"In the visual arts, the era of the early '70s believed itself to be a great flowering of postcapitalist culture. It believed that the commodity and its mind-set would be replaced by performance and by site-specific works. The artist would perform in real time, enacting an example of nonalienated work. The artist would play out the role of the free subject, creating a model that would be emulated elsewhere in society. But the '70s represented not the last flowering of a new consciousness, but rather the last incandescent expression of the old idealism of autonomy. After this, no time would be real, no labor would be living, no cultural expression would be outside the commodity-system."
—Peter Halley
"I think that almost everybody is potentially a shaman. What is needed is to wake up that potential and begin to explore experientially one's spiritual relationship to the universe, to other forms of life on the planet, and to each other. … Respect is a key word in this regard because the experiences that come from shamanism tend to foster a great respect for the universe, based on a feeling of oneness with all forms of life. By getting into harmony, one has much more power available to help others because harmony with the universe is where true power comes from."
—Michael Harner
Our particular point in culture, more so than any other in the history of humanity, appears to be at a critical threshold where the option of continuing as we have been before is being perceived as no longer viable. The message is out on all sides that we must choose between survival and suicide, and there has been an increasing demand at the creative edge of our society to shape a new social order. It is a task in which we may, of course, choose not to take part, but my own personal concern, for some time now, has been the question of what role art might play in response to this need for "accelerating the transformation," as Riane Eisler has put it, "from a dominator to a partnership in all aspects of our lives."
As the art world undertakes the fateful closure of Modernism and its failed utopian ambitions, two morphogenetic fields—we could even say, two Postmodernisms—seem to be emerging within the world of artistic practice. Only one of them so far is visible and dominant within the mainstream, and that is deconstructive Postmodernism, which is playing out the Weberian process of disenchantment with medicinal forms of nihilism not meant to ward off an otherwise irredeemable reality, but to come to terms with it. Deconstructive artists reject what they perceive as the Modernist myths of stylistic innovation, change, originality, and uniqueness, which are now viewed as the worn-out trappings of a chic but totally impotent radicalism; often these artists work by stealth, assuming the posture of counterfeiter or charlatan, a sort of trickster-figure, who is not going to get us out of the mess we are in, but will engage in the only legitimate cultural practice possible for our time—which is, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, a seminal theoretician of the Deconstructive scenario—"the chance, labyrinthine, manipulatory play of signs without meaning."
The other Postmodernism, happening simultaneously if rather less visibly (because so far there has been, at least in the art world, no comprehensive or workable framework for it), is what I choose to call reconstructive Postmodernism, that is challenging
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