In literature, the postmodern is, once again, hard to separate from the modern, since many of its keynotes—for instance, a love of complicated artifice and obviously literary devices, along with the mixing of realistic and frankly fantastic or magical devices—are at least as old as James Joyce’s founding modernist fictions. But certainly the expansion of possible sources, the liberation from the narrowly white male view of the world, and a broadening of testimony given and testimony taken are part of what postmodern literature has in common with other kinds of postmodern culture. It has been part of the postmodern transformation in American fiction as well to place authors previously marginalized as genre writers at the centre of attention. The African American crime writer Chester Himes, for example, has been given serious critical attention, while the strange visionary science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was ushered, in 2007, from his long exile in paperback into the Library of America.
What is at stake in the debates over modern and postmodern is finally the American idea of the individual. Where modernism in the United States placed its emphasis on the autonomous individual, the heroic artist, postmodernism places its emphasis on the “de-centred” subject, the artist as a prisoner, rueful or miserable, of culture. Art is seen as a social event rather than as communication between persons. If in modernism an individual artist made something that in turn created a community of observers, in the postmodern epoch the opposite is true: the social circumstance, the chain of connections that make seeming opposites unite, key off the artist and make him what he is. In the work of the artist Jeff Koons, for instance—who makes nothing but has things, from kitsch figurines to giant puppies composed of flowers, made for him—this postmodern rejection of the handmade or authentic is given a weirdly comic tone, at once eccentric and humorous. It is the impurities of culture, rather than the purity of the artist’s vision, that haunts contemporary art.
Nonetheless, if the push and charge that had been so unlooked-for in American art since the 1940s seemed diminished, the turn of the 21st century was a rich time for second and even third acts. Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Murray, and Chuck Close were all American artists who continued to produce arresting, original work—most often balanced on that fine knife edge between the blankly literal and the disturbingly metaphoric—without worrying overmuch about theoretical fashions or fashionable theory.
As recently as the 1980s, most surveys of American culture might not have thought photography of much importance. But at the turn of the century, photography began to lay a new claim to attention as a serious art form. For the bulk of the first part of the 20th century, the most remarkable American photographers had, on the whole, tried to make photography into a “fine art” by divorcing it from its ubiquitous presence as a recorder of moments and by splicing it onto older, painterly traditions. A clutch of gifted photographers, however, have, since the end of World War II, been able to transcend the distinction between media image and aesthetic object—between art and photojournalism—to make from a single, pregnant moment a complete and enduring image. Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and Robert Frank (the latter, like so many artists of the postwar period, an emigrant), for instance, rather than trying to make of photography something as calculated and considered as the traditional fine arts, found in the instantaneous vision of the camera something at once personal and permanent. Frank’s book The Americans (l956), the record of a tour of the United States that combined the sense of accident of a family slide show with a sense of the ominous worthy of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, was the masterpiece of this vision; and no work of the postwar era was more influential in all fields of visual expression. Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and, above all, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who together dominated both fashion and portrait photography for almost half a century and straddled the lines between museum and magazine, high portraiture and low commercials, all came to seem, in their oscillations between glamour and gloom, exemplary of the predicaments facing the American artist. Adam Gopnik
The theatre
Perhaps more than any other art form, the American theatre suffered from the invention of the new technologies of mass reproduction. Where painting and writing could choose their distance from (or intimacy with) the new mass culture, many of the age-old materials of the theatre had by the 1980s been subsumed by movies and television. What the theatre could do that could not be done elsewhere was not always clear. As a consequence, the Broadway theatre—which in the 1920s had still seemed a vital area of American culture and, in the high period of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, a place of cultural renaissance—had by the end of the 1980s become very nearly defunct. A brief and largely false spring had taken place in the period just after World War II. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, in particular, both wrote movingly and even courageously about the lives of the “left-out” Americans, demanding attention for the outcasts of a relentlessly commercial society. Viewing them from the 21st century, however, both seem more traditional and less profoundly innovative than their contemporaries in the other arts, more profoundly tied to the conventions of European naturalist theatre and less inclined or able to renew and rejuvenate the language of their form.
Also much influenced by European models, though in his case by the absurdist theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, was Edward Albee, the most prominent American playwright of the 1960s. As Broadway’s dominance of the American stage waned in the 1970s, regional theatre took on new importance, and cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Louisville, Kentucky, provided significant proving grounds for a new generation of playwrights. On those smaller but still potent stages, theatre continues to speak powerfully. An African American renaissance in the theatre has taken place, with its most notable figure being August Wilson, whose 1985 play Fences won the Pulitzer Prize. And, for the renewal and preservation of the American language, there is still nothing to equal the stage: David Mamet, in his plays, among them Glengarry, Glen Ross (1983) and Speed the Plow (1987), both caught and created an American vernacular—verbose, repetitive, obscene, and eloquent—that combined the local colour of Damon Runyon and the bleak truthfulness of Harold Pinter. The one completely original American contribution to the stage, the musical theatre, blossomed in the 1940s and ’50s in the works of Frank Loesser (especially Guys and Dolls, which the critic Kenneth Tynan regarded as one of the greatest of American plays) but became heavy-handed and at the beginning of the 21st century existed largely as a revival art and in the brave “holdout” work of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods). As the new century progressed, however, innovation once again found its way to Broadway with productions such as Steve Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked, Jeff Whitty, Jeff Marx, and Robert Lopez’s Avenue Q, Lopez, Matt Stone, and Trey Parker’s The Book of Mormon, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.