32

Now we need to complete this exploratory account of postmodernist space and time with a final analysis of that euphoria or those intensities which seem so often to characterize the newer cultural experience. Let us reemphasize the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it the desolation of Hopper's buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of Sheeler's forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendor. The exhilaration of these new surfaces is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content -- the city itself -- has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the twentieth century, let alone in the previous era.

Source type: picture
Info: Edward Hopper "Untitled (Rooftops)” - 1926
Original size: 800x514 px. Edit

Now we need to complete this exploratory account of postmodernist space and time with a final analysis of that euphoria or those intensities which seem so often to characterize the newer cultural experience. Let us reemphasize the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it the desolation of Hopper's buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of Sheeler's forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendor. The exhilaration of these new surfaces is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content -- the city itself -- has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the twentieth century, let alone in the previous era.

Source type: picture
Info: Midwest - Charles Sheeler - 1954 / Walker Art Center
Original size: 1000x553 px. Edit