the transmitted-light image acts to seduce and alienate the viewer all at once. Claims Wall, the hypertrophic scale and elaborate presentation of his work becomes ‘“an analogue of capitalist social relations. which are relations of dissociation.”¹²

Depending on one’s predisposition, such an assertion is, either plausible or a bit of a stretch. Whether we accept or reject Wall’s formulation, however, the interesting point is that his work utilizes something of the modernist artwork’s relationship to its own glorified physicality, but in the service of a project politically allied to Sekula’s. Unlike Sekula, however, Wall refuses to discard the aesthetic baby with the bath water. The “opportunity is, both to recuperate the past- the great art of the museums- and at the same time to participate with a critical effect in the most up-to-date spectacularity.”¹³ In short, whereas Sekula ultimately undermines his own efforts by presenting rigorously attenuated aesthetic objects, Wall uses photography’s traditional conventions ironically, deflecting them along a much different trajectory towards entirely novel rhetorical ends.

Certainly, the pedagogical implications of this comparison should be clear. Forbidding students access to photography’s earlier traditions and practices is, in a sense, to hamstring them early on in their education, much in the manner that work like Sekula’s falters on its own refusal of the very formal and material systems which enable and encourage the audience’s engagement with the image. But, at least for Sekula, the decision to forgo these possibilities is an informed one.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The means of integrating postmodern theoretical concepts into undergraduate photography curricula has been the source of endless pedagogical second­guessing on the part of many instructors. The result has been confusion and frustration on the part of students. To be candid, most photo practitioners are imperfectly qualified to offer instruction in the intricacies of postmodern theory and cultural studies. While our training importantly intersects those fields of specialization, its overlap is only partial. Unlike the disciplines of, say, literature and film, which enjoy relatively elaborate scholarly histories, photography’s contact with theory has always been a bit spotty. Lacking a well-established critical community within the academy, artists themselves have had to face the task of bringing this material to the classroom. Inevitably, in the hands of practitioners, the teaching of postmodern theory is accompanied by idiosyncratic interpretations, simplistic explications, and peculiar lacunae. Given the occasionally uneasy relationship between contemporary critical discourse and art practice, however, this is not necessarily a lamentable state of affairs.

There is a sense in which the projects of postmodern theoretical analysis and image making are fundamentally at odds with one another. As mentioned earlier, a lot of current critical activity tends to be concerned less with its object of study than with its own ability to erect cohesive conceptual systems. In fact, the tension between theory and practice can be a good deal more charged than that, particularly to the extent that some strains of analytical work demonstrate a deliberate indifference to (or even open hostility towards) their own subject matter. For instance, as long ago as the nineteen seventies, film scholar Christian Metz was advocating a theoretical practice, which favors what he terms a “voyeuristic sadism sublimated into epistemophilia.”¹⁴ In plain English. Metz construes theory metaphorically as a kind of vivisection; his assertion. apparently. is that it’s necessary to destroy the object of one’s interest in the service of knowing more about it. Or to be a little bit less inflammatory, Metz is suggesting that, for the theoretician, it is necessary to both love and disregard the object of one’s study, to cultivate a “kind of deliberate ambivalence.”¹⁵

Just as postmodernism’s various projects of critical analysis can bear indirectly (and, at times aggressively) on the interests of artists, practitioners ought to feel equal license to pick away at present theoretical discourse in a free-ranging manner, mining those ideas that enable our activities as object-makers. and freely discarding that which proves distracting or nonperformative. This is not, by the way, to advocate a retro anti-intellectualism, but instead to champion the notion that, ultimately, being an artist presupposes committing oneself to the task of crafting articulate things.¹⁶ To a large degree. contemporary theory and practice have become parasitically codependent, and, at this point, to separate one from the other, even were it desirable, could be to damage both. But, if the encounter with postmodern theory causes a stunted will to engage in production altogether, then we must be prepared to jettison its intricate abstractions in favor of whatever misreadings and cheap heresies sustain the creation of our work.

At best, postmodernism’s agenda of inclusion creates a permissive attitude towards an entire constellation of interpretive possibilities, offering students entry into a bracing if cacophonous cultural exchange. However, these ideas can also prompt a somewhat debilitating pessimism. In the course of presenting contemporary theory, it is easy to inadvertently communicate the idea that the attempt to make meaning is largely futile and that students’ perception of their own identities as expressive agents is a quaint modernist fiction. A few pupils typically manage to productively inhabit these ideas, but a great many simply crumple into a nihilistic solipsism. As often as not, this manifests itself as a lethargic unwillingness to offer informed critical responses to their own and others’ work. Thus, it becomes very important to impress upon beginning image-makers that the lessons of postmodernity do not lead to a comfy relativism, a lazy destination where all expression resides in a gray haze of indeterminate value. In fact, quite the opposite is true. While contemporary art analysis substitutes many provisional verities for modernism’s notion of a transcendent aesthetic “Truth,” evaluative criteria nonetheless remain. The contemporary image-maker must attend not just to one system of creative activity, but to a range of dispersed aesthetic and conceptual possibilities, each with its own values, prerogatives, and goals. One can argue the merits or these various projects, but, once located, it is perfectly possible to reach evaluative conclusions about one’s work. Thus presented, postmodernism ought not to portend an “anything goes” looseness. Indeed, one’s task is multiplied. An artist today must understand a range of conceptual systems, place his or her work within one of those practices, and comprehend the rationale and criteria by which to gauge its virtues and failures.

Finally, regarding the integration of postmodern theory into post-secondary photo curricula, it should be said clearly and emphatically that historiography is not history! Recognizing that any photo-historical canon is subject to exclusions and oversights, students nonetheless must be given a toehold on understanding the medium’s past technological, conceptual, and aesthetic developments. In a sense, the specific version of history offered and methodology employed is less important than providing a stable point of departure for later exploration and questioning. To the extent that an admittedly partisan modernist account of the history of photography precedes and negatively prompts more recent debates, intersecting such material early on makes a certain amount of curricular sense.

In conclusion, then, it’s worth considering that, after twenty or so years, postmodern agendas are beginning to look a bit threadbare. While it may still be possible to make art that transgresses the boundaries between high and low culture, engages the politics of the image, or lays bare the conditions of representation, such gestures are increasingly rote, over­wrought, and obvious. It’s no small irony that an intellectual movement whose original task was located in the reassessment of a conceptually static, often prescriptive modernist formalism has itself given rise to a tradition-bound academicism increasingly out of touch with the thinking and creative trajectory of many younger artists and teachers. In those just entering the profession, we are beginning to catch the first glimmers of an intergenerational skirmish- a tussle perhaps not unlike the one that marked postmodernism’s decisive upset of modernity in the seventies and eighties. It is probably too early to tell if we are poised for a wholesale rejection of today’s intellectual/creative regime, or for an accommodation that reconciles certain elements of both modernism and post­modernism. In any event, the minute fault lines opening within postmodernity seem continuous with the very concerns, antagonisms, and headaches occasioned by the introduction of its various theoretical systems into the curriculum. In this sense, we do well to continue thinking about theory’s peculiar pedagogical challenges since the task of those most directly affected by its legacy will, likely, be to dismantle and deflect the very debates such inclusions have wrought. This, of course, could be the subject for another conversation entirely.

NOTES

1. Throughout I will use the term, “theory,” “criticism,” and “postmodern analysis” more-or-less interchangeably. Strictly speaking, this conflation is imprecise, but serves here as a useful shorthand for that range of ideas and aesthetic positions which have informed the discussion surrounding art and art criticism of the last twenty or so years.

2. A lot has been made of the postmodern theorists’ notoriously opaque and circular writing style (Lacan and Derrida are particularly impenetrable). The convoluted friskiness, of these thinkers’ use of language is meta-logically consistent with the content of their writing; i.e., in order to discuss the ultimately meandering, indeterminate relationship between language and meaning, they use words in a manner that is meandering and indeterminate.

3. At the time. conspicuous possession of a dog-eared copy of Baudrillarcl’s Simulations more-or-less guaranteed one’s status as a grad school hipster.

4. Andy Grundberg. Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974–1989 (New York: Aperture Foundation. Inc., 1990), 21–42.

5. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis. Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 190.

6. Ibid., 199

7. Try being ironic, for example, in a language you only half understand!

8. To head off a familiar objection, this isn’t to say that avoiding express political content isn’t in itself the assertion of an ideological position.

9. Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism. Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax. Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of An and Design. l 984 ). 53.

10. Apropos this observation, it’s interesting to look at images from Sekula’s more recent projects, for example, those in his monograph, Fish Stories. Compared to his earlier work, these pictures demonstrate a concern for formal precision that would wobble the knees of the most diehard photographic modernist. Oddly (for Sekula), within certain passages, the book’s layout recalls the “images only” aesthetic one generally associates with traditional photographic monographs.

11. Jeff Wall, “Typology. Luminescence, Freedom: Selections from a Conversation with Jeff Wall,” in Jeff Wall, Transparencies (New York: Rizzoli. 1987). 99.

12. Ibid., 100

13. Ibid

14. Christian Metz, The lmaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington. Indiana: Indiana University Press. 1977). 16.

15. Ibid.

16. Or, for the more conceptually inclined, it at least means issuing articulate utterances.