Incursions into Popular Culture

Abstract

The notion of New York visual artists and performance artists making feature-length films for wide distribution, sometimes even within the Hollywood system, is a complex one. In the 1980s and 1990s a significant number of these artists, who include Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Kathryn Bigelow, David Salle, David Byrne, Eric Bogosian, Amos Poe, Becky Johnston, and Julian Schnabel, crossed the boundary between high art and popular culture. And they did so in ways that exceeded any similar such forays by other generations.² For this reason, we must consider how the more mainstream arena in many cases reconfigured the artists’ earlier art-world concerns. We must also inquire how the presence of these artists as directors in commercial film practices altered the meaning of their works, and, in the best work, made visible the very processes of production.

The postmodern sensibility of our time is different from both modernism and avant-gardism precisely in that it raises the question of cultural tradition and conservation in the most fundamental way as an aesthetic and a political issue … [The] main point about contemporary postmodernism is that it operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art, in which the second terms are no longer automatically privileged over the first, a field of tension which can no longer be grasped in categories such as progress vs. reaction, left vs. right, past vs. present, modernism vs. realism, abstraction vs. representation, avant-garde vs. kitsch.¹

Andreas Huyssen