"To See the Earth Before the End of the World" - Analysis of the Postmodern Art Paradigm Shift (Essay Blogpost)
After walking through the Arsenale and seeing the many exhibits, I suddenly stepped into a lush jungle. The bricks and vaulted ceiling of the Arsenale was left behind and made way for a kudzu, vine, and wildflower filled room equipped with a creek and mud-men waiting throughout the exhibit. “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” by Precious Okoyomon explores how nature is inseparable from the history of colonialism and enslavement.
Okoyomon specifically focuses on how kudzu was brought to
the US to combat the soil degradation from cotton plantations and became an
invasive species. She attributes this change to the environment to the history
of enslavement that caused its need and uses the plant at a metaphor for how
the history of enslavement and racism has strangled and entangled itself with
both nature and the human world. They connect these ideas by having kudzu near
the creek and sugar cane, another type of plantation crop, while bringing in
mud-men to represent natives forever tied to the land being grown over by this
very same kudzu. They incorporate materials that are dead, decaying, and living
into their work to show how all stages of life are being affected and how the
land scape is dying in this transition. They have an eerie horn sound play that
is reminiscent of a train horn and is both disturbing and sounds industrial. It
ties this natural landscape to being corrupted by invasive species, but this
invasive species is not just the kudzu, but the industrious colonial powers who
brought the plant to the environment, forever changing it.
One of the main areas of interest with this artwork that
makes it distinct from renaissance works is that this work is an experience. There
is no frame as you are literally walking into the work of art. The art also isn’t
just visual, but eerie sounds like an endless train horn play on the speakers
and the smells of the various plants and spices also interact with the
audience. A renaissance painter would only support perspective, but “one
consequence of… perspective as a means and metaphor for vision was a distancing
of the viewer from the viewed, and hence subjects from objects” (Nelson 5). Thus, there is a shift here as postmodern
painters want the audience to do more than see the painting or show off their
skills and display a realistic image. Postmodern artists want the audience to participate
in their work and to interact with it so that the audience may be more fully
confronted by the exhibit. Okoyomon’s piece is inescapable, you must confront
it to leave and interact with the piece by navigating its twisting path. Many renaissance
artworks expected the audience to experience their work from a certain viewpoint
(which is why the art in the Frari cathedral was so interesting as the art was
in the location it was made for). By having to walk through the artwork, you cannot
just see Okoyomon’s work from any one angle and thus there is an ever-changing
perspective. The work is also not linear, with a winding path and several
offshoots to the path, giving a narration with multiple paths and no singular
correct choice. The trail is also a representation of the winding path that led to this situation and the history behind why this work occurred.
There is a paradigm change from the renaissance and modern
artwork. A renaissance painter might see kudzu and choose to simply paint the
kudzu overtaking the countryside at that particular moment, capturing it like a
camera and a modern artist might take the kudzu and either paint it in a form following an ism of
choice or might choice to make it more of an impressionist image, but Okoyomon
with their postmodern perspective sees the kudzu and instead of painting what they
sees, asks themselves how this came to be and connects the kudzu to slavery and
chooses instead of painting the scenery, to bring the audience into the work.
Despite all three mindsets seeing the same thing, Okoyomon “saw new things when
looking at old objects with old instruments [and] may make us wish to say that …
[they] lived in a different world” (Kuhn 115). This is the paradigm shift.
Postmodern artists do not just experience an event and ask themselves how it works
as a person with a renaissance mindset might, but instead ask why it occurred and
typically advocate for some kind of political or societal change through their
works. The description of Okoyomon’s work literally calls for ecological revolution
and revolt, calling for a rejection of the renaissance ideals that caused this
destruction of nature in the first place. The title is in support of this change
by suggesting the end of the world is near if no changes are made and that we
need to reflect on the world more and truly see it for what it is in order to
save it. This push for environmental concerns is also a part of the paradigm
shift to postmodernism and rejection of the industrious renaissance thought.
Works Cited
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
4th ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012.
Nelson, Robert S. Visuality before and beyond the
Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
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