Short answer: Postmodernism

I flubbed this question during an important conversation today. It would be deeply inappropriate to reach out to the committee to ask to change my answer, but for my peace of mind I need to voice it somewhere.

At least, I think I finally deciphered the question a handful of hours later. I was nervous and didn’t quite stick the intuitive leap between my preferred jargon and theirs. Which art theory? There are so many, the arguments about which are most valid get painfully pedantic rather quickly, and why would I limit myself to one? And why would I even want to limit myself to one for both pedagogy and personal work?

At first I thought they were testing my awareness of semiotics or the hermeneutic circle that used to be a running conceptual theme in the department as it was. (In the latter case it tended to refer to the idea that materials/parts, technique, and meaning of art as inextricably linked to the extend that in order to properly discuss one you have to discuss the interactions of all three. Before I confirmed that this was not what they wanted, I thought I was about to talk about how my selection and manipulation of materials was designed to heighten the themes in my artwork.)

With the benefit of hindsight, I think this was a question I would have phrased as: what art movements are most meaningfully aligned with your pedagogy and personal artistic practice?

Postmodernism. Postmodernism is the answer, though it is also sufficiently broad as to require further explanation.

Answer part 1: How does postmodernism relate to my pedagogical priorities?

A running theme in postmodern thought is questioning who is considered most authoritative and why. This often takes the form of searching out which groups, individuals, and types of thinking have been left out of established canons.

In the classroom, one way in which this postmodern questioning attitude manifests is my determination to expand the art history examples I put before studio art students. Even if I have a plethora of examples, are they all from western European countries? Are the artists all men? Are they all white? Are they cis and straight? If so, then my students deserve a broader set of examples.

Another way in which the postmodern reexamination of hierarchies manifests in my classroom is in which assignments students receive when learning strategies for depicting space. There is value in learning about linear perspective, but it does bear the staggering conceptual limitation of treating one viewer’s point of view as the ultimate authority on the scene. If, like me, that is the visual norm in which an artist was raised then it might help to seek out examples of what is gained by an alternate paradigm. David Hockney’s Getty presentation “Painting and Photography” used examples from several Asian artistic traditions to show indisputably rigorous work that depicted space in just such alternate paradigms.

Finding these gaps and striving to bridge them is likely to be a lifelong pedagogical endeavor. It is a single but important example of how postmodern thought affects my teaching ideals.

Answer part 2: How does postmodernism relate to my personal artistic practice?

The obvious answer is that women artists have long been marginalized or excluded in the artistic canon. My entire MFA thesis related to that fact. I make art about it, I study it, and I feel too strongly about it to be a good choice for polite interview conversation.

Let’s look instead to a more recent example of how postmodern theory relates to my personal artistic practice. Among all my artistic endeavors of 2024, my foray into fanbinding is easily the artistic project that felt most profoundly aligned with my interests and values.

Fanfiction itself complicates authorship and authority over the direction of the story with a profoundly postmodern sensibility. How audacious, to love a story so much that you rewrite it! How curious, to love a story so much that you also read a plethora of its doppelgangers! How capitalistically foolish, to write anything that can be neither published nor monetized!

Without the option of operating under capitalistic logic (because of the boundaries of fair use), fanfiction (and fanart and all the related fan activities) tends to operate in an informal gift economy. Without an MSRP, how do we assess value? The usual hierarchy of value is useless in this situation.

I’ve been avidly reading fanfiction for at least the past dozen years. Last year I reached out to the author of one of my favorite fanfics and asked permission to print the story and make a copy for her and a copy for me. No money would be exchanged, and I would not print a single page without this author’s blessing. I received said blessing, and then proceeded to make an absurd set of four volumes.

The books I made are playful, as a lot of postmodern art tends to be. Since the point was emphatically not to transgress fair use by making anything remotely monetizable, at each design crossroads I chose the more laborious, unprofitable, and idiosyncratic option.

What does this look like in bookbinding?

I designed custom chapter heading illustrations for each volume. The endbands were hand-sewn. Each book had a ribbon in a color coordinating with a significant early emotional beat. Letters were printed out separately and secured via letterlocking (aka pre-digital information security as studied and demonstrated by the Unlocking History research team). I gritted my teeth and learned enough of a new (to me) graphic design program to typeset the story. I made my own bookcloth and painted on the title information.

It was a mountain of work to accomplish in a single month, but it was worth every bit of effort to send the author’s volumes as appreciation for the joy I’d had in reading the stories thus bound.

So, yes. My favorite project of 2024 makes no sense at all without postmodernist attitudes towards meaning-making and authorship.

Bonus answer:

My growing obsession with fiber arts also makes a lot more sense in relation to postmodernism. It’s so painfully easy and common to underestimate the intellectual rigor and value of knitting, weaving, crochet, spinning, etc. The Industrial Revolution upended those daily necessities, and even the original Arts and Crafts Movement was deeply flawed by generally ignoring the economic unavailability of their work to the working class. We can’t afford to continue with fast fashion as it is, then. Visible mending and other handicrafts may not save the world, but they are postmodern resistance worth attempting.

TLDR: postmodernism. I should have said postmodernism.