[+]
Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism responds towards the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyse the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by analyzing the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism—the how and the why of an imperial regime’s representations (social, political, cultural) of the imperial colonizer and of the colonized people.
As a genre of contemporary history, postcolonialism questions and reinvents the modes of cultural perception—the ways of viewing and of being viewed. As anthropology, postcolonialism records human relations among the colonial nations and the subaltern peoples exploited by colonial rule. As critical theory, postcolonialism presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology and the praxis of neocolonialism, with examples drawn from the humanities—history and political science, philosophy and Marxist theory, sociology, anthropology, and human geography; the cinema, religion, and theology; feminism, linguistics, and postcolonial literature, of which the anti-conquest narrative genre presents the stories of colonial subjugation of the subaltern man and woman.
Source: H.H. Arnason, A history of Modern Art, 1988 (3rd edition), Thames and Hudson p. 482
Décollage, in art, is the opposite of collage; instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images, it is created by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image.[1] The French word “décollage” translates into English literally as “take-off” or “to become unglued” or “to become unstuck”. Examples of Décollage include etrécissements and cut-up technique. A similar technique is the lacerated poster, a poster in which one has been placed over another or others, and the top poster or posters have been ripped, revealing to a greater or lesser degree the poster or posters underneath. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Décollage)
Déchirage (from the French, déchirer: ‘to tear’) is an artistic style that distresses paper to create a three-dimensional patchwork. It is a form of décollage, taking the original image apart physically through incision, parting and peeling away. Romare Bearden (b. 1911 – d. 1988) the African American collage artist used déchirage as an important element of his abstract expressionist paintings. The first public display of “Photographic” Déchirage (the tearing of layers of digital photographs to create a distinctive three-dimensional image) was at the Art of Giving exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in 2010. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Décollage)
It can be argued that the depliage is a form of décollage, as it is made by initially removing the staples from a staple-bound magazine. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Décollage)
As one familiar with the word “assembly” might assume, assemblage is a form of sculpture comprised of “found” objects arranged in such a way that they create a piece. These objects can be anything organic or man-made. Scraps of wood, stones, old shoes, baked bean cans and a discarded baby buggy – or any of the other 84,000,000 items not here mentioned by name – all qualify for inclusion in an assemblage. Whatever catches the artist’s eye, and fits properly in the composition to make a unified whole, is fair game.
The important thing to know about assemblage is that it is “supposed” to be three-dimensional and different from collage, which is “supposed” to be two-dimensional (though both are similarly eclectic in nature and composition). But! There’s a really fine, nearly invisible line between between a bulky, multi-layered collage and an assemblage done in extremely shallow relief. In this large, grey area between assemb- and col-, the safest course is to take the artist’s word for it. (Source: http://arthistory.about.com/od/glossary/g/a_assemblage.htm)
In the practical arts and the fine arts, bricolage (French for “tinkering”, Dutch “knutselen”) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.
…
In art, bricolage is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of many postmodern works.
…
In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as, for example, the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture.
…
In his book The Savage Mind (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used “bricolage” to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. In his description it is opposed to the engineers’ creative thinking, which proceeds from goals to means. Mythical thought, according to Lévi-Strauss, attempts to re-use available materials in order to solve new problems.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage)
Deconstruction (or in French déconstruction from the verb ‘deconstruir’; to deconstruct) is a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Born in the French colony of Algeria to the descendants of Sephardic Jews, while escaping religious persecution, emigrated from Spain and Portugal to North Africa. As Jews within a French colony, their legal status was impacted by external tensions within Europe during the rise of anti-Semitism.
Influenced by, among others the work of structuralist historian Michel Foucault (1926-84) who explores the way the human gaze is structured by discourse or language. The post-World War II era witnessed a period of great political, intellectual and creative transformation in France. A rebellious element also emerged in the visual arts: Situationist International had a immense impact on European culture and offered an approach to the world involving spontaneous actions breaking the rules ordering a particular situation. In Derrida’s method of deconstruction, one can see a parallel to the tactics of the Situationists; approaching each text as a singular event, takes a look at the forces already at work within the text or institution Derrida is analyzing.
His upbringing in a political and cultural complex context (being a French Jew in Algeria, in a post-WW II era of transformation and a artistic-intellectual disruptive time) may be seen as marking of Derrida’s work. His interest in the idea of difference may be related to his personal experience in dealing with identity.
“The fluctuating nature of his identity depends on who is doing the looking, revealing a world where identity is multiple and eccentric to the individual.” … “Through the gaze of the Other I am born in the visual, given an identity beyond my mortal body.” (Richards, 2008, p6)
Derrida countered the idea of the existing structuralists who -in his vision- designed another repetition of the same tendency to marking the traditional discourse of Western thought. Maybe related to his own experience with colonialism (a system that benefited one party at the expense of another), Derrida offers an overture towards a new complexity, to understand how our interpretations of politics, religion, or works of art are delimited by the structures allowing us to represent our ideas.
Deconstructivism is an architectural movement that began in the late 1980s, which is influenced by Derrida’s theory of Deconstruction. Deconstructivism reacts on Modernism, that focusses on order. It presumes that society is confusing and disorderly. The world is chaotic and fragmented and every individual creates it’s own interpretation. This vision is expressed through the architectural design. Characteristics are: chaotic, fragmentated, confusing, with dislocated elements of architecture that defies gravity, illogical in it’s construction, and an idiocratic use of material and an interest in manipulating a structure’s surface, skin. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit deconstructivist “styles” is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos.
Examples are: Coop Himmelb(l)au and Frank Gehry (among others)
Source: Reframing Derrida (2008) p.141
Source: Reframing Derrida (2008), p. 141
Source: Reframing Derrida (2008) p.142-3
Source: Reframing Derrida, 2008, p. 144
Sources:
Richards, Kevin Malcolm. “Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student.” (2008). Print.
http://www.joostdevree.nl/shtmls/deconstructivisme.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructivism
