Oh no, it's PoMo

I had been looking forward to this week’s topic because I had first been introduced to PoMo in the Contemporary Issues in Photography class I took a few years ago. However, after reading the chapter and the summaries, I don’t know any more about PoMo than I did last week. Perhaps because the Contemporary Issues class focused on photography, my introduction to PoMo was limited. In that class we discussed appropriation most specifically the work of Sherrie Levine and the concept that “originality is impossible, anyway, given that there is nothing new under the sun. Therefore, invention and uniqueness are no longer essential in making art.” I suppose in some sense, the readings reflect this concept. For Lyotard, the post-industrial world is characterized by the loss of the narrative “which has served to guarantee the truth, or use-value, of knowledge throughout history.” So in essence, what Lyotard is describing is a loss of truth. This leads into the other discussions about truth and reality. The articles that intrigued me the most were the discussions about September 11. Because some of the events were captured on film, they became real to us. Would they have been less real if they had not been televised as they occurred or replayed in a continuous loop? For those of us who watched the events unfold on television, the reality was controlled by those reporting on the events and those individuals themselves became spectators as any informative information was lacking. How would we have reacted to the events if they had not been captured on camera? This discussion makes me wonder about the assassination of JFK. Would we view this event differently if we did not have the Zapruder film which provided us with a vantage point that virtually made us front row witnesses to the assassination? (One of the things that is appears to be missing in the historical recounting of the Kennedy assassination is noting when the film was first made public. Unlike 1963, we live in an age of immediacy which we take for granted.) Well, I seem to be digressing. I am looking forward to class when my classmates can help me get a better understanding of the readings and PoMo.