1.
The critical relationship between modernism and postmodernism is that while modernism was centred in the analysis of life within the context of a “western industrialized world”, postmodernism represents a critique both to modernity and to the western world it analyses. Modernism was the term coined by Baudelaire (1821-1867) to refer to the socio-cultural transformation brought-about by modernity. It is about what it feels like to live in modernity and it is not particularly attached to art –for which Clement Greenberg is credited. Greenberg provides a thorough explanation about modernism in art in his essay “Modernist Painting”, where he dates modernism as ranging from the second half of the nineteenth century to the 1960’s. Greenberg picked Manet as his earliest example of modernist painting; this is because of the new vision one is required to have in order to understand the depiction. However, modernism, as a conception of art in general, was rooted in French practice as soon as 1914. Modernism was a break with the mimetic ways of representation.

Postmodernism is the paradigm of thought that resulted from the intellectual stir-up in the late sixties, particularly 1968, time when social movements were popping all over the world. The term was coined by Leo Steinberg as a critique to the formalist orthodoxy, this is, modernist theory and practice. Autonomous art is that which cuts loose from the matrix of modernity just as modernist ways of thinking were happening before Greenberg, Robert Rauschenberg (mid fifties) had already broken with the modernist visual paradigm (sensibility). In this sense played the role that Greenberg attributes to Manet with respect to modernism. Postmodernity forces us to see with different eyes, in this sense, postmodernism forces us to see with different eyes; in Jasper Johns’ words it is the detachment of retinal art. This new vision is to be applied not only to the artistic sphere, but it is focused on marginalized aspects of the modern tradition overall. The postmodernist theorists replaced Duchamp; instead of being a “peripheral figure around the edges of Dada and Surrealism”, postmodernity aimed to place him as “the avatar of the entire spectrum of posmodernist art activity” (Frameworks, 35).
Photography plays an important definition on Baudelaire’s definition of modernity. It was part of that seducing world created by order, technology and humaneness. Although he didn’t like photography as art, he did enjoy the pleasures of being a flaneur; a proud French intellectual who enjoyed the glamour and benefits of modern-Paris after the Haussmannization. Seurat was also a flaneur and he is, I would say, the epitome of modernist painting especially because of his ambiguity, or as Zygmunt Bauman[1] would say, ambivalence. Seurat has been quoted as ambiguous because his pictures can be interpreted as both utopian and dystopian with respect to the society they depict. To Bauman, modernity reaches its mature stage, as a cultural project, with the Enlightment; and as an institutionalized way of living, with the development of the industrial society. Thus, the orderly society, perfectly organized and with the perfect proportions portrayed by Seurat, reflect the ambivalence between modernity and the need for order –scientifization of all languages, even the artistic one; for Baudelaire, in the example of photography. Modernity creates robots, at the same time, cameras exist to record the existence of the robots; Seurat chooses to depict them in a way that was not accessible to photography until digital photography came –and even now, although we have the technological resources to manipulate the image, we cannot make a human being with perfect Greek proportions. Seurat’s technique and Bauman’s theory match-up perfectly. Bauman is talking about ambiguity as the resultant product of the process of ordering, which is characteristic of the modernity. Seurat says, if there is another media to allow mimetic representation (acquired through scientific language), therefore painting will be non-mimetic. This echoes what Johns had in mind by saying that postmodernism was a detachment from retinal art. On the other hand, Gerhart Richter is also concerned with the relation of photography and painting but in the postmodern context. In the nineteenth century, photography was trying to find its place in the fine arts. Once it got a place, there was a point where photography was explicitly non-mimetic, and so, verging with painting. The role Richter plays is that of the redeemer of painting at a time when postmodernist culture believed it dead; the inverse process of what happened in the nineteenth century.

I think that postmodernism itself is an unnecessary category created by what Bauman identifies as the defining feature of modernism –ambivalence. Postmodernism is nothing but modernism with better technology and global means of distribution; the artistic practice changes to adapt itself to the relatively new conditions of an already existing category –modernism.
2.
The issue of gender has been a recurrent theme that was (arguably) first explored in an open way by Duchamp in the persona of Rose Selavie. Female artists like Ana Mendieta have also explored gender transfiguration; the statement in these kinds of works is that we are all human beings. It is a complaint to the useless and yet inevitable distinction between men and women. Gender wise, inequality has always been a problem because the natural differences between men and women (like strength and birth) have been serving as the platform to oppress women and by doing so; eliminate the competition for men in the modern bourgeois world. The nuclear family is an example the social construction that allowed the bourgeoisie to cut the competition (within the workforce) in half from the beginning.

This is just a little example of how men have been shaping the world into patriarchal forms. Under the patriarchal structure is obvious that most of the art that deals with gender issues is made by women, mainly because they have been gaining terrain as society advances. Even so, escaping constructs that have been built into our heads from the beginning of mankind is as difficult for women as it is to man. Examples of this can be seen in works like The dinner party, by Judy Chicago. In this piece, Chicago attempts to make homage to important women in history; the problem is that she portrays them as vaginas. Many of the gendered art was made as a critique to the objectification of women; as examples we have Jeff Wall with Picture of a woman which besides critiquing the view of the woman as an object of male visual pleasure, is also a historical reference to Manet’s A bar at the folies-bergères. I think that representing women whose achievements were accomplished via intellectual or similar kind of work as only their vaginas is a terrible, objectifying mistake. Perhaps her idea was to critique the objectification by making it obvious; to question that side of patriarchy that regards women as objects independently of their other attributes but I think that this could have been accomplished in a more direct way, without having to appeal to sexuality in such an obvious manner. In the end, Freudian interpretations of art are one of the most male centred theories there are, and I think that, for the most part, they are weak.

Within gendered art, we can also find examples that either critique or support the ideals of beauty imposed by the dominant ideology. Ana Mendieta is a good example of how these ideals of feminine beauty can be challenged; she shows her body pressed against plates of glass or acrylic, alluding to the idea of distortion and damage –of feminine bodies. Lisa Steele gives the same example but in different media; her video Lisa’s birthday suit, is a record of her history trough her scars, showing the human side of feminine beauty. I find this example a particularly interesting one because not only does it criticize the male idealization of femininity, it also dignifies the little details (often called imperfections) that help to make us unique; the impressions of the world in us. At last, I think it is worth mentioning Cindy Sherman, who is considered as another critic woman because she mocks Hollywood’s iconography with respect to women. Nevertheless, my instinctive reaction towards her work is not as a mock or critique but rather as advertising or supporting those ideals. The problem is that gendered art (and art in general) can be ambiguous. As such, art can always be manipulated by the institutions in charge of legitimizing the artists (i.e. Museums, “important” galleries, etc.), therefore we can be skeptical about gendered art that we can find in the big museums (the same applies to art that is supposed to criticize the dominant ideology) because we can assume that it has gone trough a filter that, to a certain extent, contaminates it.