Falling Through Postmodernism. Volume One: Blindness

By Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette

After Postmodernism, it is now time to return to an abandoned territory in search of our own blindness. What did we not see during the age of theorizing, to what were we blind? In three substantial case studies this volume, the first of three books on Postmodernism, the author closely examines some of the remains of a lost era. Cultural blindness is the result of a social wounding that some artists find the courage to examine. Although the paintings of Anselm Kiefer were celebrated globally, the historical content and political meanings of these works were lost in the transition from Germany to other nations. It now time to recover the political challenges presented by Kiefer's art and to make his hard questions visible again. Working obsessively for decades, German artist G?nther F?rg photographed the historical remnants of modern architecture built between the wars, buildings with histories dark and light, knitted unobtrusively into contemporary urban fabrics. By juxtaposing photographs of fascist and modernist architects, the photographer seemed to have been pondering the morality of architecture in an age of compromise and collusion and asking the viewers to re-see and re-consider old choices. More recently, the ethics of subject matter surfaced in a rare public discourse surrounding a small group of disturbing photographs we have collectively refused to look at. What are the limits of looking, and, on a certain day in September of 2001, did we find the end point of our collective imagination and encounter the twenty-first century Sublime? From what did we what did we turn away in our willful blindness? This book goes back in time to look again at our blindness.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692412050
• ISBN13: 9780692412053
• Release Date: March 2015
• Publisher: AHS
• Length: 586 Pages
• Weight: 2.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.0"