Does R. Kelly’s Opus Herald the End of Postmodernism and the Death of Irony?

In Planet Simpson, Chris Turner’s smart, fawning dedication to The Simpsons, he rather grandly suggests that, despite two or three decades of ironic detachment, “the future belongs to the sincere”. The self-reflexive irony so characterised by The Simpsons, Taylor argues, is merely a cultural transition period, a stopgap solution to the postmodern re-understanding of the world. Postmodernism and its pastiche and irony – these are merely placeholders while we figure out what the hell to do when meaning and morality are constantly in flux.

The postmodern destabilisation of old hierarchies and axioms has had broad-ranging, diverse effects, some positive (e.g. feminism, civil rights etc.), some less so (e.g. The Simple Life). Indeed, there is not enough time or space on this or any blog to document the swath that postmodernism has cut through culture. But the effect of the postmodern on art specifically might be summed up by saying that it challenged how artists approached representation i.e. what it is that art purports to actually show. While for centuries it was verisimilitude that was key – that art should approximate real life as much as possible, whether in painting, drama or film – postmodernism suggested that the only option left was to lay bare the art-ifice of art, to focus all the attention on the prefix “re-” at the beginning of ‘re-presentation’. To wit, the audience have to be in a double space, aware that that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe while they simultaneously enjoy how realistic the picture seems.

In the later half of the twentieth century, artists worked to reveal artifice much more directly through the aggressive use of irony, a wink at the viewer that detached him or her from the presented ‘reality’. Ironic representation might be exemplified by Charlie Kaufman’s films, particularly Adaptation, as its focus on the writer forces the viewer into the the ‘double view’ that irony demands – the film moves its plot forward by forcing the viewer to engage the constructedness and cliché of the plot while enjoying the very same patterns. This wryness, this wink and nod to the viewer is the contemporary standard – everything from music videos to film to blogs revel in this knowingness, this subtle admission that this all really just a game of sorts in which the rulebook has been thrown out of the window. Far from being an occasional technique, irony is the current model for representation and, according to many, is the only sensible approach to a world rightly wary of sincerity.

Now, if you have been dedicated enough to read this far – you might well be asking: what the hell does this have to do with R. Kelly? Well, I’m about to suggest that if ironic detachment has been our culture’s artistic M.O. for some time now, then Kelly’s recent opus Trapped in the Closet might signal some sort of shift – that the age of irony is ending and is being replaced by an even drier, more layered and inscrutable one. Read the rest of this entry »