The Postmodern Animal

While furthering my research, I discovered an authority on animal arts,Steve Baker, an art historian. {Further research on his background} His book, The Post Modern Animal, deals with the significant features of ironies and its relation to the postmodern art of animals. He mentions how irony has played a significant role in early postmodernism.

Chapter 2 from the book:

• The question being dealt with is whether the activities of an artist can save certain animals, homo sapiens, etc. 
• Irony played an important part in self-consciously clever moves of postmodernism
• 1980s: Images of the animal seemed to proliferate across the arts. He discusses this 'first stage' of postmodernism and discusses it further in the chapter in order to get a sense of how exactly the newly visible animal got caught up in parroting and parodying and to what effect. 
• pg 27: example used was the Royal Academy's exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, a return to painting was now a big focus
• two colorful paintings by Malcom Morley: Parrots & The Lone Ranger Lost in the Jungle of Erotic Desires
• pg 28: This exhibition wasn't embarrassing like Kitsch art had been; it was rather striking. Other images of animals were also present
• A presence of animals meant that there was an end to the 'austere' modernism which felt that there wasn't any place for animals
• Christos Joachimides addressed in a catalogue essay of avant-garde of the 1960s & 70s "bound to be self-defeating" on account of their narrow, purt art approach devoid of all joy and senses."
• Writers found Morley's animal imagery 'postmodern' formal expression and in his evocation of a sensual primitive pleasure
• Julian Barnes novel Flaubert's Parrot {1984} told a story of how an English doctor Geoffrey Bralthwarte went to France in order to find the parrot that Faulbert had wrote about. It was a really sad and serious story
• He attempted to do something by considering how Flauberts own animal imagery may now be understood 
• Uses film exp. Greenway
• pg 37: psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: rage and how you can feel humiliated, revealing what matter to us
• "postmodern animals might productively be thought of as the rhetorical figure of the human, animal, and artist or philosopher whose purpose is to imagine it hold to idea of a good life"
• Adorno "from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy"  
• pg 38: two stages of postmodernism
• ironic detachment and a freedom from humiliation 
• vainly raging about things that matter
• Irony changes nothing; it will have little to contribute to creative work of postmodern animal

The chapter was very interesting and I would like to further explore Baker's works. I think that he is going to be a very vauable resource in my thesis. 

To do: check out Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation from the library. Call number: 398.369 B168P