Philosophy of Art: Could Neo-Dadaism be considered Postmodernism?

Yes, it is, especially as a liminal movement.

It's important to understand that post-modernism isn't anti-modernism.

They both stand in opposition to the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, they both use introspection (expressionism in modernism, self-referentiality in post-modernism), parody/satire, and reprise, etc... as central devices.

So for Neo-Dada, and it's always best to use particular examples-- so take Robert Rauschenberg's Bed from 1955. This obvious owes a debt to Marcel Duchamp as a readymade -- hence the term 'neo-dada'. He has taken a readymade, what is ostensibly his bed, and has adulterated it: he has turned it into a work of art with paint with pen, a violent devastation of the object such that it can no longer serve its original function, framed it and put it up on the wall. It looks at first glance to be a dada readymade melded with an abstract expressionist painting (and this is valid, to show how post-modernism is very much a continuation of modernism)

So why is this post-modernism rather than modernism?

In 1969, Leo Steinberg used the term postmodernism to define Rauschenberg's "flatbed" picture plane, which contains a plurality of artifacts that when together are not compatible with the pictorial field of premodernist and modernist painting.

The modernist position of art as bearing a ideal of unity, an ideal of medium specificity, of transcendence beyond the everyday is abandoned in favor of the postmodern ideal of the artwork as an assemblage constructed from a multitude of heterogenous segments: these segments do not need to be of the same medium, code, style, etc... and some segments may retain their identity as functional objects, as long as the assemblage as a whole is a sovereign work of art; as in Rauschenberg's Bed, paint is cheek to cheek with a bed quilt. The form of this new work of art is constituted by multiplicity, a medley of incongruous elements in collage which produce an ambiguity.

So now, with neo-dada, we no longer have an ironic twist of concept and presentation to turn a functional object into a work of art (as with Duchamp et al.)

Instead the functional (also the ethical, and the political) with met with the purely formal to create an unstable cacophony. It is this violent alliance which defines post-modernism.

/r/askphilosophy Thread