Tomma Abts and Intention in a Post-Ironic Stage

Tomma Abts
Lives and works in London, UK. In 2011 she had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, and greengrassi, London. Her work is included in the group show ‘The Indiscipline of Painting’ at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, UK, until 10 March.


 

Uphe, 2011, acrylic and oil on canvas





CB Over the years, some of the painters I admire most have said that their main objective is to create an image they have never seen before. I’m curious if you share that conviction and, if so, what relationship that goal might have to abstraction?
Tomma Abts I don’t know if I would call it a ‘goal’ to make something unseen, but maybe an incentive – not knowing what the outcome might be is what makes me want to start another painting. I have no plans, sketches or preconceptions when I begin, it is just decision after decision – an ongoing process of putting something onto the canvas and then editing it, then putting something down and editing it again – and in that way slowly constructing something. I don’t think that ‘unseen’ equals ‘abstract’; I think unseen has to do with the openness of the process. The making itself leads the way. The image is the manifestation of the process.
I am not sure what the term abstraction means at this point. I have certainly never made a decision to be an abstract painter in the sense of having a concept I have to adhere to. I just think it gives me a lot of freedom not to have to work around representational issues, meaning that nothing is a given.
CB Forging something from nothing is a deeply romantic idea. Is romance something that exists for you when making an image and, if so, can you say how? Do you imagine the viewer having access to that sentiment?
TA ‘Romantic’ isn’t something I am afraid of or embarrassed about, but I don’t think about it or the viewer’s response. When I paint, I have to deal with the problems at hand. But I know that viewers’ responses go beyond recognizing the formal construction, or the discourse it might relate to in their heads. There is something else going on, because the painting is developed over time – while working on it I am always open to what I might do with it next, nothing is fixed. And, as we all know, ‘higher beings’ are involved!
CB Perhaps you mean that in jest, but I do think artists – often those who deal to some extent with abstraction – are becoming more forthright about the relationship of their working process to metaphysical concerns or even spirituality. What do you mean when you say ‘higher beings’?
TA I was hoping not to have to expand on that! Sigmar Polke summed up this discussion perfectly in the 1960s. Most painters have the experience that painting ‘happens’ not when you try really hard, but in the moment when you let go. Things can fall into place in a way you couldn’t have conceived of before. I don’t feel comfortable with the word ‘spirituality’ in connection with my work. It immediately evokes a notion of spiritual kitsch, and makes me think of work that takes itself too seriously in its tackling of grand themes. For me, painting is a concrete experiment that is anchored in the material I am handling. Metaphysical concerns – in the sense of examining the properties and possibilities of an object – sounds better.

Pollock and Pastiche

Jack The Dripper

Published: March 9, 2008

The police report filed after Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956 states that when the artist’s
car overturned near his home in East Hampton, N.Y., he was wearing “a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry and no ID.” The haphazard outfit offers a window into Pollock’s persona: disheveled, unconcerned about superficialities, powerfully intriguing.
Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Pollock has entered the canon of American icons not just because of his artistic accomplishments, but also thanks to the myth surrounding his tortured life and premature death. (Many have surmised that even if he had survived the car crash, his severe alcoholism would have killed him.) No wonder fashion designers keep bringing him up: he’s the archetype of the all-American, ruggedly handsome, bottle-swilling man with plenty of talent and a (well-hidden) sensitive side. A year ago, Hedi Slimane borrowed Pollock’s drip artworks for Dior Homme; in the late ’90s, Helmut Lang started a trend for paint-splattered denim, sending enthusiastic imitators to their garages. (As with Pollock’s art, the do-it-yourself versions never quite matched the original.) This season, Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurentrefreshed the action-painting look with pants, shorts and shoes smudged
with practically every color in the Benjamin Moore catalog; in New York, Adam Kimmel took a complementary approach, focusing not on the Abstract Expressionist’s artwork but on what the artist actually wore.
“Pollock famously said that modern art is the expression of the contemporary aims of the age we’re living in,” Kimmel says. “I find that very inspirational, because every generation has to deal with issues in its own way. His work was the result of a true need to express, and with his jeans, T-shirts and overalls, he embodied the idea of man as creator. He was at the forefront of existential masculinity.”
In 1949, Pollock’s fame skyrocketed when Life magazine rhetorically asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Soon after, he became the subject of a well-publicized documentary — but the accolades came at a price. Pollock abandoned his signature drip style; his work turned darker. Seemingly frozen by the pressure to live up to his reputation, he plunged deeper into alcoholism and was hardly painting at all by the time of his death, at age 44. Pollock was one of the first celebrity artists of our time, and, as it turned out, one of the first celebrity casualties. An expression of the age we’re living in, indeed. [?][?][?]Armand Limnander
1. Pollock at work in 1949. 2. A painterly look by Helmut Lang for spring 1998. 3. Dior Homme’s Pollock moment for fall 2007. 4. Spring 2008 looks from Adam Kimmel (left, modeled by the artist Jack Pierson) and Yves Saint Laurent.

How the fashion of the 2490's Will Look Like, According to the 1980's

Buck Rogers - the 25th Century's use of 80's Aesthetics

 Apparently the 25th century will look like the 1980's

Keith Coventry - East Street Estate

This painting bears a geometric design of bold black graphic blocks descending at an angle from the upper left to lower right corner against a light impasto white ground. Set on a perpendicular grid, the rigid black markings of consistent breadth but irregular length form a flat, variable, abstract pattern. The painting’s simple colouring, form, and ground echo the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist paintings from the early twentieth century; while the rhythmic spatial variation is reminiscent of de Stijl and the Dutch painter Theo von Doesburg’s angular forms that seem to extend endlessly into space.

In fact, Coventry’s painting reflects the arrangement of social housing blocks which make up the East Street Estate in south London, a significant detail which is included on the small nameplate affixed to its wooden frame. Coventry began the ‘Estate Paintings’ in 1991 and has created dozens of different configurations since. Tate’s collection includes two key works from the series:East Street Estate and Heygate Estate 1995 (Tate T12300). For these works the artist reproduces the summary plan depicting the architectural footprint of the buildings on a single council estate at the same scale and in the same colour as represented by the public housing authority on signage near the entrance to each site. The series thus includes diagrammatic variations in dark red (Pelican Estate), brown (Lake View Estate), aubergine (Brockmoor Tower) and yellow (Peckham Park Estate) floating atop white brushwork. Depicted as observed in situ, there is nevertheless a sense of isolation or dislocation to Coventry’s painted colour blocks, which share a relationship only to each other. The standardised forms strangely provide no indication of topography or context beyond the estate’s domain. In this sense both the source itself as much as the painting’s modernist aesthetics are constrained by form and are thoroughly self-referential. But Coventry’s transfer of these simplified structural configurations to the fine art of painting provides a critique of this mode of representation as well as the contemporary sociopolitical conditions, by pointing to the inherent reductionism of an ‘aerial view [which] neatly resolves the complexity of thousands of individual lives into a few cool rectangles’ (Blazwick 1997, p.4).

Coventry’s painting and sculpture from the 1990s use modernist conventions to reflect abstractly on the social realities of urban life – his ‘Estate Paintings’ mark the rupture between the aspirational aesthetic forms of postwar planning and the failure to realise utopia on a social scale. At the same time the series signifies an optimistic, all-encompassing value system; while falling short of grand expectations for a new order, the ‘Estate Paintings’ commemorate a certain moral and political conviction gradually abandoned by the dismantling of the United Kingdom’s welfare state.

The concern for sociopolitical issues particularly situated in the context of south London can further be found both in Queens Road SE15, Planted 1988, Destroyed 1992 1994 (TateT12298) and Burgess Park SE5, Planted 1983, Destroyed 1988 1994 (Tate T12297), two unique bronze casts of vandalised saplings also in Tate’s collection. This pair of sculptures was first exhibited alongside a number of ‘Estate Paintings’ in Coventry’s 1997 exhibition at The Showroom, London and were included in the display Society Consumed at Tate Britain in 2003, alongside East Street Estate and Heygate Estate.

Further reading
Iwona Blazwick, ‘Vandal’, Keith Coventry, exhibition catalogue, The Showroom, London 1997.
Cheyenne Westphal, Keith Coventry: White Abstracts & Estate Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Frahm, Copenhagen 1998.
Vanishing Certainties: Keith Coventry: Painting and Sculpture, 1992–2009, exhibition catalogue, Haunch of Venison, London 2009, reproduced p.38.

Kari Rittenbach
February 2012

Tomma Abts - Disturbingly Weird

Is anyone there?

They have human names and inviting personalities. But under the surface, Tomma Abts' paintings are disturbingly weird. By Adrian Searle

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• The Guardian, Tuesday 13 December 2005

Loert, 2005, by Tomma Abts, one of the paintings that won her this year's Turner prize. Photograph: Marcus Leith, courtesy Greengrassi

Fewe, Lübbe, Mehm, Moeder: the syllables are like murmurs. And just like Beckett's Krapp, Clov, Hamm and Watt, the names have a primitive ring. But these are paintings, not characters from a novel or a play. And even though their upright rectangular proportions recall domestic portraiture, there is no one there. Naming a painting is the last thing Tomma Abts does, and she takes them from a German dictionary of regional first names. This is more than a conceit.

Naming these paintings compounds the feeling that they are somehow unknowable, and not to be easily dismissed. They look back at you, much as a character might; staring you down and dragging you in, to enmesh you in their inner complications. What strange paintings they are - uncanny and disquieting, even though quietness is a large part of their appeal. You want to have some sort of human relationship with them. Yet so restrained, impersonal and inexpressive is the artist's touch, that their author might as well be absent, too. Abts' paintings are full of paradox, uncertainty, flaws and personality, which might amount to the same thing.

But they also wake you up, sharpening your perceptions, making you alert to composition and contradiction, to their spatial anomalies. Again, like characters, they are filled with deception. You might think of them as snares or traps. One glimpses things hidden just under the surface, traces of things buried under the skin.

Abts has lived in London since 1995. She is in the current British Art Show, and took part in the prestigious Carnegie International in Pittsburgh last year. She has shown at the ultra-cult Wrong Gallery in New York (it occupies nothing more than a Manhattan doorway), and at the Kunsthalle in Basel. Last week, she opened a new exhibition at Greengrassi, an unexpectedly generous, barn-like space tucked away in a south London backstreet.

Abts' paintings are small and muted. They look like they ought to belong to an earlier form of modern art, such as neo-plasticism, or to a movement in European modernism that never existed: one of those last-gasp appeals to utopian idealism, coming after cubism, futurism and constructivism, some sort of abstraction about to be nudged aside by surrealism. Even their colour looks a bit old and dimmed, as though one were looking at some of her paintings under a low-wattage light. Such colour gives me a slight sense of synaesthesia, as if one might smell its age, or its shrillness might induce a feeling of queasiness.

Circles, triangles, dynamic rhomboids and compound, curvilinear forms predominate. There's often a collision between aesthetic cleanliness and clarity, and a sort of overwrought ornamentation, like a pattern on a prewar scrap of wrapping paper, or old abstract wallpaper. There are shadows where shadows shouldn't exist, highlights where none ought to appear, fault-lines like decorative metal inlays, 20th-century geometries modelled like early renaissance drapery. Frankly, they're weird, and sometimes almost unpleasantly mesmerising.

This, you might think, looks like a recherche, minor sort of painting, one that happens on the margins, at a tangent to the main event. This, after all, is 2005. This untimeliness, the uncanniness and homelessness of Abts' paintings, is important. So, too, is their apparent artificiality, the feeling that their authorship is a kind of construction. I felt something similar when I first saw the work of Raoul De Keyser. And as with De Keyser, I like the fact that Abts' paintings are unplaceable - fitting neither into a movement nor a recognisable historical moment. Where do they belong, one asks, and what's with this pedantic need to categorise them? Abts has said that what really excites her is the idea of work so unplaceable that it might point to the "art of the future". Who knows what the art of the future will be? People who try too hard to make art that belongs to the moment have already missed the bus. Go your own way; do something else.

Which is precisely what Abts has done. Her paintings are just big enough to command a presence on the wall, yet small enough to make you want to get up close. Once there, the eye slides and the mind stumbles around in the effort to grasp what it registers. The longer one looks, the more their quietness comes over as a sort of furtiveness, a kind of dissimulation. The smallest details carry weight, as does the colour, or the lack of it, or the mutedness of it. What at first sight seems a readable, reasonable, comprehensible compositional logic turns out to be irrational, subjective and arbitrary. It is as if to say: you can begin a painting anywhere, and where it ends will be somewhere else; something happens along the way.

In fact, many things probably happen along the way, as the paintings take on a life of their own. The artist becomes the painting's accomplice. These paintings can take months. The colour shifts, forms change, things get buried, but nothing is abandoned. How can we tell whether the process of painting and repainting, the alteration of forms, colour and pictorial organisation as she goes, is not so much a matter of working towards a resolution, as just painting pictures on top of other pictures on the same canvas? You can feel it, when you look: these paintings are the result of one extended, unwavering journey.

Abts makes these paintings with the canvas not at an easel or hung on the wall, but with canvas laid flat on its back on the studio worktable. While she is working, she sees them from above. Psychologically, this seems important. I imagine her looking over them much as a writer pores over the blank sheet of paper on a desk, or as a general studies a map. This is more than a simple matter of orientation; as with the scale of the paintings, it infers a kind of intimacy with the object. Mondrian and Pollock worked with their canvases laid flat, and much has been made of this distinction. Looking at Abts' paintings, one sometimes feels that one is also looking down on their shallow planes, wheeling above them, endlessly circling. The planes below shear off one another, sliding away or tilting over and under one another, or rear up above the flatness of the surface towards one, as though one might reach down and unpick them.

Whenever you think the painting is giving you something concrete, it takes it back, reverses itself, turns itself inside out, in a sort of constant flux and reflux of certainty and doubt. Painters are always going over old ground, even when they're not aware of it. Whatever a painter does leads in several directions at once: backwards, forwards, sideways. Is that the central metaphor here?

Sometimes in Abts' paintings the layered planes fan out like a hand of unreadable cards; one has no idea how to play them, or even what the game is. What is in the deck? The abstract and the representational, the figurative and non-figurative, the serious and the stupid. It is a difficult game, and easy to screw up. You have to concentrate, and take things seriously. But never forget that players who take themselves too seriously and give themselves airs are not infrequently those who make the biggest fools of themselves, and make the most stupid paintings. Abts plays quietly, poker-faced, giving nothing away. Such players stay in the game the longest. They are fixating to watch, even if it is hard to follow their game

· Tomma Abts is at Greengrassi, London SE11, until January 14. Details: 020-7840 9101

Anselm Reyle - Painting and Readymade

Issue 86 October 2004 

Anselm Reyle

FOCUS

These works hover uncertainly in the present

Although armed with an array of gestural brushstrokes, kitschy found objects and outdatedly ‘modern’ sculptural forms, Anselm Reyle skews his pieces away from their retro beginnings by yoking them with such futuristic materials as day-glo and fluorescent paint, neon light, silver Mylar and sheets of mirror. The results are futuro-modern, perhaps, or retro-contemporary.
In 1964 Clement Greenberg despairingly described how painterly abstraction had become, in the hands of a watered-down second generation, ‘by and large an assortment of ready-made effects’ where ‘the look of the accidental had become an academic, conventional look’. Forty years later these ready-made effects are willingly taken onboard by a new generation, ready to dissociate them from their original contexts without the need for the self-conscious irony of their Postmodern predecessors. The drip, the pour, the stain, the gestural brushstroke all have a role to play in Reyle’s painting, as do monochromes, striped canvases and black and white Op geometricism lifted straight from Victor Vasarely. For Reyle the painterly gesture is there for the taking: it has the same potential ready-made status as a found sculptural object.

A recent exhibition of Reyle’s work at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein was mounted as a tribute for the 90th birthday of German Art Informel painter Karl Otto Götz. There are perhaps formal similarities between their works, but for Götz, well known for his dynamic compositions, some executed in a matter of seconds, speed was the key: ‘Rapidity was a necessary means for me to reduce the degree of conscious control to a minimum.’ Reyle’s paintings, on the other hand, are dependent on a deliberate slowing down and increase in conscious control. Gestural marks in contrasting colours sit fresh on pristine white backgrounds; any wayward splashes or paint-can imprints are applied later as finishing touches to balance the composition. In the large-scale Untitled (2004) the black background sets off bold stripes of poured paint in gothic shades of purple, neon pink and metallic silver, which were appplied later, carefully traced around the outlined drips. For all their rock‘n’roll demeanour, their harshly jarring colours, splinters of mirror and nonchalant smears and splatters, Reyle’s paintings are underpinned by a cool compositional meditation.

The unfashionable painterly styles Reyle chooses to rehabilitate have a three-dimensional counterpart in the stylistically awkward found objects that often form the basis of his sculptures: a wagon wheel loaded with faux pastoral associations; an earthy pot that speaks of 1970s interiors and rustic aspirations; an abstract, angular, free-standing monument that seems to be the sculptural equivalent of Polke’s 1968 pastiche abstract painting titled Moderne Kunst. Reyle borrowed this sculptural form from a 1950s work by Italian sculptor Consagra Pietro, but in his updated version (Monumento al Partigiano, Monument to the Partisan 2004), it is constructed from mirrored glass, its sharp planes disintegrating beneath a reflective surface that allows for an almost complete integration with its surroundings.

Reyle’s revisitations of obsolete forms rely for their unsettling effects on the considered use of unlikely materials. His interventions are always as easy as possible, involving either a change of colour, light or simply context. Vase (2004) is an earthenware pot found at a flea market, now exhibited on a pedestal in a room full of Reyle’s paintings, its drippy glaze finding echoes in their abstract lines. He aims for a transparency of method: cladding a sculpture in mirror, painting a vigorous macho abstract in shiny silver and fluorescent pink, lining an old wooden wagon wheel with pale blue neon (Wheel, 2001). But despite the simplicity of such means, the results are profoundly alienating. The ghostly blue glow around the wheel gives it an other-worldly presence beyond the clichéd origins of both the wheel and the neon light. Is this a metaphor for the spiritual role of the decorative object in everyday life? A hallucinogenic homage to an emblematic form? Or just a warm-hearted jazzing-up of an old-fashioned prop?

Reyle’s approach to the past seems somehow tender, almost compassionate in the face of time’s inexorable transformation of the fresh and exciting into the lukewarm and outmoded. The newly autonomous objects and images he creates are liberated from their histories and given instead a new role to perform, in a concentrated interplay between two and three dimensions. By amplifying details, cranking up colours, tweaking the lighting and distorting reflections Reyle teases out resonances and sets up a rapid exchange of formal information that flows from piece to piece like an electric current.

Kirsty Bell

Post-Ironic Modernism

Greene Naftali is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Ida Ekblad, which marks the artist’s first solo show at the gallery. Comprised of paintings and sculptures, a common energy courses throughout the work which is characterized by a deep interest in color, shape, and line as well as history, refuse, and time. In both media, one sees twisted, interlocked forms that function on both aesthetic and metaphorical levels. While they may occasionally bring to mind the work of Kandinsky or even Dubuffet, the paintings turn primarily on the legacies of postwar abstraction and especially its Scandinavian incarnations, such as the proto-Situationist CoBrA group. The raw brute, almost anti-cultural quality of Karel Appel and Asger Jorn’s work forms a clear precedent for Ekblad’s yet the younger artist gives it a distinctive twist by imagining a painterly idiom infused with bold lyricism, occasionally washed out colors, and the vibrancy of the city street.

The urbanity of Ekblad’s work comes increasingly into focus in her sculptural work, the parts of which are often picked up from the curb or grabbed from the scrapyard and then combined in the artist’s studio. These works made of societal refuse have a sharp, jagged quality about them, an almost violent exuberance. The parts that comprise them are often left close to their found form; they undergo none of the macho crunches characteristic of someone like Chamberlain. By contrast, three additional sculptures in the show take on a more utilitarian function, appearing in the form of gates. Striking and lyrical and placed in the center of the room, these portals neither facilitate nor constrict passing from one space to another like such things normally do. Rather, the invocation of openings and gateways that they make is more metaphorical, the viewer being invited to pass from one state to another. Fittingly, Ekblad has often described her production in poetic terms; everything from word to paint stroke to metal scrap joins together to create grammar, line, rhythm, and meter. There is a certain pride and pleasure (without prejudice) that Ekblad takes in putting these parts together, which comes across in the crude and forceful I.E. with which she signs her paintings and reliefs. Her signature does not so much denote authorship, however, as much as it signals a spirit of evocative invocation. Hungry and curious if not voracious, Ekblad’s work invites the viewer to view contemporary life not in its traditional pop language, but rather through the very energies and refuse that bring it into being.

Ida Ekblad was born in Oslo, Norway in 1980. Her work was recently featured in ILLUMInations at the 54th Biennale di Venezia as well as the 5th Prague Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall and Bonnier Konsthall, Stockholm, and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Migros Museum in Zurich and the New Museum in New York.

GATEKEEPER BUTTERFLY

Notice that this block of iron once was part of a mountain triumphing with the force of chaos
A piece preserved, it became cause to be less, Stubborn Yes but
Imagine the rest of the face

A gate opens unto a strengthened defense
bare chested like a man
but not given access, only led through a narrow passage, sedate.
Gnawing with rusty teeth on a frieze with quails and peacocks pecking grapes

You are represented kneeling, your hands flat on my thighs, in an attitude of reverence
Muted silver, spoon and stick in molds of muck
One must stand one’s dusty ground, not stringent but strung out, uncompromising like but still willing
Yielding, like incubating eggs in her mouth

Depress that old smooth rod, let it weigh, do blend do bronze its way, through my gate
I push with force, submissive as bequeathed by a visceral change of course
You, miraculous bait, with a flower in your hand, bearing your palette
palming my tomb in duet, your runes my alphabet

Post-Irony by Zoe Williams

The final irony

'Isn't it ironic?' You hear it all the time - and, most of the time, actually no, it isn't. Hypocritical, cynical, lazy, coincidental, more likely. But what is irony and why did pundits think it would die two years ago, after September 11? Zoe Williams meticulously, sincerely, unironically, hunts it down

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• The Guardian, Saturday 28 June 2003

Taking its name from the Greek eironeia (dissimulation), irony consists of purporting a meaning of an utterance or a situation that is different, often opposite, to the literal one.
Maike Oergel, Encyclopaedia Of German Literature

Irony is a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.
The New Oxford English Dictionary

Pretty much everything is ironic these days. Irony is used as a synonym for cool, for cynicism, for detachment, for intelligence; it's cited as the end of civilisation, as well as its salvation. Pretty much every form of culture claims to be shot through with it, even (especially) the ones that conspicuously aren't. I read last week that Bruce Forsyth hosting Have I Got News For You was an "ironic statement", as if you could ascend into irony just by being old, as you used to with wisdom. I read, too, that it was ironic for Alan Millburn to leave his job to spend more time with his family, when the doctors and nurses under his care don't have that facility; well, it's not ironic, it's just standard-issue self-interest, with maybe a smattering of hypocrisy. I've read claims of an "ironic" interest in Big Brother - nope. Lazy, maybe. Possibly postmodern. Not ironic.

We have a grave problem with this word (well, in fact, it's not really grave - but I'm not being ironic when I call it that, I'm being hyperbolic. Though often the two amount to the same thing. But not always). Just looking at the definitions, the confusion is understandable - in the first instance, rhetorical irony expands to cover any disjunction at all between language and meaning, with a couple of key exceptions (allegory also entails a disconnection between sign and meaning, but obviously isn't synonymous with irony; and lying, clearly, leaves that gap, but relies for its efficacy on an ignorant audience, where irony relies on a knowing one). Still, even with the riders, it's quite an umbrella, no?

In the second instance, situational irony (also known as cosmic irony) occurs when it seems that "God or fate is manipulating events so as to inspire false hopes, which are inevitably dashed"(1). While this looks like the more straightforward usage, it opens the door to confusion between irony, bad luck and inconvenience.

Most pressingly, though, there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times. The first is that September 11 spelled the end of irony. The second is that the end of irony would be the one good thing to come out of September 11. The third is that irony characterises our age to a greater degree than it has done any other. The fourth is that Americans can't do irony, and we can. The fifth is that the Germans can't do irony, either (and we still can). The sixth is that irony and cynicism are interchangeable. The seventh is that it's a mistake to attempt irony in emails and text messages, even while irony characterises our age, and so do emails. And the eighth is that "post-ironic" is an acceptable term - it is very modish to use this, as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.

Now, after all that effort numbering and sub-numbering the points, I'm going to deal with them in the wrong order. That isn't ironic, it's just a bit sloppy. There are four important epochs of irony (unless you count Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but to do that, I would need to have read them).

Phase one Socratic irony is simply part of a canon of rhetorical tools devised to distract people from the fact that they've been sitting still listening to hard talk for an awfully long time. The technique, demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues, was to pretend ignorance and, more sneakily, to feign credence in your opponent's power of thought, in order to tie him in knots. This is amazingly prevalent in contemporary social intercourse - every one of us, I'd guess, has a friend who engages in an argument, waits patiently until you've said something really trenchant and probably wrong, then cocks his (or her) head to one side and says, "Do you think that's true?" thereafter pursuing each one of your most ridiculous points and challenging them from a perspective of utter (pretended) ignorance. Weirdly, this is never called irony, even though every other bloody thing that anyone ever says is.

Phase two Romantic irony was framed by Schlegel(2) the German philosopher. Here, it became a much more complex philosophical tool, of which the nuts and bolts were that you simultaneously occupied two opposite positions (what you say versus what is real). There were problems with this as a direct path to truth later on, but I'd need a more Socratic grasp of how not to be boring before I could go into them. The point with Schlegel was that irony would give you a divided self, which in turn gives you a multiplicity of perspectives, which is the only way you will unlock the truth of the whole. This romantic (or "philosophical") irony had a great influence on the English Romantic poets - Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, with its commentary running alongside the narrative, divides the perspective (plus, he read Schlegel, so I'm not just making that up).

But irony as part of the British literary tradition doesn't, generally speaking, commence with Romantic irony, but rather with the device that has its roots in Socrates, viz, saying the opposite of what is true in order to underline the truth. So, from this you'd trace a line from Chaucer, through More, Sidney and Milton, arriving at Swift and Austen, where you can see a pleasing bifurcation of irony's literary use. Austen uses irony as a means of being understated. Swift, by contrast, uses irony for polemical purposes, conjuring grotesque images ironically (babies being eaten, mankind enslaved to the morally superior horse) in order to state his case (that the Irish were starving, that humanity was going to the dogs) ever more forcefully.

Phase three Irony as a tool of dissent, a grim but failsafe gag and mainstay of popular culture, took hold during the first world war(3). The gross disjunction between patriotic rhetoric and the reality of the war itself led to a widespread use of irony as a means of puncturing deceitful propaganda. Every convention of today's ironic, satirical news forms (from Private Eye, through Viz, to the Onion) has a germ in the Wipers Times, the first world war trench newspaper (established, independently of military authority, by Captain FJ Roberts of the Sherwood Foresters.) At this point, irony was still purporting to be an overview - to be wading through the mulch of accepted wisdom and exposing its fraudulence. So, for instance, the Wipers Times would print a list of Things That Were Definitely True, and it would contain a proportion of propaganda ("40,000 Huns have Surrendered"), a proportion of enemy propaganda ("The Germans Have Plentiful and Tasty Meats") and a proportion of nonsense ("Horatio Bottomley has accepted the Turkish Throne on condition they make a separate peace"), thus undermining any information coming from anywhere at all (it's interesting that the paper was caustically ironic on the subject of the war itself, but never deviated from the line that home leave was a blessed relief, when, in fact, most soldiers found it stressful and devastating to return to normality after the trenches - there is a limit to how far you can take irony before you have to shoot yourself).

Where irony springs up as a response to being lied to (by authority, or prevailing culture, or whatever), it is still adhering loosely to Chaucer's model - it states the lie in order to expose the lie, and is therefore a route to truth. It has some moral import. It may say "This belief is wrong", but it doesn't say "All belief is wrong". When people call ours the Age of Irony, that is not the kind of irony they are on about.

Phase four Our age has not so much redefined irony, as focused on just one of its aspects. Irony has been manipulated to echo postmodernism. The postmodern, in art, architecture, literature, film, all that, is exclusively self-referential - its core implication is that art is used up, so it constantly recycles and quotes itself. Its entirely self-conscious stance precludes sincerity, sentiment, emoting of any kind, and thus has to rule out the existence of ultimate truth or moral certainty. Irony, in this context, is not there to lance a boil of duplicity, but rather to undermine sincerity altogether, to beggar the mere possibility of a meaningful moral position. In this sense it is, indeed, indivisible from cynicism. This isn't to say that "truth-seeking" irony has evaporated - many creative forms still use irony to highlight the sheer, grinding horror of pursuits or points of view that are considered "normal" (like The Office, for instance; and much of American literature is masterfully good at employing irony with a purpose - to choose at random, Pastoralia, by George Saunders, Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, anything by Philip Roth, The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen).

But other strands of media use irony to assert their right to have no position whatsoever. So, you take a cover of FHM, with tits on the front - and it's ironic because it appears to be saying "women are objects", yet of course it isn't saying that, because we're in a postfeminist age. But nor is it saying "women aren't objects", because that would be dated, over-sincere, mawkish even. So, it's effectively saying "women are neither objects, nor non-objects - and here are some tits!" Scary Movie 2, Dumb And Dumberer, posh women who go to pole-dancing classes, people who set the video for Big Brother Live, people who have Eurovision Song Contest evenings, Char lie's Angels (the film, not the TV series) and about a million other things besides, are all using this ludic trope - "I'm not saying what you think I'm saying, but I'm not saying its opposite, either. In fact, I'm not saying anything at all. But I get to keep the tits." As Paul de Man pointed out, some time before FHM, "This does not, however, make it into an authentic language, for to know inauthenticity is not the same as being authentic."(4). So, we're not the first age to use irony (as some insist), but we are the first to use it in this vacuous, agenda-free and often highly amusing way.

September 11 and the End of Irony

Politicians especially (but serious minds of all sorts) dislike this newish twist of irony, since political rhetoric relies on moral framework - they may be spinning, they may be sexing up their evidence, they may be lying straight to our faces as we beseech them not to kill innocent Iraqis for no good reason (as an example), but at least old-fashioned protest waits until it knows it has been lied to before it unleashes its irony. Modern irony ridicules politicians regardless, for their sheer unironic-ness in holding a position in the first place.

So, upon the giant disaster, many people were glad to declare irony's end. Gerry Howard, editorial director of Broadway Books, said, "I think somebody should do a marker that says irony died on 9-11-01." Roger Rosenblatt claimed, in an essay in Time magazine, that "one good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony"(5).

This is striking as the kind of American self-importance that leads people to think they have no sense of irony in the first place. But there is legitimacy in the claim - for a very short time, the event seemed so earth-shattering that there did seem to be an absolute and clear dichotomy between good and evil. Once you've got one of those, then a) the act of seeking the truth through irony is pointless, because the truth is staring you in the face; and b) the postmodern ironic distance that eschews concepts like "good" and "evil" has been trounced. Naturally, irony was back within a few days, not least because of the myriad ironies contained within the attack itself (America having funded al-Qaida is ironic; America raining bombs and peanut butter on Afghanistan is ironic). But even without those ironic features, irony would have resurfaced pretty soon - only a very fresh tragedy can silence it.

The end of irony would be a disaster for the world - bad things will always occur, and those at fault will always attempt to cover them up with emotional and overblown language. If their opponents have to emote back at them, you're basically looking at a battle of wills, and the winner will be the person who can beat their breast the hardest without getting embarrassed. Irony allows you to launch a challenge without being dragged into this orbit of self-regarding sentiment that you get from Tony Blair, say, when he talks about "fighting for what's right". Irony can deflate a windbag in the way that very little else can.

What people usually mean when they yearn for an end to irony is an end to postmodernism. I'm not sure this will ever happen, since it places itself after originality and progress (what comes after the afters? Well, cheese, I guess).

Irony and America

There are a few reasons why we think the Americans have no sense of irony. First, theirs is rather an optimistic culture, full of love of country and dewy-eyed self-belief and all the things that Europe's lost going through the war spindryer for the thousandth time. This is all faith-based - faith in God, faith in the goodness of humanity, etc - and irony can never coexist with faith, since the mere act of questioning causes the faith fairy to disappear. Second, they have a very giving register that, with a sense of irony, would be unsustainable (how can you wish a stranger a nice day with a straight face?). Third, because we think Canadian Alanis Morissette is American, and she proved some time ago, with her song Ironic, that she didn't know what irony meant (this is so ironic - first, because we think we're the more sophisticated and yet don't know the difference between America and Canada, second because America sees Canada as such a tedious sleeping partner, and yet Canada is subversively sending idiots into the global marketplace with American accents. Of course, I'm being ironic. Canadian accents are not the same as American ones!)

In fact, this is absolute moonshine, since the consummate and well-documented superiority of US telly over British telly is largely due to their superior grasp of irony (as well as the fact that they have more cash). Take, for instance, the opening sequences of Six Feet Under versus the opening sequences of Casualty - they both start every episode with a vignette in which a stranger dies a horrible death or suffers a hideous accident. In Six Feet Under, this will never be straightforward - the porn star will never die because her silicon implants explode, she will die in some way that could happen to anyone; the wheezing, scared-looking sportsman will turn out to have been just a bit thirsty, while his amazingly strong team-mate will be dying in the background from heat stroke. There's always some cosmic irony, swiftly followed by ironic dialogue. In Casualty, on the other hand - man leaves pub in middle of day; commences dangerous-looking welding job; burns own eye out in drunk accident. Dur.

Germans and irony

Not speaking German, nor watching much German TV, nor having read any German literature apart from Bernard Schlink who, let me tell you, is about as ironic as a dog chasing a squirrel, it's difficult to tell whether or not there's any truth in the rumour that they have no sense of irony. However, since they invented it (well, they invented Schlegel), it's more than likely that they've got plenty. To anyone who thinks I'm insufficiently bigoted, I have serious doubts about the French.

Irony in emailing and texts

Texting is a truly tricky form for the ironist - very brief texts are difficult to make ironic simply because it's difficult to inject many layers into seven words. However, if you write a very long text, because it's such a bugger to do, your extra effort suggests a sincerity - an undudelike urge to be understood - that sits all wrong with the irony. To get round this, forms like "(!)" and "Not" and "have evolved", but they're pretty dumb and basic.

With emails, people with a lot of time on their hands can, obviously, give themselves room to develop an ironic theme, but for people with jobs, e-etiquette demands instant response, which brings you down to the very rudiments of irony - I Love My Boss; I'm Delighted That My Ex Is Going Out With That Attractive Woman; I Really Couldn't Be More Pleased That You've Lost a Stone. Once it's as bald as that, and you're without extra signifiers like eyebrows, there is a danger of misunderstanding. However, I think we're actually more alert to irony than we are to its opposite, sincerity. Take the case of Rena Salmon, who last year shot her husband's lover, and then texted him to that effect. Her words were, "I have shot Lorna. This is not a joke." A perfect demonstration of my point (I don't get many of those) - the first thing you think when you read a text is that it is a joke.

Situational irony

This article has almost exclusively been about rhetorical irony, which has much more fluidity and variety than situational irony. That does not mean that situational irony is entirely straightforward - often, the appearance that God or Fate was attempting to make you think one thing when another was going to happen is down to your own misreading or wilful blindness, and therefore isn't ironic at all. Furthermore, where rhetorical irony can be as simple as saying the opposite of what you mean, cosmic irony is not simply experiencing the opposite of what you thought was going to happen. For instance, if I was having a party, and I thought my dad was going to come, and he didn't, that wouldn't be ironic. If, on the other hand, I was having a party and I didn't want my dad to come, and I spent three weeks working on a brilliant cover story for why he couldn't come, and then my sister accidentally blew my cover, so I had to invite him anyway, and then, on the way here, he got run over and died - that's ironic.

I hope he realises that that example was, well, not ironic, but certainly meant with no ill will.

But, whatever (here, with ludic irony, I'm trying to get out of writing a conclusion by affecting the jargon of the slothful teenager. Obviously, I don't mean "whatever" - I don't share the disaffected carelessness of the standard "whatever" user. But I'm still getting out of writing a conclusion. To know inauthenticity isn't the same as being authentic. Or even, just because you ironically know you're wrong doesn't make you right).

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1. Jack Lynch, Literary Terms. I would strongly urge you not to read any more footnotes, they are only here to make sure I don't get in trouble for plagiarising.

2. 'In it [irony] everything should be all jest and all serious-ness, everything guilelessly open and deeply hidden... It contains and arouses a sense of the indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licences, because through it one transcends oneself, but at the same time it is the most prescribed, because [it is] absolutely necessary.'

3. This is obviously debatable, but Paul Fussell in The Great War And Modern Memory made the case compellingly. Truthfully, British irony's political usage has to be deemed to have started with Swift, alongside Addison and Steele. Oh, go on, disagree with me if you like, see if I care.

4. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric Of Temporality

5. Both these quotes are from Michiko Kakutani, Critic's Notebook: The Age Of Irony Isn't Over After All; Assertions Of Cynicism's Demise Belie History