Post-Modernism and contemporary New Zealand Art in the 1980s and early 1990s

Contemporary New Zealand art underwent a transformation during the1980s with the 'arrival' of post-modernism and post-colonialism. Broadly speaking, both intellectual movements were new ways of thinking about art and culture: ways of thinking that questioned long-established patterns and hierarchies. Starting from a world-view that was sceptical of claims to absolute truth and universal experience, the new critiques of culture pointed to the ideology inherent in western high art and culture. Ideology in this context meant the kind of taken-for-granted attitudes that assumed, for instance, the superiority of high culture over popular culture; of so-called civilised post-industrial cultures over so-called primitive cultures; and the certainties of history.

This politicised approach was a direct challenge to modernism which had dominated contemporary art in the west for most of the century. Modernism had once been radical, aesthetically, but it had never challenged the accepted idea that art occurred in a sphere outside the power relations of class, race and gender not to mention geo-politics. Furthermore, modernism's aesthetic ideas had virtually hardened into a system of rules.

During the 1980s and 1990s, modernist positions were systematically 'deconstructed' and art practice was turned upside down by a new eclecticism which celebrated artistic and cultural diversity in contemporary art. Post-modernism and post-colonialism, had a far-reaching effect on artists, especially the younger generation, who found it liberating.

In its single most influential aesthetic position, post-modernism elevated Marcel Duchamp's subversive 'readymade' aesthetic so that in the late twentieth century, art was whatever you wanted it to be. Contemporary art has also been opened up to the influence of other cultures and to popular culture. The work of non-conformist artists whose work had been dismissed or ignored by arbiters of the modernist canon, has been recovered and reassessed. This has had the effect of offering new and refreshing 'models' for young artists. Globally, post-colonialism has prompted the cultural centre (America and Europe) to finally begin to acknowledge the margins (Africa, Asia and the Pacific) on equal terms.

Post-modernism introduced an intellectual environment that encouraged emerging New Zealand artists to take a more sceptical and theoretical approach, while post-colonial discourses played an important part in the dramatic development of contemporary Maori art during this period. This is the background against which much of the art presented in this topic was produced.

Barnett, Gerald. Post-modernism and Contemporary Art in the 1980s and early 1990s. Discover: Te Kohanga Taonga, updated June 29 2002. URL: http://discover.natlib.govt.nz