Postmodernism - Style and Subversion. 1970-1990 © V&A Images
Postmodernism, will we ever get an answer to what it is?
Words by Lynda Beckett
Postmodernism is said to be the most controversial of the all the art movements. I can only presume this is because it is so difficult to define, however ‘style’ and ‘subversion’ are a good place to start.
So, on a crazy-warm evening in early autumn a friend and I went to try and get our heads around Postmodernism at the V&A. Hundreds of people were hanging around the bar in the entrance hall, and in the quadrangle beside the stylish and beautifully lit paddling pool, drinking cocktails. I must admit the thought of cocktails was tempting, however the queue was five deep, so we decided to go and tackle ‘Postmodernism’. We wanted to see if we could get our heads around this subversive and amorphous art movement.
The opening piece of work was ‘Destruction of Lassú chair’ (1974). A replica of a beautifully crafted wooden chair by Alessandro Mendini sat on some wooden steps. A photomontage of the original chair and steps being burnt, in a disused quarry, was projected above the replica chair and steps. I wasn’t sure about the symbolism of this piece. Was it capturing a moment in time, a phoenix rising from the ashes, postmodernism about to enter the world, or was it simply an anarchic act?
Next came the artist and architect Ettore Sottsass. It looked like he had been inspired by Bertie Bassett and made totems from oversized liquorice allsorts. The totems made me smile, they were fun, however they looked more like something out of the Pop Art movement, and at first glance had very little to do with postmodernism. Then to my horror virtually the whole room turned into a display of architectural drawings with only a couple of models of houses and some teapots incased in glass. It had all become a little to 2D for my liking.
Yes this exhibition is subversive, but not in the way I think the curators intended it to be. It was subversive because I was in a gallery looking at drawings and objects and I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, and neither did anyone else as far as I could see. I needed a bit of an overview of postmodernism with objects and works from artists and designers that I was more familiar with. I was finding it difficult to connect to anything. I thought the postmodernist movement kicked off in the early to mid 20th century with the French philosophers and writers, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, but there is no mention of them here. The subversion had definitely started.
In this exhibition the V&A has chosen to focus on the ‘Postmodernism’ movement that started in the 1970s. Just after the fall of modernism. It explains that on the 15th March 1972 at 3.22pm, the historian Charles Jencks declared modernism dead when the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri, was dynamited. Just deserts, as far as I am concerned, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was a hideous bunch of modernist high-rise buildings comprising thirty-three, eleven-story rectangular concrete building on a 35-acre site. So, this is ‘the end’ of modernism, but what about Postmodernism? I needed to know more.
Few academics seem willing to define Postmodernism. And fewer have written anything that us mere mortals are ever going to be able to understand. Other art movements in the 20th century have been much easier to define; Impressionism by Monet’s water lilies and haystacks, Cubism by Picasso’s naked women and Surrealism by Dali’s melting watch and Duchamp’s urinal. Postmodernism as yet doesn’t seem to have seminal pieces of work that define the movement, but there are contenders – Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons are in the running.
The height of postmodernism, or ‘po-mo’ as it is affectionately called, was during the 80s and the early 90s. Warhol and Koons captured the consumer’s desire for wealth and power of the 80s. Society was infatuated with money and so was the art world. Warhol was literally printing money in the early 80s with his Dollar Sign series of paintings and drawings. One of his silkscreened dollar signs is here. So is Koons’ trademark silver-coloured bust of French King Louis XIV. The beautiful bust reflected the fascination with consumer desire, affluence, and power of the 80s. The Daily Telegraph describes it as “a glittering totem of capitalist kitsch”. Koons wanted the bust to look expensive. He loves shiny. It’s actually made of polished steel, but could so easily have been cast in silver. It stands as proud as any 18th century bust. However when push comes to shove, it’s a phony. But it’s not alone, there is a phoniness about many of the objects in this exhibition. They were beautifully crafted over-the-top designs, impractical as product designs, but always pushing the boundaries.
I enjoyed seeing Warhol and Koons’ work within this exhibition. Their work is both stylish and subversive, however I did feel that I was wading through a pan-cultural soup of product design and popular culture, fashion, graphics and architecture. Taking a quick look at Blade Runner, the maternity dress for Grace Jones designed by Jean-Paul Goude and Antonio Lopez, and the cover of i-D made me think about the impact this movement made on 20th century western culture. A combination of clashing colours, eclectic design, and wry wit shone through.
Grace Jones Maternity Dress. 1979 © Jean-Paul Goude
Still looking for a definition of Postmodernism, after seeing the exhibition, I stumbled upon a paper by Professor Martin Irvine of Georgetown University, Washington. He sees “Postmodernity as a phase of knowing and practice, abandoning the assumptions, prejudices, and constraints of modernism to embrace the contradictions, irony, and profusion of pop and mass culture. ‘High’ and ‘low’ culture/art categories made useless and irrelevant, art from outsider and non-Western cultures embraced, consumer society turned inside out.” It would have helped if I had been armed with that walking through the V&A postmodernist exhibition.
From what I understand, ‘Postmodernism’ was a reaction to modernism. Jane Pavitt the co-curator of the exhibition explains Postmodernism as “a reaction to the orthodoxy of modernism, a reaction against a single narrative and a monotheistic position in design and architecture”.
Wet Magazine. © April Greiman and Jayme Odgers
If this information had been available to me I would have understood the architecture with features from another era stuck on. But the impracticality of many of the teapots and everyday objects is still beyond me. If they were art for art’s sake then that’s fine in our post postmodernist world. There are many weird and wonderful objects, but only about 15 punters going round the exhibition; the V&A bars were obviously more appealing on a Friday night.
The V&A markets itself as a ‘design museum’. Within this exhibition it looked liked they’d just tried to link a load of stuff they had at the back of a cupboard under the banner of ‘postmodernism’ as a catch-all for their leftovers.
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 V&A Museum – London until 15th January 2012
