er refined, and must therefore be reassessed or stagnate. Furthermore, in the context of the major social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and thereafter, such work might appear increasingly irrelevant. From Burgin's viewpoint, Greenberg's privileging of aesthetic and technical issues marginalises those types of art which can be validated by reference to their relationship with their historical context, to the way in which they represent their times. Thus Dada would be of little importance in a Greenbergian art history, but significant in the context of 'a history [i.e. an art history] which opens onto history' and which deals with representations. Following from this, if the most important thing about art is that it should connect with the conceptual framework of its socio-historical context, then technical issues can be subordinated to ideas, and new means of representation, such as photography and installation, which do not fit easily within a Modernist aesthetic, are legitimated. Burgin's statement expands the concept of art beyond the relatively narrow bounds set by Greenbergian Modernism, and thereby allows the consideration as art of a range of new conceptual works such as Mel Ramsden's Secret Painting (pl. 175) which 'plays upon the irony that language is both a medium supposedly distinct from art and the source of information about art's content and meaning' (Modernism in Dispute, p.205). Burgin provides a basis for identifying work as postmodernist rather than Modernist, and also sets postmodernism in the context of its antecedents in, for instance, Heartfield's photomontages and Duchamp's readymades. The concept of postmodernism seems to have become current from the early 1980s onwards, when it began to appear in the work of writers such as Lyotard and Jameson. These writers were not specifically discussing art but more general cultural tendencies. However, Burgin's challenge to the dominance of Greenbergian criticis...
