Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Recent Canadian Art

Virgil Hammock is president of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts
at Mount Allison University.

This is a book whose basic premise is, to my mind, very dicey.
Postmodernism is a passé architectural term that was picked up, and
mercifully has now been largely abandoned, by art writers looking for
new terms to describe contemporary art. Cheetham equates postmodernism,
at least the Canadian variety, with contemporary artists’ ability to
use memory as the basic “stuff” of their art. Artists have, since
the beginning of time, used memory—their own and the history of
art’s—for the subject of their work. Art has always used past art as
a basis for its subject matter. Among the literally hundreds of examples
of this practice, two should suffice here: seventeenth-century Dutch
art’s reliance on sixteenth-century Italian art (Rembrandt/Caravaggio)
and eighteenth-century English landscape art’s reliance on
seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Most artists have, at the very
least, their own past to draw upon as a basis for subject matter. What
this has to do with postmodernism is beyond me.

This modest book contains many wild generalizations. Like so many
self-acclaimed postmodern writers, and writers on postmodernism,
Cheetham and, to a lesser extent, Hutcheon run amok with the English
language—or, to put it in their own terms, “convey textual
information” on “Western subjecthood.” Yet mumbo-jumbo is not this
book’s main problem; rather, it is the leap of philosophical logic
that the authors engage in to prove their basic premises.

Postmodernism purports to be more politically relevant than the
modernism it has supposedly vanquished. Art and artists are plugged into
the problems of contemporary society, where they offer both commentary
on and solutions to those things that plague us, or so Cheetham and
Hutcheon believe. They appear to be living on a different planet from
mine. I would suggest that the very language of postmodernist
criticism—and this book is no exception—makes art more remote from
society than ever before, and mystifies both the artistic product and
process. There is little in this book that would make me think
otherwise.