ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 argues that an informal mode of deconstruction was already in play before Derrida, in the relation between twentieth-century Modernist art and philosophy. Its most radical stage is Conceptual Art of the 1960s – where, in effect, visual art as a practice is deconstructed through its relation to philosophy. This is one of the origins of Postmodernism, insofar as it is an extreme case of the contingency thesis – wherein the artist is no longer required to physically make his or her artwork. This legitimizes new forms of creativity based on mass-culture and its technological supports, i.e. Postmodern tendencies. The chapter argues further that Derrida’s more technical notion of deconstruction is also relevant to some forms of Postmodern art practice – including the work of Malcolm Morley, David Mach, Georg Baselitz, and Harold Cohen. Deconstruction is implicated, in other words, in the emergence of Postmodernism at the level of both historical process and artistic style.
