Duchamp's decision to display readymade objects as art changed everything.

 

Duchamp was the first to realise that any 'readymade' non-art object on its own could be displayed as 'art' if dissociated from its original context, use and meaning. His best-known examples of readymade art are a Bottlerack (1914) and a porcelain Urinal signed R. Mutt (1917). The mass-(re)produced object displaced the very idea of artistic originality and the sacred uniqueness of the original work of art. Duchamp opened a can of worms. His readymades had unforeseen consequences that have culminated in the dilemmas of postmodern art.(3)

 

 

Duchamp's Bottlerack (1914) and porcelain Urinal signed R. Mutt (1917)

 

Postmodernism was thus fundamentally different to all the other movements that had come before. It did not rely on a new approach to manipulating the media in which the artist worked, as it had for the Impressionists or Cubists for example, but in the manipulation of the ideas behind them. A postmodern artist can work within any medium he or she desires. It is not the technique that marks them out as postmodern it is the message the work carries. It is, as Lyotard described it, a scepticism  towards all metanarratives (4) and the postmodernist's question must always be; what makes it legitimate?(5)

 

 I have attempted to use a similar approach to Duchamp's installation of the urinal by constructing my short film, Global Shadows, entirely from readymade images and soundtrack for, as Derrida states, collage / montage is the primary form of postmodern discourse.(6) Further, it makes great use of text and all of the commercial items shown in the film (fake or not) are taken from adverts on the Internet, advertising having been coined the official art of capitalism.(7)

 

 

Pat Bullen-Whatling, Global Shadows (2009) – stills from short film

 

Global Shadows  deconstructs the grand narrative that 'experts' have all the answers for us and is not really about the weather at all but more about the reality of Reality and the biggest grand narrative current today that through globalisation we will all become cut price Americans (in the end) – everyone is to be addicted to prosperity.

 

Postmodern theory did not foresee that the one immovable Grand Narrative would by the United States of America. Fukuyama's vision of terminal history is really about the no-option, no-exit endlessness of America. The Cold War's end was supposed to liberate the world from Marxism's oppressive grand narrative. We have instead the junk capitalism of mafia pimps in East Europe and the Third World. What happened to the seedling hope of  local “micro”-narratives nursed in theory by Lyotard and the other postmodernists?(8)