POSTMODERNISM presentation

I have Extrapolated from the notes I took of the exhibition at the V&A last year.
Postmodernism style and subversion 1970-1990

I have decided to present postmodernism in this way to capture and identify its
visual characteristics. In order to recognise it when I see it and develop my own
 dialogue with this concept.   

As well as the above, Postmodernism  is :

Controversial, theatrical and theoretical. 

It defies definition, It is exaggerated movement.

It is Colourful, ludicrous; luxurious, ironic; pastiche and messy.

It resists authority, it is radical; dystopian;

It is freedom of expression,,

It is a departure from Modernism’s utopian

visions of simplicity and clarity..

The death of Modernism was announced by

Charles Jencks, when he said “Modernism ended at 3.32pm 15^th March 1972”, 

when the internationally infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in  St Louis Missouri USA was blown up..

Jenks concluded this demolition marked the end of modernist idealism.

(Jenks was good friends with Koolhaas, The Maggie centre was built in memory of Jenks wife).

Postmodernist  architects:

experimented with styles of the past.

Gehry made a statement of radically expansive optimism, inspired by a mournful sense of the past that Modernism excluded.

Ad hoc Bricolage Frank O Gehry built this house out of improvisation, the temporary, the unfinished, and the jumbled together. Combining handmade with the readymade.

Charles Moore and Urban Innovation Group (with Perez Associates) Piazza d’Italia, 1975-77, New Orleans is a  key Postmodern statement in Architecture.

It displaced the established and crossed boundaries.

Performers deconstructed and reassembled themselves,

through the language of pastiche with added layers of complexity

by combining visual style music movement and text

Japanses Buto dancer Ono Kazuo – displays exaggerated movement.

Every gesture seems like a quote from another ancient dance.

Also the gender of the performer is elastic.

Blade runner: set in 2019. dwells on the possibilities and consequences of living in a ‘post-human’ age.  It blends Asian and western styles. The fashion is 1940 futuristic. This film is a metaphor for the postmodern condition.  Suggesting we are all manufactured by the advertising we see, the space we live in and the tv shows we watch.

Suggesting we now have artificial identities.

Romeo and Juliet uses Shakespeare’s language in 21^st c New York. Set in a modern suburb, It mixes Hip hop music with Shakespeare's original dialogue.

Frank Schreiner ‘Consumer’s Rest chair’ of 1990 was an obvious satire on the retail experience.

Designers salvaged and distressed materials to produce an aesthetics of urban apocalypse.

Artist Nathan Silver – Adhocist chair 1968 was made from standard gas pipe and insulating foam; the seat was from a tractor. It cost £30 in total to build.

  


















Alessandro Mendini, destruction of ‘the lassu chair’ 1974: an attack on what came before. he made an ideal chair of simple pure form, placed it onto a throne, his symbol of the perfect object. Then filmed and photographed it on fire. This act of destruction announces a new moment in design, something being burned, something new being born.

Alessandro Mendini Proust chair 1978

He Transformed existing objects or combined unrelated ideas into a single thing.

Here the chair is swollen to improbable proportions and decorated with a  pointillist painting by Paul Signac.

In this digital filmette made in 2012 by kati saqui.  The artist’s soundtrack  is Arvo Part ‘The passion of Christ’. The chair represents human suffering. The throwing of the chair is a gesture of adolescent rebellion.   How is this postmodern?

By placing an existing object (the chair) in an un‘natural setting and submitting it to an act of violence is the artist trying to  recapture the moment of liberation that one normally experiences in adolescence? 

This graphic collage Titled ‘self portrait’ was made in 2010 by kati saqui

It is a Comment on the alienation felt by those turned into machines by the education establishment. It can be construed as a political statement. Are we learning to become machines?

This could be the consequence of living in a post human world ( blade runner).  A comment against sameness. 

 Warhol’s $ exemplifies PM’s final stage.

The economy boomed in 1990 .

Culture was obsessed with wealth and status.

PM collapsed under its own success and because of its fatal encounter with money.

According to the V&A exhibition that is when Postmodernism ended .

  

















ALTERMODERNITY  or/and postproduction…both coined by Nicolas Bourriaud?