Postmodernism
Term applied to a wide range of cultural analysis and production since the early 1970s. Whilst there are different attitudes to what postmodernism is, it is generally referred to as a significant shift in attitude away from the certainties of a modernism based on progress. The cultural traits usually associated with postmodern cultural production include the acceptance of many styles, the importance of surface and the playful adoption of different styles through parody and pastiche.
Term used from about 1970 to describe changes seen to take place in Western society and culture from the 1960s on. These changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board. In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism. It may be said to begin with Pop art and to embrace much of what followed including Conceptual art, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Some outstanding characteristics of postmodernism are that it collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture; that it tends to efface the boundary between art and everyday life; and that it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be.
If Modernism is roughly from 1860-1960, then logically Postmodernism is 1960s - Today, However some critics state Postmodernism is over and we have entered a phase of Post-Postmodernism.
If Modernism equates with; Simplified aesthetic, Utopian ideals, Truth to materials and Form following Function. Then Postmodernism involves; Complexity, Chaos, Bricolage (mixing up of styles and materials), Parody and pastiche and irony.
Postmodernism has an attitude of questioning conventions (especially those set out by Modernism)
Postmodern aesthetic = multiplicity of styles & approaches
Theme of ‘double coding’, borrowing, or ‘quoting’ from a number of historical styles
Knowing juxtapositions, or ‘postmodernist irony’
Questioning old limitations
Space for marginalised discourse:
Women, sexual diversity & multiculturalism
Robert Venturi:
‘I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure”, compromising rather than “clean”, distorted rather than “straight-forward”, ambiguous rather than “articulated”, perverse as well as impersonal….’
‘I didn’t like Europe as much as I liked Disney World. At Disney World all the countries are much closer together, and they just show you the best of each country. Europe is more boring. People talk strange languages and things are dirty. Sometimes you don’t see anything interesting in Europe for days, but at Disney World something different happens all the time, and people are happy. It’s much more fun. It’s well designed!’
A college graduate just back from her first trip to Europe, in Papanek, V. (1995), The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, page 139
Postmodern attitude of questioning conventions (esp. Modernism)
Postmodern aesthetic = multiplicity of styles & approaches
Shift in thought & theory investigating ‘crisis in confidence’
‘That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning’
This was the lecture word for word. In my opinion this was, google's synoym's of word I wanted to use: Balderdash, Baloney, Hooey. There is a massive contradiction in the artist's shown during this lecture, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emmin, Damien Hirst, Richard Long, Olafur Ellison, Barbara Kruger, Martin Creed, and the description of Post Modernism and the very definition of what is given as post modernism. To me the majority (although not all some I do like) do not represent the way post modernism is described, in my head, when complexity, chaos, bricolage and parody is illustrated it's not through these, to me all these artists represent the fine art world, the world where theory is put before skill and talent, the world where the artist is the thinker with assistants to create the work. The world I care about is the one with talented illustrators, like Sarah Illenberger, Graphic designers that shapes the signs and advertisers that subconsciously effect us. This is the design I care about. I don't appreciate Post Modernism, Modernism was a much better era.
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