Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition and Lane Relyea: All Over and At Once

Jean-Francois Lyotard offers a practical guide for artists to negotiate the modern art world in his essay “The Postmodern Condition”. Lyotard gives challenges and ideas on how we can better our practice and the outcomes we produce.

Lane Relyea’s “All Over and At Once” is a complete contrast. He writes more of a report of the condition or progress of how artists have reacted to postmodern concerns and it isn’t favorable. He writes with a cynical attitude and does not give any inspiration or hope to a practicing artist.

In the first section he gives comparisons between art and business, and relegates art to a commodity driven relam. He shows a disconnected view of the artist and the work being produced today, using words to describe such as “lazy”, “indifference” and “ambivalence”. He also criticizes the role of discourse in postmodern practice, stating we have become overly dependent on it: “we are inundated with information to the point where it becomes meaningless to us." In the final section Relyea tries to give some ideas on how we can rectify his concerns: “Stopping a work, framing it, having it hold itself before us and challenge and reward our engagement with it – this is no longer a given for art but a stake that needs to be declared, fought for, pushed, risked, secured” – but this does very little to curb the overall disapproving tone and his denigration of the core motivations that give artists their stimulus.

As a practicing artist I do not agree with Relyea’s condemnation of art today. He seems to focus on particular small aspects and does not give any praise to the bigger innovations that have happened over the past years. I don’t want to think that art has lost incentive or value and has become a purely monetary driven practice.

I might be naïve in believing that there still is a separation between art and business but I think artists today have had to adapt to the circumstances in which we live, purely in order to survive. Relyea draws an image of an idealized artist that should be working today but if they actually existed I doubt they would be able to live, eat and produce the art work that Relyea would deem worthy.

The notions of the sublime, and the aesthetics of the sublime, that were put forth in Lyotard’s essay was to me far more inspirational than Relyea’s critique. Lyotard’s challenge to modern day artists gives us something to strive for in an overall collective sense and the ideas surrounding the sublime can be further translated on a personal level that could be accessible in all disciplines.
“To make visible the inconceivable” is a far more compellingly motivating concept for me than Relyea’s statements such as: “We need an art that makes an issue out of how it addresses both viewers and its surrounding circumstances. By this I don’t mean art that merely flaunts its personality".

Further reading into the sublime provided a resonating statement by Kant that encapsulates all the ideas brought forth in my mind when I compared these readings;
“What is sublime is the feeling that something will happen despite everything, within such threatening void” (Klimowski and Want, 16).
 



Klimowski, Andrzej and Want, Christopher. Kant for Beginners. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1996.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis Press, 1984.

Relyea, Lane. “All Over and At Once.” X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly 1.4 (2003): 3-23.