implicit art

It’s really amazing what teaching can teach you. I just got back from giving a
lecture at The South
African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA) about
"postmodern narratives." This is not an easy topic, and it was to third
year, undergraduate artists (not theorists), to many of whom English is a second
(third or fourth) language. They very quickly grasped the basics of signs / semiotic
theory and the contrast of modernism as "the crisis of representation"
vs. postmodernism as "the crisis of the real." Effortless, was the transition
into "why is this important?" (they shrewdly asked me this; it’s the
main critique of those who might undermine postmodernism as an interventionist
space of thinking). Once we got going, the students were excited by that which
my fears said they would find boring. They started answering their own questions!
They loved Laugh it Off as a South
African example of intertextuality, and themselves brought up religion and The
Apartheid State as potential "grand narratives" that should be questioned,
by looking at the construction of history. Not only did they see all of the presented relationships
between modernism and postmodernism (one being how representation can actually effect our “reality”),
but internalized them in important ways, that I could never have thought of in prepping
the lecture. In fact, I’ve added their examples to my notes for future reference.
This is why I teach and make art…