Douglas Crimp’s Pictures

In 1977, in the Artist's Space in New York, Douglas Crimp's exhibition called "Pictures" truly defined the "image generation" artists. Their works are mostly based on popular culture, expressing resistance and criticism. Although their works have their characteristics, they all try to explore the structure in the sense of images. Our experience is primarily controlled by pictures, newspapers, and magazines, on television and the movies. Compared with the picture, the real-life experience of the individual gradually fades and becomes less important. People used to think that pictures have the function of explaining reality, and now it seems that they have replaced reality. Douglas Crimp mentioned that photos are no longer only a simple image that illustrates a scene that was chosen by the artists, but it is more than a manipulation of the spectator’s visualizations. It is, therefore, becomes imperative to understand the picture itself, not to reveal a loss of reality, however, to decide how an image turns into an implying structure voluntarily. But photographs are characterized by something which, though often remarked, deficiently comprehends, in which, that they are very hard to recognize at the level of their content, that they are to an extraordinary degree opaque meaning.

Within the infinitely reproducible photography entering the art world, a heterogeneity is rebuilt in the museum, and the museum's self-sufficiency in knowledge is also disintegrated. That is to say; the art world has ended as an elite cultural system, which caused strong repercussions at the end of the 20th century. Time has passed, with the advent of the information society, time and space are rapidly integrated into the contemporary era, driven by emerging technologies.

From now on, the only thing that can keep up with the speed of technology development is the vision. The visual world flattens people's lives and becomes more and more conceptual. As a result, new media and virtual reality technologies have tied people to the shackles of “visual centralism” and even the emergence of digital museums and virtual reality technologies that will end the authenticity of traditional art. Vision might become the only way for most of the spectators to feel appreciated. Today's society is full of "functionalism" arguments, and people's fascination and worship of technology have existed in ancient times. The issue of functionalism is not too rational, but the rationality is not enough. Our world is a multi-dimensional world, and images as a two-dimensional product can record the text, color, state, etc., but always have a gap with the real world. The image is a visual imagination, and our body can directly have a variety of perceptions, allowing us to experience the world through real feelings and get rid of virtual images. Moreover, Douglas Crimp’s Picture is quite outdated, if we put his idea more ahead in time, the art form will not only be limited on pictures and simple motions on screen but more on a three dimensional or even four or five-dimensional space. Somehow, this trend will blur the definition what is the true authenticity in art? People then become more simplified and abstract on the idea that they want to express. According to the essay “underneath each picture, there is always another picture” and the artworks that Crimp purposed preserve the modernist aesthetic categories which museums themselves have institutionalized, but in the other way auctioning the aesthetic in postmodernism. Moreover, engaging their artworks with space, size and the spectators. However, he did mentioned that postmodernism is an extraction of modernism, and some people misunderstand it by criticizing their uncategorized form in art. But Crimp believed that if we look closer toward postmodernism itself, we can see the similarity art form and a future art world inside.

Modernism is based on science, stressing rational logic, experimental exploration, and advocating atheism. However, postmodern holds a philosophical attitude of “suspecting” about logical concepts and structural interpretations. This attitude leads to its lack of desire for thoughts, things, and external feelings because, in the eyes of postmodern people, their thinking cannot be relied upon. They neither affirm historical experience nor believe in the origin and authenticity of meaning. In addition to suspicion, their thoughts are almost stagnation in the eyes of rational thinkers. They can only be parasitic on the modern enlightenment rationality as an eternal trickster. Think of innocent postmodern as an antibody with a clear purpose. When we regard postmodernism as the representative of fragmentation and rebellion, we have lost the balance of thinking ourselves, standing on the opposite side of rationality, and looking at postmodernity with a holistic binary opposition phenomenon. This behavior itself creates a bias and dislocation of postmodern understanding. Art used to be a form that manipulating colors on canvas but gradually it becomes a form that is less illustrative and conceptualized. If we let the criterion of art follow with the trend of the generations, art will be more hard to define because there are no specific categories to frame them. Maybe, in the future, we called everything that is “original” as a form of art.