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June 12, 2009
Stamatina Dimakopoulou couples the Baroque and the Postmodern with melancholy and the concept of the fold as mutual traits in her article ‘Remapping the Affinities between the Baroque and the Postmodern: The Folds of Melancholy & the Melancholy of the Fold in E-rea. The following quote at the beginning of her article summarizes her understanding of the affinities between Baroque and the Postmodern:
Both the Baroque and the Postmodern are seen as breaks from and continuations of the culture of the Renaissance and of the culture of modernity, respectively; both are seen as periods of crisis or moments of transition, ushering in the end of a previous cultural dominant, and inaugurating new beginnings. The Baroque and the Postmodern find their most striking manifestations in forms and experiences that articulate intermediary spaces where tensions, antinomies and opposites remain unresolved. They perform tropes of the singular, and the multiple that resist the rationalist dualities of self and world, the universe and the particular.”
The Baroque is a form of a scopic regime Martin Jay in his essay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” challenged the ubiquity and dominance of Cartesian perspectivalism and he identified two co-existing visual epistemes: the descriptive mode of Baconian empiricism and the ecstatic mode of Baroque “madness.” These regimes, Jay claims, construct and are constructed by very particular sorts of viewers and articulate divergent systems of knowledge and value.
In Australia the neo- Baroque is associated with an aesthetic or sensibilty of extravagance, spectacle, pleasure, excess, chaos and artifice and is interpreted as a rebellion against rationalism and functionalism.
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