Robert E. Kohn

Parody and Pastiche in Bill Kohn's Udaipur Tinsmiths Robert E. Kohn

Bill Kohn's painting Udaipur Tinsmiths contrasts his own aesthetic preferences with that of his adversary Clement Greenberg by exaggerating their differences with parody and pastiche. This is a typical Postmodern approach for repudiating claims, like Greenberg's, of narrow rules Modernist artists must follow to ensure the legitimacy of their work. In the case of Abstract Expressionism and Post Painterly Abstraction, based on Robert E. Kohn's reading of Andreas Huyssen, Postmodernism failed. Though it was justified in rejecting Modernism, "such rejection," Huyssen argued (page 49), affects only that trend within Modernism which has been codified into a narrow dogma, not Modernism as such. In some ways, the story of Modernism and Postmodernism is like the story of the hedgehog and the hare: the hare could not win because there always was more than just one hedgehog. But the hare was still the better runner. Greenberg had no trouble attracting artists, but my brother was the better runner.