whatismetamodern

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VIEWS

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A job that gives total control to the worker, with no job description and no duties…

“Eternal Employment” — brainchild of Swedish artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, is set to take place inside a Gothenburg train station, with the backing of the Swedish Transport Administration. “Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work,” reads the artists’ proposal. “What Eternal Employment proposes … is an anti-performance of indefinite duration. A single person with no script, no climax, no crescendo. Forever.” The project is being explored “as an act of economic imagination” according to this article in Atlas Obscura. “While [the artists] don’t see this kind of undefined job as a vision of the future, they imagine a ‘point of reference for the future.’ ”

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Newsletter!

Since we moved our main platform to Wordpress, we have not been very active on here, our original home. If you’re interested in getting updates about metamodern stuff, you can sign up for our email-based newsletter, WiM News, at this link: https://whatismetamodern.com/wim-news/

It will come out roughly monthly, announcing our new articles and also containing material only available on the newsletter. We will not give out your email address to anybody!

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YES!!!

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A kind of #metamodern mantra spotted on magazine cover: Be messy, complicated and afraid, and show up anyway. #metamodernism #mantramagazine #showup #sbnr (at Winston-Salem, North Carolina) https://www.instagram.com/p/BqxzUVyAKwW/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1tvotnzeytdss

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Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse: A Metamodern Negotiation of the Real

We’ve written previously that Joss Whedon is one of the chief purveyors in popular culture of a metamodern sensibility, and that it may not be an exaggeration to say that his seminal television creation, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, launched aspects of what we now identify as the metamodern cultural sentiment, or at least is partly responsible for its dissemination throughout pop culture. So we figured, why not follow our recent blog post on Buffy with another Whedon creation that included a certain aspect of Buffy’s metamodernism – the television show, Dollhouse (2009-2010). One overarching theme that Dollhouse shares with Buffy is that identity is very plastic. People may or may not be quite what they seem, and... Continue Reading...

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“METAMODERN MUCH?” – Three MM Aspects in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

It’s kind of nuts that in the five years since we started blogging on metamodernism, we haven’t yet written about Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a seminal metamodern cultural product. Especially since, we might argue, Buffy is one of the television shows perhaps most influential... Continue reading

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~Buffy and Kendra as Metamodern Heroes~ From essay by WiM editor Linda Ceriello “The Big Bad and the ‘Big AHA!’ Metamodern Monsters as Transformational Figures of Instability” in Michael Heyes, ed. Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques (Lexington 2018) . . . #metamodernism #metamodernmonsters #metamodernheroes #Buffy #BTVS #Slayers # (at Sunnydale) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnLEpTDhJi0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1p8i4zb9jqjws

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Hey!

So, we’ve been kind of quiet here for a few months as we’ve been migrating our main What is Metamodern? site to a new Wordpress platform. We will keep this site as well, using it more like a typical Tumblr—with reblogs of metamodern-y posts we come across, our short writings, and links to new articles as we publish them on the main site. For more metamodern material, you can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and Medium. And the URL for the new site is: https://whatismetamodern.com

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WiM Co-Editor’s take on how metamodernism functions as an aesthetic sensibility. Click on the title to go to Medium and read it.

Eleven Methods: 1) Meta-reflexivity (“Life as Movie”) 2) The narrative double frame (Eshelman’s Performatism) 3) Oscillation between opposites 4) Quirky 5) Minimalism / Tiny 6) Maximalism / Epic 7) Constructive Pastiche 8) Ironesty 9) Normcore 10) Overprojection (Anthropomorphizing) 11) Meta-Cute

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David Byrne, Choir! Choir! Choir!, David Bowie,“Heroes”: Metamodern?

Feb 6th, 2018

Here’s one that we want to call metamodern, and yet are challenged to explain why it is metamodern. David Byrne  is a guest participant in this Choir! Choir! Choir! performance of David Bowie’s ““Heroes”.” What Choir! Choir! Choir! does is teach audiences – with no required background in music – to sing fairly complex choral arrangements of popular songs, usually within the space of a couple hours. The performances are professionally recorded and video’d to be shared on the web.

While this video/project is, we feel, sweet, moving and uplifting, that alone is not enough to qualify something as metamodern. Here’s what might be pushing us to put in that category, however:  The structure is postmodernly disruptive of the expected artist-audience relationship, while delivering a feeling of unity through its – in a sense – modernist message. And then there’s the fact that this powerfully earnest delivery (of a song whose original version many hear as ironic) is provided by David Byrne, who for at least part of the hey day of his band Talking Heads could well have been described as an avatar of postmodern ironic distance*. The braiding of these seemingly opposed sensibilities is a hallmark of metamodern work, in this case serving to give expression to the interior felt experience of both audience and performer. Metamodern? Probably? Beautiful and boldly cathartic? Definitely. ____

*And yet, of course, certain Talking Heads songs like “Creatures of Love” and “And She Was” – well, just about all of Little Creatures (1985) or True Stories (1986) seem so dang proto-metamodern but we’re not going to deal with that right now, except to say that Talking Heads were always ahead of the curve.

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To get more of our take on all things metamodern, you can follow What Is Metamodern? on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and, of course, here on Tumblr.

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Lady Bird: A Metamodern Coming-of-Age Tale

Jan 12th, 2018

Greta Gerwig’s film Lady Bird won the 2017 Golden Globe Awards for Best Comedy/Musical and Best Actress (Saoirse Ronan). This may be the first film that treats the transition from Postmodernism to Metamodernism during the dawn of The Aughts as history...

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Shared by WiM on Dec 9th, 2017

Sufjan’s song and his ability to look around the difficult corners with love and curiosity epitomizes an aspect of metamodernism we have particular affinity for. @Sufjan.com thanks for making us work a little and stretch and wonder.

Friends,

I wrote a song for Tonya Harding. It’s not at all related to the new biopic (I sent it to the music supervisors but they couldn’t find a way to use it). This song has been years in the making. I’ve been trying to write a Tonya Harding song since I was 15. I wrote a short piece about it here. There are two versions of the song and we are releasing them on tape cassette (available now) and on 7-inch (available soonish). All digital versions are available now:

http://smarturl.it/tonya-harding

Please enjoy. If you don’t know who Tonya Harding is, go see the movie, or read her Wikipedia page. She’s amazing. My prayer is peace on earth. Lord help us.

I love you Tonya.

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From our sister publication, Artocratic!

Shared Sep 27th, 2017

In our latest interview, married Ukrainian art team, Alexander and Alexandra Krolikowski discuss metamodernism, life-as-art, post-Soviet Ukraine, eloping, their love for Wes Anderson’s films, the revival of ritual, and the importance of analog film.

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Iridescence

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An Epistemic Taxonomy of Knowing and Shit

Posted Aug 25th, 2017