1. What is the difference between modernism and postmodernism? How does postmodern life or situation is organized?
The fundamental difference between modernism and postmodernism is that modernist thinking is about the search of an abstract truth of life while postmodernist thinkers believe that there is no universal truth, abstract or otherwise.
Modernity is the world shaped by the industrial revolution, the invention of mechanical, mechanized labor, and political manifestos. It’s the mechanical age. Post modernity is organize more like the internet. It’s the exchange of information. It’s globalization, that there are multiple languages, there are multiple ways of thinking, all in contact with each other. The way that it’s organized is not a grid.
From the factory to the internet. Modernism was preoccupied with kind of rationally organizing our lives and our societies and rationally organizing our philosophy and our mathematics and science. Postmodern disposition is going to call that into question. Your ability to explain everything scientifically and to get to the bottom of things. Postmodernism is the assertion that there’s no neutral place to stand.
2. What does the lecturer mean by neutral knowledge?
We all interpret the world around us in our own way according to our language, cultural background, and personal experiences. In other words, everybody has their own views based on his or her social and personal contexts. Not relativist. You only know things through relationships to things. It’s an absolute kind of knowledge.
3. What does Jacque Derrida mean by “text” when he said “there is nothing outside the text”? what does this statement mean? Can you find us an example?
That there’s nothing outside of interpretation. There is nothing outside of context. Meanings only exist as interpretations. Interpretations are fundamentally linguistic: they happen within systems of ‘signification’. For example, Kosuth’s chair artwork. The chair is already interpreted, if it’s intelligible to you. The chair is a text and there are lots of different facets to that text.
4. How can you interpret this painting by Rene Magrite
The text in the painting translate to ‘This is not a pipe’. Although the image shows a drawing of a pipe, it is not a pipe, because it is just an image of a painting, not an actual pipe. This is all sort of things but pipe. There are multiple ways of interpreting the painting, however, Magritte interrupts the significance of written language and the significance of representational painting.
5. What is “deconstruction”? can you find an example of this in advertising, fashion, and or art?
Very conscious and very careful trying to pay attention to how something is constructed. It’s not just dismantling and just taking apart, it is trying to recover and remember how language is constructed or how meanings are constructed. It’s a process of remembering. Usually that happens the way we’re drawn to and the way we remember it is by interrupting. So, deconstruction is always using strategies of interruption because it is for the sake of being conscious of the construction that’s there. It is still dismantling but, for the sake of understanding how it was holding meaning, clarifying or mediating meaning.
Michael Mapes. He recreates the human visage by arranging fragments of a person’s life—photographs, locks of hair, handwriting samples, jewelry—into highly detailed works of art. Mapes has been making these pieces for years, generally working with subjects intimately close to him. But in his newest project, he’s decided to deconstruct (then reconstruct) some of the Dutch Masters’ most famous 17th century portraits, rendering classics like Bartholomeus van der Helst’s painting of Geertruida den Dubbelde into startling franken-portraits.
6. What does the statement “power is knowledge” mean?
Those of you have the ability to change their situation and to affect the situations of others, have the ability to change and affect what they know and what you know. Your ability to change somethings is wrapped up in knowledge. Knowledge is always constituted within and shaped by social systems that provide an ordering of human behavior.
7. What is considered as a strong power? what does this mean? Name the artist that respond to this? What does the artist’s statement in a work “Protect me from what I want” mean?
A strong power produces effects at the level of desire and also at the level of knowledge. It is when you do something because you want to – it is the right thing to do and because you want to do it. It operates on the level of desire.
Jenny Holzer responded to this. It disrupts the process of wanting in relation to a sign.
8. Below are photographs by Agan Harahap – an Indonesian contemporary photographer. He is famous for altering existing photographs to make new fictive truth. Have a look at it and tell me what you think? Do you think the event happened? is it real? What does this tell us about the medium of photography? And how can photography tell us about truth, is it a reliable tool in telling the truth? What is this telling us about the role of myth in visual culture and communication?
People did not see the event live but when looking at a photograph, they may think that the event in the photograph is real. People may believe in it and assume things by just looking at a photograph. The image can build facts when it is actually unconfirmed. The event is actually not real but if I didn’t know the fact that it is not I may have the believe it is real. Photography make people think it is real, it is the truth. People assume photographs are evidences in stating facts. Photography may be a reliable tool in telling the truth but it can also be manipulated. It can also change the fact when people interpret it in different ways.
It is telling us to stop believing everything you see online.
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