Postmodernism appears charming and quaint now.
I suspect only a small number of people have ever got to grips with the phenomenon of modernism in arts and culture, although it emerged in the mid-19th century and was declared dead several decades ago. Yet a massive tome (or tomb) published by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to accompany its exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 – 1990 implies postmodernism, too, has passed.
For many people, mere mention of the word is profoundly irritating. Others toss it around lightly in conversation, precisely to cause profound irritation. Perhaps it is useful, then, to reflect on postmodernism as something that is no longer with us. In retrospect, it appears charming and quaint, as when a difficult relative, intimidating when alive, becomes more endearing at the funeral.
The book contains 41 essays on postmodern design in all its manifestations, from furniture to architecture, posters to pots. In the first essay, exhibition curators Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt explain, with commendable clarity and levity, how postmodernism departed from modernism. Modernism was about progress. Design – so long as it was new and original, pared back to essential functional, forms and as good as it could possibly be – was perceived as crucial to ushering in a better world. Postmodernism, on the other hand, was a kind of giving up. Modernist ideals had come to nought. There seemed to be few signs of genuine social progress. “Good” modernist architecture had turned bad; the “international style” produced monotonous high-rise boxes that either trapped their poverty-stricken inhabitants in slums or provided a measure, in height, of the obscene wealth of corporations (a kind of “biggest dick” competition). So the postmodernists found it easier to do away with arguments about “quality”.
Central to postmodern thought is the tendency to challenge binary oppositions, a refusal to see things in black and white, in either/or terms (good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or false). You can see this at work in politics, where the major parties desperately grab for the centre, in preference to being labelled “left” or “right” (think Tony Blair’s “third way”). People are bound to like you if you avoid saying anything anyone might disagree with.
A bunch of French philosophers who discovered this amusing strategy became popular in the 1970s for making a point of not having a point, which meant they could not be proved wrong unless it was wrong not to have a point, and the point of postmodernism was that there was no right or wrong … hilarious stuff. If postmodernism was a sitcom (something along the lines of Everybody Loves Raymond), “neither one thing nor the other” would be the lame catchphrase.
In postmodern design, “fun” – or that model of ambivalence, “interesting” – replaced “good”. Often, the fun was poked at abandoned modernist ambitions. As architect Charles Jencks remarked: “After all, since it is fairly dead, we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse.” But despite rejecting the idea that one style is better than another, the postmodern mixing of styles emerges as itself a distinctive style, evident in the work of the Memphis Group, founded in Milan by Ettore Sottsass.
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion offers a riot of colour and wackiness in its many reproductions. Readers tiring of such statements as “Memphis showed that innocuous, domestic things – sideboards and teapots – could play a part in the hyper-real life of the postmodern subject” may find respite in the Bel Air Chair (1982) of Los Angeles-based designer Peter Shire. “Good design” really does seem beside the point when one looks at the supposed maternity dress by Jean-Paul Goude and Antonio Lopez, modelled with attitude and aplomb by Grace Jones.
When the text of the book becomes earnest, as in James Wines’s essay on environmentally conscious architecture-based artworks (“Arch-Art”), it seems to break with the spirit of the thing. Far more telling as social comment, yet also wickedly witty, is Talking Heads frontman David Byrne photographed in his famous “big suit”. Byrne, in a brief postscript, closes the book on postmodernism: “Time to move on,” he writes.
POSTMODERNISM: STYLE AND SUBVERSION, 1970-1990, edited by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt (V&A, $110).
Edward Hanfling is an art historian and critic. He is co-author of Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation.