Graduate Art Seminar Week 12

How has the use of narrative changed in contemporary art? In the past,important religious or historical events were usually the subject of narrative art. Today any idea no matter how important or mundane is worthy of investigation. The way a story is told can be more meaningful than the content of the narrative. In the modernist tradition narration and representation were removed to focus on the formal elements of a work in defiance of the historical norm. Representation and narration are linked,especially in photography, cinema,and video. Critic Craig Owens uses the idea of the palimpsest as an allegory where events and characters have layers of meaning. Heartney believes this leads to illegibility as opposed to modernism's "mythology of coherence",and notes that Roland Barthes, in his essay "The Death of the Author" puts the emphasis on the reader or viewer to give meaning to the "text". This is the case in the work of many contemporary artists whose vague and disjunctive stories offer no obvious way of interpration.