Who knows anymore what postmodernism means? It’s not a movement, it’s not even a style. It’s a collection of attitudes, some of them quite contradictory. In architecture, it originally meant the end of the sterile glass box and the return to romance, decoration, and humanism. Then deconstructivism raised its irrational head and now all its bizarre manifestations are somehow thought to be postmodern, too.
In art, postmodernism spawned the notion that it was impossible to say anything new anymore, and that all artists could do was “appropriate” from the past. It also has come to mean, for some weird reason, the embrace of popular culture, strident anti-elitism, and the subversive idea that there is no such thing as historical truth.
If nothing else, postmodernism is a feeling of disorientation and uncertainty, a loss of modernism’s faith in the future, and worse, a sense of doubt about the past as well. Toss in some anxiety over the end of the industrial age and the approaching turn of the millennium, and you have the psychological cocktail.
Strangely enough, a good place to get a strong dose of this postmodern angst is in a little gallery in Edgewater. In fact, to visit the Polo Gallery is to immerse yourself in our current cultural predicament, not just because of the art inside, but because the whole River Road environment reinforces the sense of dislocation.
Outside the gallery’s windows, in the bright Hudson River light, is a bizarre landscape of glitzy condominium complexes and abandoned factory buildings, piles of rubble and arrangements of manicured shrubs, old waterfront taverns and fern bars. Land deals percolate, shopping centers sprout up, and the evil genie of toxic waste hovers. Looming in the distance is the mirage-like skyline of Manhattan’s western shore.
Polo has been open for 2 1/2 years. The current exhibit, “Urban Order,” deals loosely with the theme of cities. But, the show also has a lot in common with an earlier exhibit at Polo called “Post-Archaeology,” in which artists created pseudo-artifacts from imagined civilizations.
Many of the works in this show exhibit the same strange and uneasy relationship with the past. Most of it would look much more surreal if it didn’t so much resemble the environment outside.
Roselyn Rose’s collage-paintings combine fragments from the past – the entrance to an Egyptian tomb, Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel,” Assyrian archers – to create a sense of lost civilizations. It’s like flipping through a Rolodex of art history. Except we’re made to feel that the crush of historical stuff is oppressive, that the symbols of culture don’t add up to anything, that the past is a puzzle that can’t be solved.
Some of the sculptors in the show manipulate architectural forms from the past, and these too, present themselves as puzzles. Roy Steele’s red clay sculptures have been oxidized with salt to make them look like relics. A pair of ruined towers – intended as phallic symbols – suggest something from an ancient civilization. In contrast, Luis Castro’s architectural fantasies look fresh, like neat abstractions in limestone, combining such elements as flying buttresses, a medieval colonnade, and quatrefoils. But the parts don’t combine into a meaningful whole in the way that real architecture must. There are strange jumps in scale and odd juxtapositions.
Janice Mauro’s sculptures look like streamlined female fertility figures from primitive cultures, and there is an air of religious ritual about these works, but their solemnity is offset by contemporary kinkiness: The figures stand outside upright coffins decorated with sexual imagery.
Even the automobile becomes a relic in this show. Steve Mumford’s painting of cars stacked at the junkyard remind us that our own civilization is creating relics at an accelerated pace, so much so that we have to stack them on top of another.
Sharon Vatsky, deep into the archaeological-museum aesthetic, plays with the current preoccupation with angels. One of her fragment-like reliefs has a section of an angel’s wing on it. Another is a piece of a arch, with broken pieces of vine coiling around it. The funniest one – and humor is rare in this show – is on the theme of the fallen angel, and looks as if a heavenly being has fallen into wet cement.
No single artist stands out in this show, and yet the overall exhibit, and the gallery setting itself, makes a strong impression. Everything here feels post-something, whether it’s postmodern, or post-industrial or post-archaeological, or whatever. Of course, sooner or later somone will have to accept the consequences of this kind of thinking. It tends to beg the question. If we’re through with all these things, then what exactly has come to replace it?
